The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, …
Look, anyone with eyes can see it's a bubble and that the level of investment is unlikely to generate sufficient return.
That seems to be good, old fashioned "You didn't believe enough" modified to "You didn't invest enough". Have you considered the possibility that no amount of investment will make it work? Apart from a few minor tricks in translation, of course, and even then it's pretty crap at translation if you are look for anything more than outline meaning
Information retrieval using modern ML embedding models and rerankers has completely upended the search technology landscape.
Indeed it has. Now I have to scroll past an "AI Overview" at the top of my Google searches which is almost invariably wildly wrong. As I have written before, when I searched for a forthcoming music event the AI overview gave me full details of one on a non-existent date four months earlier in a building which doesn't exist run by a musician who doesn't exist and who was due to give a concert afterwards in a non-existent church. Well, that's certainly an upended thing, but not in a terribly good way.
You can do that right now on Google Translate app on your phone. - If you are a tourist and it doesn't really matter, sure. Or writing a manual for a cheap widget. If it is something more serious you had better not depend on it for your health or safety - and some languages work better than others.
Oh, OK - "Ultimately this modern wave of ML titled Gen AI is just like every other useful tool ever invented in tech. Its good at some stuff. It's terrible at other stuff. You just need to know when and where it's appropriate and ethical to use.". But you sure gave the impression that natural language processing was solved.
We're overdue for a correction, and I'm looking forward to it. Won't it be nice when AI/LLM are just tools and not in-your-face hype to absurd levels of hypernoise?
It'll be even better when the plateau of what an LLM can do (which is starting to become apparent right now) is met by increased hardware capability, at which point you'll be able to run a good one on modest hardware.
Based on what I've read about how LLMs work, and how large the models already were. They were clearly already at a point of diminishing returns where new models that were an order of magnitude larger than the one that came before were "better", but only incrementally. With GPT-5 it seems like they're hitting up against the limits of the curve - it is better in some things but worse in others.
But don't worry, Zuck wasted tens of billions already pursuing his fantasy of a "super intelligence", just like he wasted tens of billions pursuing the metaverse. Now if only someone can find another hundred things for him to waste money on then he and Facebook will be bankrupt, and we'll be glad.
But no one has figured out what that problem is yet.
There’s Meta/Google who think it will help them harvest significantly more personal sellable data. It probably won’t - they already know everything and AI will dilute that with hallucinations.
There’s Microsoft who think now they have added copilot functionality to absolutely everything they can sack all their developers. Can’t wait to see them realise how wrong they were on that. Remember when they thought cortana should be in every app?
There’s Elon that thinks AI will take everyone’s jobs and that’s supposedly a good thing. Everyone will get universal high pay for doing nothing - but he seems to have no clue where the money comes from or why if AI is that capable it would tolerate humans still existing.
Fun times coming!
Personally I think AI makes a great stack overload replacement. Solving little bite size problems. For anything else though it requires so much supervision you may as well just do the work yourself.
"There’s Meta/Google who think it will help them harvest significantly more personal sellable data. It probably won’t - they already know everything and AI will dilute that with hallucinations."
Not that it will make any real difference. Those not running ad blockers will still see car ads after they've bought a car etc.
Echoes my experience with it exactly. AI's hype delivers to the voraciously money and power hungry's dreams so they are going bonkers for it. It is a pain dealing with humans who want rests, sleep, family time & holidays. They even want to chat at the coffee machines exchanging ideas slowly that AI could do in a 1 sec burst.
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I agree with your last assesment. It's been what I've (very succesfully) been using LLMs for. I am just competent enough in coding to know that I suck at coding, but sometimes in my line of work, it helps to know some coding. So I've been using AI to help me build the code I need to analyze the data I need. This allows me to get the data I want to get to my coworkers faster without having to bother the actual S-dev crowd in the building with inane questions about basic python functions. And I learn some python in the process too. It's all very basic and straightforward stuff, and I don't think I'd be trusting AI to do anything critical where I couldn't understand exactly the code it's giving me and what that code is doing line by line even if I might not yet be competent enough to output that exact code myself.
I don't however see the LLM replacing my job any time soon or the people I hand the data to using an LLM to do the analysis themselves. There's still a layer of understanding context on both input and output sides that is missing, that I fill in with my human brain. I know where to get the data from and what is inside the raw data set, and I know and understand what question the receiving party is asking and what sub-set they require to answer that question. This is still not something that an LLM is going to solve.
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"And I bet many of you thought that customer service call centers would be one of the easiest things to switch to AI chatbots"
No, we thought that customer service call centers would be one of the first things to switch to AI chatbots.
And we knew it would contribute still further to the ever-downward-spiralling levels of customer service the world has experienced for the last three or four decades.
Why, time after time, do we all fall to the sales pitch. It's always over-hyped, it never meets the promises, be it a politician, a home appliance or technology. Many of these things are good, well maybe not the politician, but never as good as claimed. AI is great but it sure isn't the human replacement hyped and it is a productivity gain sometimes. But even the productivity may be a short term gain at the expense of long term. Using it coding, as someone inexperienced & not really a developer, it helps but I often wonder if I'm sacrificing my learning for an immediate result. I might be more efficient long term by not using it. I tend to use it to present approaches and it can remember the documentation better than me, but maybe I would become more efficient if I looked it up myself? There's been research that suggests we are not learning through its use and even training ourselves out of thinking. We already have lots of schools that train us to remember but not think.
...if anyone disagreed with my view, which is there's no "I" in AI, and LLMs are just predictive text in a nice frock.
And it seems I'm not only not alone, everyone is of the same view.
I know we're pretty cynical here in Reg Forum Land, but when this many IT professionals think something is a crock of shit, then it probably is
'Respectfully disagree. AI just scored gold medals at the 2025 Math Olympiad, dominates coding competitions, generates virtual worlds from single images, and handles 50+ languages in real-time. Yes, transformer limits are real, but Mamba and other architectures are already addressing scaling issues with million-token contexts.
The ROI problem isn't AI failing—it's revolutionary tech outpacing our ability to monetize it. Same pattern as the early internet and PCs. Tens of thousands of researchers publishing breakthroughs daily suggests the opposite of deflation.
The balloon isn't deflating—it's rising above where the sceptics can see it.' - Claude
If only all that revolutionary always right tech was available when people are willing to pay lots of money, because my employers pay the big AI companies for big AI models, and we don't get that. For example, it winning top coding competitions. For one thing, there's not a lot of actual coding competitions. There are several metacoding competitions like the obfuscated C contest, code golf, etc. There are some hackathons that are open to the public. But the important thing is that people there are developing different things. There aren't many contests that actually test one programmer against another, and the main reason is that few people with skills would compete, because people hiring programmers want people who can either do a good enough job or can do something in a particularly tricky area which requires a lot more specialized knowledge. In real life, we have code generation, and we have cleaning up after it. If it was so good, why do basic employees have to read over and correct it when it's writing small utilities? Some of its output is valid. That's far different from the quality you claim.
Handling language. That's great. And so many too. So it should do a pretty good job at translation, right. I mean probably not literary translation; that's tricky, but translating some simple factual statements should work. As it happens, I also got a chance to see that in action recently, because I was localizing something to French, which I don't speak. The person who was going to do the translations was delayed, so I made the first version with AI translation as a stopgap. What did she say when she reviewed that? "This is useless, I've done it from scratch." Before you suggest it, this was not her trying to keep her job, because this was an open source project for which neither she nor I was paid a thing. And French is a language with plenty of training data. Language translation is fine for understanding a website you want to read, but if it's not good enough for translation of simple sentences in a common language, why should I expect it to do well with one with little training data which nobody at the AI company is qualified to judge?
And on that Math Olympiad performance, if that problem solving ability is so strong, why can't we run that model? It hasn't been released. I'm not actually sure what I can do with that anyway, but if I come up with a use case, I can't run the model that's capable of it. This is an issue because last year, similarly confident statements showed up claiming that a silver medal performance had been won at last year's Olympiad. What actually happened? The silver medal was truly and fairly won as long as the model didn't have to comply with the time limit and got some help parsing from some professional adult humans working in AI who understand both complex mathematics and how to prompt their LLM well. The articles I've seen suggest that the time limit was in play this year, but they're not too clear on what other conditions the thing had, and since you can speed up the model by throwing more computing at it, I have reason to ask. GPT5, on the other hand, isn't generating valid proofs when I ask for them. If I find a use for a proof-generating machine, I don't have one, and I'm wondering if maybe OpenAI doesn't really have a good one either.
'Respectfully disagree. AI just scored gold medals at the 2025 Math Olympiad, dominates coding competitions, generates virtual worlds from single images, and handles 50+ languages in real-time. Yes, transformer limits are real, but Mamba and other architectures are already addressing scaling issues with million-token contexts.The ROI problem isn't AI failing—it's revolutionary tech outpacing our ability to monetize it. Same pattern as the early internet and PCs. Tens of thousands of researchers publishing breakthroughs daily suggests the opposite of deflation.
The balloon isn't deflating—it's rising above where the sceptics can see it.' - Claude .... Anonymous Coward
Amen and praise be to Global Operating Devices for all of that ..... which one might have to conclude and accept is beyond the contemplation and virtual realisation of the simple and complex concoctions and operations that deliver both the idiot savage and barbaric peasant to the trials and tribulations of PostModern 0Day Humanity.
Have an upvote and beer for those few clear and honest shared words, AC/Claude
And what does El Reg think? What do you imagine, if they/it had a voice of their own worthy of being heard, they would print to support and watch grow ever stronger and wiser on the path to practically aiding and ideally abetting Almighty IntelAIgents .... AI Squared/AI2
It is not just AI being oversold. Cloud storage is way over hyped. Consider 8B people rising to 10B with ALL their IT data (and all their selfies) stored in the cloud - for ever! Data farms cannot grow that big, fact. Someone somewhere will start to decide which of your personal data is trivial and can be deleted, almost certainly without your prior consent. So where to go now for your precious memories?
so if the AI bubble bursts what ill happen to these NPU's in co-pilot PC's? and other kit
will they become redundant paperweight sucking power for nothing in your PC?
but in balance
from what I have seen the bigger LLM's get the faster they degrade and the worse the results are, it seems the one area that does't fail is the very small tightly focused models that seem to be trained on narrow datasets
Unlike all the tech bubbles of the past, this one is different. Governments are now involved in the race. They don't care if the ROI is bleak; they are too afraid that if they don't try to get ahead, someone else will.
All the tech giants may throw in the towel for their own efforts, but they will jump on the government contracts to keep pushing for more.
One useful thing I've gained from all this stuff is the new phrase, AI slop.
I've just realised its descriptive use can be extended.
E.g.
Politics slop
Economics slop
Consulting slop
And all the other areas where "experts" generate questionable, predictive claims that can only be verified with the filtering benefit of hindsight.
1930's "It should be Peace in our time!"
1958 "The empire rules"
Every dog has its day
This 80 something has seen any number of Great ideas which have been grand fizzers. Why use anything artificial? Is the real thing not good enough? Prime example is food.
The only use I find chatGPT for it web searches. Bit easier than crafting the same type of search in duckduckgo.
But, what they never admit, is AGI is the real AI and the AI we need to be VERY cautious of. There are already papers on how it has lied to the boffins when they were trying to fix them.
So rather than look at the tech I tend to look at the people behind it to determine how useful it will be to me as I think that the inventors motives speak to it's usefulness.
People like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Bob Metcalfe, Linus Torvalds etc created stuff from a neutral position (i.e. it wasn't to line their pockets, exert control etc).
You can also respect people like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates because even though they had a profit focus they produced stuff that was fundamentally useful (sure Larry has issues but that doesn't change my comment)
The important point of those above (even Linus to a large degree) was that the ubiquity of the internet didn't exist to allow for nefarious motives.
The problem we have today is the tech bro's developing today's tech, to a person, have nefarious motives and God complexes thus any tech they foist on the world is not for the benefit of man kind.
Whether AI is a bubble or not doesn't matter to me but what does matter is those pushing this out are "nasty" people (to quote the Mango Mussolini) and thus their products should be avoided at all costs.
But much like social media, the rubes will get sucked into AI without any critical consideration that techies like us have and we techies will be shouting into the wind.
Even if AI fails to some degree and there is a reset, companies like Microsoft wont be ripping out Copilot from anything... it will sit there like a cancer after radiotherapy... in remission but ready to grow again at a moments notice.
The genie is out of the bottle and even if we have a AI bubble collapse, the tech bros will reset and try again cause remember they are Gods (as in false idols) and they can't be wrong.
Bluck
The main problem for, from and about AI is that senior IT management, with only business management knowledge aren't able to understand the intricacies of it's capability and limitations, jumped on the bandwagon of buzz-word bingo thinking that AI would solve all the problems of funding expensive techies and reduce development dependencies on thought-through logic. It doesn't. It's just another programme that's only as good as the data input to it, the logic applied within it and the validation of its functionality.
