Is the AI hype justified or will the bubble ‘burst’? | Ep. 158

Nvidia becomes a $3T company based on its latest AI chips (with Intel and AMD also in the game), leading the AI hype machine to go into overdrive. But at the same time, some are suggesting that the bubble is about to burst, and that AI investments may not pan out as users feel less enthusiastic. Computerworld contributing columnist and author Mike Elgan joins the show to discuss these and other technology news items from the past week.

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Keith Shaw

[charlesd]

I do not believe of what I'm hearing here. The digital twin idea has been around for decades. The oil industry has been doing it for years and has indeed helped make unconventional plays competitive with conventional. AI has been integrated too but it is not revolutionary as this guy suggests. Tbh this sounds like typical tech spin. I think AI is starting to be exposed as more hype so the tech industry needs the next thing to keep idiots buying stocks that are already at greater than 40 P/E. And all just in time for the next round of printing.

Remember big data, VR, VE, driverless cars, block chain...

[casparnigell]

I predict this will be the biggest bubble bursting we'll ever see. Not because AI is all hype, but because people are to far ahead with the development. We've got a long way to go...

[MrRufus]

Great podcast! You guys are doing such a great job covering all these important and interesting tech topics. Thank you!

[rstewart]

And I’m sure all of these speculative, AI-based tools, baked into the operating system, sounds wonderful when you are a so-called “digital nomad, ” who makes their living writing magazine articles.

The digital nomad lifestyle is cool if you can pull it off, but there are so many other kinds of work that can’t be done as a digital nomad, and that is the world most people live in.

I must ask whether or not the market for these speculative things may be significantly smaller than Mr. Elgan thinks.

[rstewart]

All of the stuff about “AI in the cloud” behind the cheap phone is going to take several years to develop, and get right, and will likely come long after the bubble pops and sanity returns.

Just like the use of expert systems techniques and logic programming was used AFTER the AI Winter of the 80’s set in.

[Matrium]

Look at what we have, which is (admittedly impressive) word-predicting machines and what big-tech CLAIMS, which is ridiculous and you 100% see that it's a bubble. But then again, so is the Tesla stock and that's still kicking too.


True AI will come one day, but that just needs so much more work than predicting a sentence that is designed to SOUND coherent, but may be completely false. Or it might be true. The thing is you can never know, because the LLM doesn't know it either

[thegreatkris]

If you tried using Gemini for even basic math you will see just how far off AI is. If you see how MS Copilot continually breaks, and how awful awful awful Grammarly writes. You'll know. AI has its uses but it's very far from making you feel like Joaquin in Her.