I think it's likely everyone is overindexing on this, in every direction. The modal reason any startup applies to YC is to line up fundraising. Investors are obsessed with AI right now. Yes, they shouldn't be. At the same time: the CS techniques underneath "AI" are the most important thing to happen to CS in decades; it would be a little weird not to somehow intersect "AI", if only because you're working with embeddings or high-dimensional data somewhere; it would be like building an application purposefully without topological sort, or without trees. And if you're doing anything like that, it would be pretty dumb not to play up the "AI" angle in this market.
I'm sure a lot of it is pure slop, just a bunch of prompts and a CRUD app. But I wouldn't be so quick to assume that anybody talking about "AI" is just a bunch of prompts.
Without looking carefully, I can't tell which ones are generative AI / boiling the oceans to bullshit you; it's possible that some of these are legit uses of machine learning, which existed before ChatGPT and will hopefully continue to exist in the future. But I bet it's all ethically questionable bullshit.
Forerunner AI jumps out as a likely ethical black hole, based on its one line description "Copilot for aerospace engineers making rockets, munitions, satellites." On top of code theft, water use, emissions, and the many other horrors of Copilot and its ilk, we can also add war profiteering.
No. I think we're past the point of it being hipsterism to suggest that AI techniques are "hype". Not every startup exploiting it is bona fide, but what's happening here is for real.
I second this. I just fear the hype surrounding generative AI is leading to extreme tunnel vision and neglect of other promising tech (cough crypto) and even other areas in ML and deep learning that might actually be more fruitful for Agi.
I'm not sure the history of CRDTs is at all bound up in cryptocurrency, which, for instance, isn't mentioned in the INRIA paper (which paper mentions previous CRDT designs that just didn't have the name).
So much pessimism and downright denial on the impact of this technology.
The old guard have put earplugs in and wonder why everyone's dancing, they just can't hear the music. In this context it's their refusal to try anything and attempt to downplay everything. The technology will move on, with or without them, and that's the most beautiful part.
You can hate the marketing of AI, you can hate people starting startups to take advantage of this new technology, but you can not stop this technology from moving forward. They will fall into the same category as the people who denied the impact of the Microcomputer, the Graphical User Interface, and the Smartphone.
I feel like that is a great example of hype. Some that looks impressive but once you watch for a bit you realize it's a shallow copy that required a million hours of footage to generate.
Personally, I didn’t find the Minecraft demo very impressive, aside from the speed of inference. 20fps is quite an achievement, generating Minecraft screenshots, not as much.
