I'm Trying to Avoid AI These Days

I feel as if AI has peaked at the time of writing, and I guess we live in a time where everything and everyone is slapping AI to every product they have. It's like couple of years ago where everyone was slapping blockchain and NFT to their products or companies, the wave has moved towards AI in 2023-2024.

As part of my work, I get a change to attended different conferences, and in 2023-2024 almost all the conferences that I've been to has given a significant potion of their conferences to speakers, and companies that are interested in featuring AI.

From what I've seen lately, I tend to avoid topics on AI in general unless that's something big such as ChatGPT 4-o, and here's why,

Companies putting AI on everything

Like I mentioned earlier companies have been slapping AI to almost every product they offer, and I've seen some companies going even further and slapping AI to the end of their names. For example I have seen companies going from XYZ, to XYZ AI. Again here to ride the wave.

But technically most of the time these companies add nothing of value when it comes to AI but providing a ChatGPT wrapper over them.

NFT and blockchain grifters

I've seen so many people moving from one hype to another, during the blockchain and NFT hype in 2020-2023, I saw people who became blockchain and NFT experts overnight, and some even starting startups and services that uses blockchain technology.

Fast forward couple of years, I see the same people have become experts in AI, and starting different services and startups on AI. But then again most of these are ChatGPT wrappers, or use a custom GPT model.

These inherently not bad, but it begs me to question to motivation of these people and services, are they here to create something useful with the technology, or here to ride the wave like they did during the NFT hype, and are not real experts in AI.

Do we really need AI for this problem?

And while listening to their pitches and talks, I sometimes wonder do we really need AI to solve these problems? and why can't we use traditional methods? Where using something that's time tested or the existing solutions would still be better than training an AI while spending large amounts of energy.

It's not just small pitches, and talks about AI from grifters, but also looking at what happened to the huge pitches and promises made by Rabbit R1 and Humane AI pin, I am very skeptical for majority of AI pitches.

So all in all, I'm trying to avoid AI talks, pitches, and the hype that is going on. Like in any hype wave, something good will come out from the hype, but still it's difficult to filter out what's good and what's not.

Maybe I'm less optimistic than many of you out there, and maybe I will miss that chance like I missed with BitCoin in 2009, but still I need more convincing by these pitches that they are doing something new, something good than wrapping something around chatGPT.