this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it's an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn't groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.
Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they'd drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say "what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?"
This makes so much sense.
I always thought, surely their higher ups must know this is utter garbage?
They do but it's just to scam investors.
^^^^^ 🛎️ 🛎️ 🛎️ This! Anything but forever-growth is a failure, and the hype train must roll forward… even if the tracks it’s riding on are bubble gum and wishes.
Very well said
Absolutely. We got so much crap from the markets and customers because "it's 2024 and you still don't have AI in your product". So we threw in an integration to a local LLM to please them and keep them from leaving to our inferior-in-every-other-way-but-have-AI competitors.
Yes, the companies have a reputation to protect, but it's also just a standard hype-cycle. If you pay attention to tech history these things always go in cycles like this.
Whether the tech is actually useful or not doesn't actually matter. What matters is whether you can convince investors to fork over the cash with a shiny presentation.
The tech industry has basically habituated to surviving on selling us bullshit through hype cycles. I think it's become dependent on them.