if anything, AI is __under__hyped.
Discussion
The people are NOT ready
💯
the wrong aspects are overhyped while the true impact is underhyped
Agree. Most of the fear mongering is in some way a tactic to rush in regulation and build moats.
The fear mongering is stupid, but so is the hype. Modern "AI"s are statistical prediction models.
They are fed a ton of data and then told to generate new data that looks like the original. This is the case for LLMs, diffusers, and every other generative model you’ve heard about lately. At training time they crunch through billions of examples, learn the statistical regularities that tie one fragment of data to the next, and store those regularities in an unfathomably large cloud of numbers called "parameters".
Nothing about that scares nor hypes me. Computers are now faster at doing math and thus can do this sort of computation. Shocker!
Oh my gawd, I'm like literally like shaking like right now, oh my gawd, someone call Alan Turing, we have a mathematical emergency, computers are faster now!
In China, the oil from a Chinese Watersnake has been used for several centuries as an anti inflammatory. The oil actually worked, and it's still used today in Asia among those who prefer to not use drugs.
In the mid 1800s, people from China emigrated in mass to this relatively young country that promised hope and freedom. They naturally brought with them their traditions, including medicine. Westerners at the time were obsessed with learning from China, and upon seeing them use this weird oil as an anti inflammatory, some salesmen saw this as an opportunity.
The average Caucasian living in America had almost no knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine, so those salesmen calling themselves "healers", showcased this powerful snake oil from the faraway land of China.
They didn't truly know what snake oil is actually for, just that the Chinese used it as medicine and that they could sell it for a lot of money. So they did.
Quickly snake oil boomed in America; you could buy snake oil everywhere, you couldn't consider yourself a respectable merchant if you didn't sell snake oil! Everyone wanted the stuff.
As the demand for snake oil skyrocketed, more and more merchants jumped on the literal bandwagon, claiming their products were the authentic Chinese remedy. Many of these products were entirely fake, containing little to no actual snake oil. The salesmen, now self-proclaimed "snake oil salesmen," would often travel from town to town, pitching their wares to unsuspecting crowds with outlandish claims about the oil's healing properties.
The public, eager for a cure-all, ate it up and snake oil became a cultural phenomenon.
However, as with any fad, the backlash was inevitable. As people began to realize that the oil wasn't living up to its promised benefits, skepticism and criticism grew. The term "snake oil" became synonymous with deceit, and the salesmen who sold it, charlatans.
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Can you think of anything in the modern day that may be following a similar path?