The Majority AI View

Summary

Even though AI has been the most-talked-about topic in tech for a few years now, we're in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned. Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren't the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech. And what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI, which can be pretty succinctly summed up: Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value. What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on. AI Hallucinations If you read mainstream media about AI, or trade press within the tech industry, you'll basically only hear hype repeating the default stories about products from the handful of biggest companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the like. Once in a while, you might hear some coverage of the critiques of AI, but even those will generally be from people outside the tech industry, and they will often solely be about frustrations or anger with the negative externalities of the centralized ...