• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    My prediction is that it’s just the latest buzzword on the pile of buzzwords and by 2028 a new one will pop up and the only time you hear “AI” will be in the line of “Hey, remember when everyone was talking about AI?”

    Before AI it was “The Cloud”. Before the cloud it was “Virtualization”. They’re saying all the same things about AI that they said about the cloud and virtualization…

    I guess the real money is inventing the new buzzword that sales people can say will make your business faster, more agile, and more efficient. :)

    • r00ty@kbin.life
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      5 days ago

      I think it’s a real shame because all three of those things you mention are useful. The problem is that once they become a buzzword, then everything needs to be done using that buzzword.

      Cloud has been misused to hell and back, and I have no doubt AI will too.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Before AI it was “The Cloud”. Before the cloud it was “Virtualization”. They’re saying all the same things about AI that they said about the cloud and virtualization…

      So you’re saying AI will make a measurable (arguably net positive) impact and forever change the way we do things in our day to day, just becoming a standard toolset offered by many providers? Because I’d argue that’s what virtualization was, as well as the cloud to a lesser extent. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to be convinced on virtualization being a bad thing (not as much the cloud tho, that has some solid negative arguments).

      If you’re trying to shit talk AI, you’d be better off comparing it to block chain than cloud/virtualization, since the latter two are an integral part of a large amount of the work we do, and the former is mainly for illicit drugs/activities and stealing money.

      • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        agreed, virtualization was one of the best things to happen in IT since the dawn of the internet. i can’t even imagine how much less efficient and reliable datacenters and the entire internet would be without it. Not at all comparable to AI.

        i actually work for a company that does very little virtualization now and it’s fucking awful.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I think the comparison is apt, it’s not that LLM is useless, it’s just that, currently, it’s insanely overhyped. Just like the .com had irrational companies that evaporated but underlying tech was useful. Just like in-house servers were considered to be dead with everything being cloud hosted, now there’s recognition of a trade off. Just like there was pressure to ship everything as an ‘.ova’ and nowadays that’s not really done as much.

        An appropriately used level of LLM might even be nice, but when it’s fuel for the grifters, it is going to be obnoxious.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            Virtualization as a ‘platform’ was a bit overhyped, hence my ‘.ova’ comment. There was a push for a lot of applications to exclusively ship as a whole virtual machine, to create OS variants dedicated to the purpose of running single applications. For a lot of applications it was supremely awkward, because app developers ended up having to ‘own’ things they didn’t want to own, like the customer network configuration.

            Virtualization as a utility has of course persisted, but it’s much more rare for a vendor to declare their ‘runtime’ to be vmware than it once was. Virtualization existed in IBM for a long time, vmware made it broadly more available and flexible in the PC space, and then around mind 2000s things started to go a bit crazy with ‘virtualization is the runtime’.

            Now mind you, compared to dot-com or ‘big data’ it was trivial, but it was all a bit silly for a time there.

    • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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      5 days ago

      The Cloud is still a thing though. As is virtualization

      And AI (LLMs, media generation, machine learning) are going to stay a thing as well.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Yeah, there’s generally a kernel of value wrapped up in all sorts of bullshit.

        Some with the .com boom, obviously here we are with internet as a critical infrastructure, but 1999 ‘internet’ was a mess of overhype.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      Everytime I see this kind of hype pop up I think back to when there was this great announcement from Silicon Valley about a “revolution in transportation” and it turned out to be the Segway.