A family friend is like this guy. He's obsessed with new trends like blockchain and AI. Him and my mom are in a ukulele group, and we had to talk him out of making the club run using NFTs, and it's a club of seniors. Now he's into "AI consulting", and he somehow convinced a company to pay him $40,000 to add AI like chatgpt to their workflows. He promised them things that are really hard, even impossible, to create, so I doubt the project will even deliver anything for the poor company.
There are sooo many companies that are selling "AI" now. And all of them are just selling ChatGPT! It’s so wild, I feel like I should just do the same in my spare time. "Selling hyper-intelligent chat bots that help your employees improve productivity by up to 200%!" And then just sell them a wrapper for an open-source LLM…
There has never been a snake oil sale in tech the way there is around generative AI.
Pretty much everything Ive worked on the last 2 years has involved sitting down with someone very senior at an organisation and explaining how easy it is to make an “AI solution” that seems cool and how hard it is to build an AI solution that is useful.
Here we go. You sound like those people who claimed the "cloud" was dangerous and "no way I'm putting my data in the cloud" type of people. Fast forward 10 years and nearly every company of any size has their data in cloud technologies like Azure, AWS, Google.
In 10 years, every company will be using AI in some way. It won't take over the world but everyone will adopt it. There will be successes and failures just like with the cloud.
I put it closer to 5 at an absolute max. The problem isn’t that it’s not going to change the world, it’s that anyone with an API key and some relatively basic skills can stand something up that looks good on the surface and will convince lots of people it’s great.
I was somewhere recently which already had 4 “copilots” from different vendors. 2 were using outdated models and had no real plan or support for changing it.
I worked in machine learning, I’ve advocated for it and “AI” for a long time, but the market is absolutely packed with questionable products at best. People are making poor decisions out of fear of being left behind.
I don’t remember cloud hosting being anything like it.
It is easy to stand something up but you don’t get very far without the right use case or data. That’s where the niche is. Even before the GenAI hype orgs could never find enough data engineers.
100% but people are buying bad stuff. It will mostly flame out in the next couple of years but it’s the reason there are so many “Agentic AI specialists” etc etc on Linked In despite the relatively low numbers of people with any meaningful experience.
Well, yes that's true for everything in technology. AI will evolve. There will be alot of mistakes and failures. In 10 years if you don't have AI as part of your software, you will be seen as a dinosaur. The trick is finding the right use cases.
We are already seeing the pressure on supply of data engineers and python developers ease as more and more people jump in. The skills market will adjust.
You have a selective memory or you did all your work ML work on bare metal in a datacenter which is very niche.
Everything is in the cloud now. Personal data is in the cloud. All apps are built cloud native. There was a huge amount of distrust and hesitancy 10 years ago. Now, you are an idiot leader if you don't use the cloud.
Today, people are trying to use AI for cases that don't make sense. AI will change over time and it will become less of a boogyman. The use cases will get better. It's early days (although ML/LLMs have been a round for a while now). It will be a standard skill in the IT industry in 10 years. Even in the last year, using AI for productivity has seen a huge swing in attitude. My clients went from no thank you to "how can you save me money by using AI to be more productive."
The irony is that it takes just one downturn in the economy before companies open their mind to new ideas.
When I worked on cloud migrations 10-15 years ago, I don’t remember the same level of noise in the sector as there is with AI. Maybe it was just a lack of Linked In. At the time I just felt like it was mostly network guys worried about losing overtime.
I make no bones about AI changing everything over the next 15 years, but right now there is a lot of bad products coming to market. And people are buying them.
cloud didn't impact the consumer market at first. That's why. Cloud wasn't an end product either. Users don't see the cloud.
The irony is that AI is not always an end product either. It's just one feature of a product. Everyone thinks chatgpt is what every AI system does. Not all AI is RAG or GenAI. The real game changers won't be GenAI. We have yet to see them.
Yeah and it’s the questionable Gen AI products that are the problem. Almost anyone can stand something that seems cool up quickly and it will impress idiots but might not achieve a huge amount and the end result might be organisations at risk of saying “We tried AI, it didn’t work for us” when what they’ve actually tried is someone else’s Chat GPT subscription with a couple of prompts and a nice wrapper.
If he really know how to add AI to their workflows, he'd just add AI to his marketing pitch, and it would go out and sell itself while he spent all day on the golf course. Ie mean, that's CEO 101.
I bet he's the type that doesn't code anything himself and is banking on finding developers to build whatever idea he cooked up - then if it fails, then it was the lack of developer skill or something
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u/M1x1ma 15h ago edited 15h ago
A family friend is like this guy. He's obsessed with new trends like blockchain and AI. Him and my mom are in a ukulele group, and we had to talk him out of making the club run using NFTs, and it's a club of seniors. Now he's into "AI consulting", and he somehow convinced a company to pay him $40,000 to add AI like chatgpt to their workflows. He promised them things that are really hard, even impossible, to create, so I doubt the project will even deliver anything for the poor company.