I think it really depends how a person judges the progress from chatgpt 3.5, 3 years ago to Opus 4.5.
In one light it is super impressive and amazing progress, in another light it is not impressive at all and totally over hyped.
Using the Hubert Dreyfus analogy. It is impressive if the goal is to climb as high as we can up giant tree. The height we have reached isn't impressive at all though if we are trying to climb the tree to get to the moon.
What is meant by "AI Music" is not works by Iannis Xenakis or certain Autechre albums.
We should be defining all this better but we won't. It is also that there is no "AI music" equivalent of the amen break to invent new forms of art. The cultural structures and norms that made that possible no longer exist.
It really is the difference though between art and porn. A blurry distinction on paper but quite obvious in practice. Quite obvious in motivation.
Ever since the first electric guitarist who turned their amplifier input up way too high (*), artists have been ignoring the instructions that came with the technology and (mis)using it to make art, and they’ll do it with this one too.
I think the Deepseek moment that everyone started trying Deepseek and chain of thought was the weekend of 1/25/25 and 1/26/25.
The progress lived up to the hype the past year. To say otherwise is to be either intellectually dishonest or you just didn't bother using the tools in order to feel how much progress was made.
I just went back to a project that I remember the models struggled with. It felt like years ago but it was from July. Even July to now is night and day different.
> To say otherwise is to be either intellectually dishonest or you just didn't bother using the tools
We can’t have a proper discussion if you start by making wrong and uninformed statements about a stranger and promptly assert that you believe anyone who disagrees with you is either malicious or wilfully ignorant. People can experience the same things and still reach different conclusions or have different opinions.
When the same revolutionary messaging is touted over and over with revised dates whenever the previous prediction hasn’t panned out, anyone is justified in not buying that “this time is different” when that has been said multiple times before.
It’s the boy who cried wolf. Sure, maybe someday it will be true, but save it for when it is instead of repeatedly saying “next year”, “in the next five years”.
I had a job at a small investment firm at the time in college and to me it is nothing like the dotcom bubble.
The dotcom bubble was the "new economy", the old economy had changed forever and was dead. No one thought it was a bubble. Even when the bubble popped it took until 9/11 to wake us up from the mass hysteria.
I can't think of another "bubble" that practically everyone thinks we are in a bubble. To the point that I think many would find it irrational to believe we are not in a bubble. That is not what bubble is. A bubble is the madness of crowds, not the wisdom of crowds and the crowd certainly believes we are in a bubble.
There were front page news stories about a possible bubble back then.
The chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously made a speech warning of "irrational exuberance". It can't get much more direct than formal government warnings at the highest level.
"the old economy had changed forever and was dead."
Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?
However your point that if everybody are thinking there is buble there is none is valid. Ironically your whole post undermine this point. And you are not alone in your analysis. General bubble wisdom is not settled as one might think.
Plus famous Alan Greenspan "irrational exuberance" was in 1996. And AFAIK in 1999 everybody know there is buble but it busted only in 2000. On top of that I have seen overlying plots of stock prices now and before dot com suggesting there is 1-2 years of increases still to go.
> Ehem - what is the difference compered to now? Wasn't programmers obsolete by 6mths ago and nobody would work so we do need UBI?
You're applying an arbitrary time constraint to the realization of AI's promise in order to rubbish it. This is a logical mistake common among critics: not yet, so never. It doesn't seem as if there is a near limit to the tech's development. Until that changes, the potential for job wipeouts and societal upheaval is real, whether in 5 or 50 years.
Sorry but that was not my point. My point was refuting of the thesis (in the comment that I am replying to) that nobody was making grand claims about AI contrary to grand claims about internet pre dot com. Obviously in both cases there were/are grand claims made.
Have you considered that your investment firm and other peers at the time were in an information bubble?
In fact outside of tech if the dotcom bubble wasn’t being discussed it’s because most folks—being not, or barely, online yet—weren’t paying any attention to it per se. The bubble they cared about was the broader stock market bubble, which was definitely widely perceived as a bubble.
Very untrue, economy doesn't happen on online forums in echo chambers but out there. Every major company invests into AI however they can for the classical FOMO emotion.
This is how movers and decision makers think. No CEO thinks - this will crash, so lets invest into it massively and spread our company finances more thinly when the SHTF comes.
25 years time. "I remember the LLM bubble, everyone knew we were in a bubble but they carried on as if the music would never stop. Don't worry, our situation is nothing like that, there is no talk of a bubble."
I think it is a form of scientism to say Campbell is "wrong" but people love scientism. For many it is standard orthodoxy and a blind spot of mass stupidity.
I think Campbell is the pop version of The Golden Bough. I have only read a little of the The Golden Bough but is so immense, alien and unrelatable. I have also read how James George Frazer was also "wrong". As if the conclusions of a 19th century Victorian somehow negates the 12 volumes of collected mythology. Independent thought and reasoning though is not a strength of those prone to scientism.
I don't think the US Congress has declared war since Word War 2.
I would say this is the exact same thing we did with Manuel Noriega in 1988.
Personally, I hate that we do these things but it is certainly not impossible in the long run the lives of the Venezuelans will be improved.
It is hard to get an exact figure but inflation last year was 150-200% and that is an improvement from what they had. 50,000% hyperinflation at the end of the last decade.
Given I was just annoyed at my grocery bill an hour ago because of 3% inflation I really can't imagine what life is like with that level of inflation.
This was true in 2010. I use to have a USB wifi adapter that was specifically meant to make sure linux would always work. I lost that adapter years ago.
I can't remember the last time I tried a distro that didn't just work on a random computer with a random wifi but it has been several years now.
Nvidia cards on the other hand...last year I had to try about 10 distros before I found something that wasn't a huge pain in the ass.
I think it is like the way getting married is statistically more healthy.
Friends and a partner act like a small life coach. I am sure many unhealthy habits are correlated with being left entirely to your own devices. I know I would go to the doctor more if I had a partner coaching/bugging me that I go more.
We are the outliers. If everyone was wired like me, the concept of a dinner party would simply not exist and Facebook would look like this.
