I still like the computer itself. Breaking something, poking at it, fixing it, and then it suddenly works. The hard part now is liking the industry around it.
I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly.
I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even just asking the LLM to write a piece of code and learning from its output. I think it makes me a better programmer because I can bootstrap the knowledge needed for a new project much faster and spend more time programming.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do
In my opinion you should interpret the usage of "AI" here to mean "the entire business/management/financial/bubble ecosystem surrounding LLMs". The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized rather than a specific technical assessment (although that often is an issue too)
My prediction is that it will go the same way as the dot com bubble. The hypesters and fraudsters will eventually collide with objective reality, but the technology will persist and society at large will benefit from the infrastructure and the increased access to knowledge.
> society at large will benefit from the infrastructure
Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.
If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.
Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
That's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most.
There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or increases in price, then individuals will largely be locked out of the benefits that having access to AI could bring, leaving it purely in the hands of larger companies. People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer, for the benefit of their employer.
> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Choose one:
- You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer.
- You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for your hobby. You have to lease an H200 behind an API to do it.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
LLMs remind me of being a kid again being in wonder of all the possible things that could be done with a computer that haven't been figured out yet. The internet was relatively new and everyone had their own ideas of what that would enable. Fast forward to a few years ago and it was easy to believe that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of things an individual could do with the internet, apps, 3d graphics, etc, had been decently picked over and that things were stabilizing. Now I have no idea again what computing will look like in 5 years and it's exciting.
The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.
Snake oil implies that it does nothing, not that it doesn't do everything it's boosters claim it does. Snake oils were medicines sold as cure-alls with no active ingredients.
I wonder what the better pithy phrase would be then for "thing that is obviously useful, but is being hyped beyond it's (current) ability by those with a vested interest in doing so"
The fats in Chinese Water Snakes are rich in omega 3s and do have genuine benefits to consumption. The problem with snake oil wasn't that it was useless. The problem was with hucksters selling it as a cure-all for everything from cancer to syphilis. The metaphor is pretty apt IMO.
Isn't coding solved and we should all be out of a job by now according to Dario? Or what about AI 2027 -- we're only 6 months away! Time to build a bunker!! LLMs themselves aren't snake oil, they're just a useful technology, but all the marketing around them is FUD mixed with hype mixed with the most irritating people on the planet (the ones that aren't bots at least).
Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?
It's a oversimplified characterization of LLMs as a slot machine. You put in some money, and pull the lever/submit a prompt, and maybe you get a jackpot/working code. It's typically used by morons who think they're smart for repeating it, and that they aren't the stochastic parrots in the room.
I just reversed engineered large parts of my 2011 car odb comms. Was able to hook a stm32 board to the car communication and have full control over a lot of stuff so that I can build my own instrument cluster from a lcd screen. It literally took me one evening to get the first proof of concept working. I never touched stm32 stuff before.
This is less an anti-AI post and more a post against the greed of the industry:
> But things feel different now. I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
You can simultaneously believe that AI is really cool and also that also a lot of companies are degrading the internet, society, and private ownership at large.
I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.
Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.
This post resonates with me. I remember in Kindergarten getting my very first life experience with computing tech: grounding myself by touching the bottom screws of a Apple IIe. I've loved them in nearly the same way as OP.
I get the way he feels. I remember how special this stuff used to be because of how niche it was. It does feel a bit like the normies co-opted it but that is my personal and selfish view.
Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.
I remember when I was around 10 and we got out first PC - Compaq Presario - that we shared among us 4 siblings. And I was instantly hooked to. And then about a year later, we got internet connected and the first website we visited was Pokemon.
I remember at my high school, the computer room in the library was fitted out with the new colored iMacs. I was shocked! How could a computer look like this. You had to register to use it each day during lunch breaks because so many people wanted to use them.
I remember the first time I came across an Apple magazine, and it was showing screenshots of the new OS X. The Aqua interface got me hooked. I'd read, and re-read, every page, drooling over the screenshots. It wasn't until ~10 years later I got my first Mac and I was obsessed with it!
I think the author simply grew up. It's easy to ignore all of the business stuff and just have fun when you are kid. Nothing is stopping the author from generating all sorts of crazy stuff with AI if he wants to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
My first computer was a pentium II. After one year learning about computing in my school lab and friends’ computers, it was amazing to have something to tinker with. And it and its successors brought me plenty of delight over the year. First discovering Linux (with Linux Mint and Gnome 2 as I couldn’t install Debian), learning assembly and C, learning Blender, learning how windows internals worked,… It has been a tool that has shaped my life. And yes, the current trend of presenting it as a mere source of entertainment and a very small sets of features is sickening.
But this day, I dabble with OpenBSD and Linux (Alpine) and it’s a bit of fresh air. There’s some convenience lost, but you get the freedom of computing back.
I still like the computer itself. Breaking something, poking at it, fixing it, and then it suddenly works. The hard part now is liking the industry around it.
I love computers too, but it doesn't resonate with me when people call AI "snake oil." The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. AI does more or less what it's marketed to do, sometimes badly.
I still write code by hand. But LLMs have been a legitimately useful tool when I've wanted to dig into a new field like computer graphics, theoretical physics, or numerical analysis. Or even just asking the LLM to write a piece of code and learning from its output. I think it makes me a better programmer because I can bootstrap the knowledge needed for a new project much faster and spend more time programming.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do
In my opinion you should interpret the usage of "AI" here to mean "the entire business/management/financial/bubble ecosystem surrounding LLMs". The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized rather than a specific technical assessment (although that often is an issue too)
The same thing happened around PCs, gaming, the Internet, the web, and cryptocurrency. It's a hit driven industry that loves hype.
My prediction is that it will go the same way as the dot com bubble. The hypesters and fraudsters will eventually collide with objective reality, but the technology will persist and society at large will benefit from the infrastructure and the increased access to knowledge.
> society at large will benefit from the infrastructure
Data centers as infrastructure are very different from DSL rollout though. Much, much more expensive to maintain, with a much much shorter timespan.
If the bubble pops and data centers get shut down because there’s no one to pay the bills, there won’t be much left 5-10 years later in terms of infrastructure.
Assuming that we recover from the damage being done now. As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
That's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most.
There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or increases in price, then individuals will largely be locked out of the benefits that having access to AI could bring, leaving it purely in the hands of larger companies. People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer, for the benefit of their employer.
> As one example, a friend of mine has remarked that large corporations will benefit from the current AI-induced reality of no one being able to afford their own hardware, and keep prices that way to enforce a renters model on computers.
Choose one:
- You spend 30 hours writing a program to manage data for your hobby. You write it on your personal computer.
- You spend one hour generating a program to manage data for your hobby. You have to lease an H200 behind an API to do it.
Which one will you choose?
I know which one I'm choosing.
I choose A.
I know that many others choose A as well.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
I don't have time for that.
I swear the anti-AI crowd would all be picking to die if you each had a choice between immortality and living to 85.
This all feels so damned performative. These are irrational decisions.
AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
Programming computers is a fad. It's an anachronistic relic.
None of you is writing punch card programs.
None of you are building vaccum tube logic.
None of the things we build today are going to last. Your programs will be meaningless in a hundred years. Probably closer to ten years.
Programs and code and programming languages are as ephemeral as social media.
Get over it. It's not that important.
This is so needlessly combative and performative, which is especially hilarious as you claim the _others_ are the ones being so.
> AI is better at this than you. You just won't admit it. And it's going to get 10,000x better than you in just a short while.
Where is the 10x (not even 10,000x) revenue? No companies other than those selling the AI itself are seeing it.
> None of the things we build today are going to last.
Exactly, so why do you care how some people build things? It's not that important.
LLMs remind me of being a kid again being in wonder of all the possible things that could be done with a computer that haven't been figured out yet. The internet was relatively new and everyone had their own ideas of what that would enable. Fast forward to a few years ago and it was easy to believe that a lot of the low-hanging fruit of things an individual could do with the internet, apps, 3d graphics, etc, had been decently picked over and that things were stabilizing. Now I have no idea again what computing will look like in 5 years and it's exciting.
The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.
Snake oil implies that it does nothing, not that it doesn't do everything it's boosters claim it does. Snake oils were medicines sold as cure-alls with no active ingredients.
I wonder what the better pithy phrase would be then for "thing that is obviously useful, but is being hyped beyond it's (current) ability by those with a vested interest in doing so"
You could reasonably call it "overhyped". People will disagree with you, but that's fine; you won't be making a falsifiable claim.
That seems pretty par for the course for every major advancement in technology. So maybe just “capitalism”?
It’s hard for me to think of any piece of new tech that hasn’t been over hyped by the people selling it.
For sure. I'd argue this cycle is operating at a different scale though
The fats in Chinese Water Snakes are rich in omega 3s and do have genuine benefits to consumption. The problem with snake oil wasn't that it was useless. The problem was with hucksters selling it as a cure-all for everything from cancer to syphilis. The metaphor is pretty apt IMO.
Isn't coding solved and we should all be out of a job by now according to Dario? Or what about AI 2027 -- we're only 6 months away! Time to build a bunker!! LLMs themselves aren't snake oil, they're just a useful technology, but all the marketing around them is FUD mixed with hype mixed with the most irritating people on the planet (the ones that aren't bots at least).
AI is snake oil. It sells you a slot machine in the guise of a colleague.
Oh, not using it right? Not the right model? Insert coin to continue.
Snake oil, total snake oil.
This doesn't even make sense. Maybe if you fleshed it out?
Snake oil is something not medicine sold as medicine.
AI is something not a colleague (a slot machine), sold as a colleague.
Right, that's what you already said. What I don't understand is the "slot machine" analogy you're making. In what sense is AI a "slot machine"? Are you talking about the stocks of AI companies?
Variable intermittent reward. Pull the lever, get something nice or something bad. I've had far too much bad today and I'm furious.
It's a oversimplified characterization of LLMs as a slot machine. You put in some money, and pull the lever/submit a prompt, and maybe you get a jackpot/working code. It's typically used by morons who think they're smart for repeating it, and that they aren't the stochastic parrots in the room.
I just reversed engineered large parts of my 2011 car odb comms. Was able to hook a stm32 board to the car communication and have full control over a lot of stuff so that I can build my own instrument cluster from a lcd screen. It literally took me one evening to get the first proof of concept working. I never touched stm32 stuff before.
Good for you, son. I've just spent the whole f*king day screaming at an agent on a deadline.
This is less an anti-AI post and more a post against the greed of the industry:
> But things feel different now. I can relate to what Chris Person said when he expressed his frustrations about how these slick conmen are using the technology I adore as tools for exploitation and disempowerment. The Internet, built by idealists on a foundation of openness and community, has become a mire of dark patterns and gardens with ever thicker walls, desperate to keep people within an ecosystem where their attention is the prized commodity. I’ve witnessed a nerdy space full of nerds be invaded by marketers, callous capitalists, and “brogrammers”—exaggerating the worst, most toxic, aspects of geek culture in their pursuit of money and power. I’ve poured hundreds of hours of work into open source projects only to have it all be scraped into a plagiarism machine and then aggressively sold back to me. It feels that the hope I had for the future technology could give us, the naïve and starry-eyed fantasies I fostered in my youth, has been eroded when faced with a reality where the thing I love can make a lot of money for people who don’t care for any of it.
You can simultaneously believe that AI is really cool and also that also a lot of companies are degrading the internet, society, and private ownership at large.
I think the author doesn't realize how gatekeepy this sentiment is; that they earned their love of "the computer", that it was formative to them, that they put all this uncomfortable effort into learning how to program, and thus (subtextually) they should have a say in how other people use "the computer".
I love the computer too. Never more than while writing 6502 assembler for a decades-defunct home computer for literally no purpose at all.
Meanwhile, the economy needs software to be written and I need employment, and I'm lucky enough to have a job that hews somewhat close to my interests, whether that be learning the latest JS framework or to prompt Claude. It's all pretty decent and better than chiselling coal out of a pit for 10 hours a day.
This post resonates with me. I remember in Kindergarten getting my very first life experience with computing tech: grounding myself by touching the bottom screws of a Apple IIe. I've loved them in nearly the same way as OP.
I get the way he feels. I remember how special this stuff used to be because of how niche it was. It does feel a bit like the normies co-opted it but that is my personal and selfish view.
Mr. Enger echos a lot of thoughts that I (and a lot of people on these forums) seem to have. We can still make an attempt to remake what we love, with personal websites and self-hosting. However modern architecture kills even that with DDoS attacks and IP blacklists on everything. It is no wonder that people are starting to promote alternate protocols like Gemini (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297467) that explicitly make it impossible for many of the evils of the World Wide Web to be repeated.
I love the computer, too.
I remember when I was around 10 and we got out first PC - Compaq Presario - that we shared among us 4 siblings. And I was instantly hooked to. And then about a year later, we got internet connected and the first website we visited was Pokemon.
I remember at my high school, the computer room in the library was fitted out with the new colored iMacs. I was shocked! How could a computer look like this. You had to register to use it each day during lunch breaks because so many people wanted to use them.
I remember the first time I came across an Apple magazine, and it was showing screenshots of the new OS X. The Aqua interface got me hooked. I'd read, and re-read, every page, drooling over the screenshots. It wasn't until ~10 years later I got my first Mac and I was obsessed with it!
I think the author simply grew up. It's easy to ignore all of the business stuff and just have fun when you are kid. Nothing is stopping the author from generating all sorts of crazy stuff with AI if he wants to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
My first computer was a pentium II. After one year learning about computing in my school lab and friends’ computers, it was amazing to have something to tinker with. And it and its successors brought me plenty of delight over the year. First discovering Linux (with Linux Mint and Gnome 2 as I couldn’t install Debian), learning assembly and C, learning Blender, learning how windows internals worked,… It has been a tool that has shaped my life. And yes, the current trend of presenting it as a mere source of entertainment and a very small sets of features is sickening.
But this day, I dabble with OpenBSD and Linux (Alpine) and it’s a bit of fresh air. There’s some convenience lost, but you get the freedom of computing back.