The underlying engine: you buy something, you make everyone believe it’s very valuable, you sell for more than you originally paid. Or you continually sell for less unless you have earned more than originally spent. The rest is details/stories made up to sell.

OpenAI have 700 million weekly users and an ARR of $12bn. Lots of people - myself included - are very happy to pay for a service that they find useful. How is that not a real business with a real product?

Hm. It seems as though the author is misrepresenting their interviewee here, in the title of the article, no less! Shame.

Obviously, claiming that "hype" is _the_ product of AI is categorically inane. No, "hype" is instead obviously a _byproduct_ of our current era. The "true product" will only be clear in hindsight, but at the moment the two contenders are: a) A buoyant and burgeoning industry of AI companies that only accelerates in growth -- unlikely, just like the theory of dark energy, or b) a bubbling industry which creates a the grounding framework and infrastructure for the next wave(s) of AI progress.

Whichever one of those it is, it won't be "just hype". That sort of thing is reserved for NFT markets.

How the fuck is this submission flagged? It's an excellent analysis that explains exactly how and why the AI hype is way worse than all the cryptocurrency scams taken together.

Has anyone really been saying that we're going to replace doctors or teachers? Or is it more that we're saying that new tools will offer potentially engaging new applications for things like personalized learning and or assists for doctors and others.

As an example the United States has a cap on the number of doctors to keep doctors' salarys high... In many cases nurses are in a great position to provide more real care. If tools can help nurses do so isn't that a good thing? I don't view that as replacing doctors so much as delivering more personalized medicine and human care.

While I find the interviewee's personal story, particularly their upbringing in Kolkata (one of my favorite cities -- terracota cha, collegee street) humanizing I'm not sure how relevant it is to the discussion. However it does remind you that there's so much more than simply shaping text. Absolutely.

Our real physical lives are the core of our meaning and AI has no real impact on most of that. Don't we all know that though?

Big Tech simply sees business models around search and ads in Search and AI -- at least for consumers -- is the new search and hence opportunity for ads in search... We can criticize that all we want but this guy was getting that salary for 20 years.

Anyway, to blame Kolkata's challenges on colonialism when it's got some of the best sidewalks in India.. when its very existence in many ways is related to colonialism.. is a myopic perspective in my view. Compare and contrast with Kerala (the other Communist state in India). Kerala has some of the highest economic and quality of life output in the country. Kolkata can and should too. Blaming colonialism and bringing up Gaza strike me as simply trying to make sure that this is relevant to a particular Community to get clicks... aka sell ads. Sigh.

This is true in other cases, AI is just the most obvious example.

The use case for AI is spam.

> Any form of doubt or questioning is quieted.

Witness any HN comment thread with "pro-AI" vibes (which is almost all of them). It's almost as though AI has become a religion.

More re hype as the product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44737346