I imagine the flop of ChatGPT 5 along with it becoming clear that current gen models aren't living up to the expectations might be starting to cool investor expectations.

I've been having an ongoing argument the past month with with a 70-something step relative I see often who has always come to me for computer advice about this exact thing. I've tried to let it go many times, but she keeps hammering at it, even bringing it up out of the blue. Since you mentioned something similar, forgive me for popping in with my own rant here, but it has been really getting on my nerves.

She absolutely will not hear it that "AI" does not mean it is actually intelligent but rather a marketing scam and that it has zero chance of developing general intelligence. It's been disappointing because like I said, she used to trust me about computer stuff, but now angrily asks me "do you even know about <some pop sci "expert"> and the projects they're working on?!," namedropping all these supposed "respected" scientists she's been reading about the impending AI apocalypse and thinking I'm uninformed for not knowing them. It's like shit lady, I used to argue with Ray Kurtzweil's singularity nuts 12 years ago about this same sort of garbage. She's actually fairly youthful in her views for a boomer, she's a sci fi fan and prides herself on being socially progressive, and frequently talks about how much she loves science, but has always had a real "woowoo" new-agey bent to that

The conversation first came up because she told me about how she's been literally losing sleep with actual insomnia, thinking about AI with respect to what it will mean for her grandkids, what will happen to them in a world where machines become "ever more" intelligent, repeating talking points she heard somewhere about how "once machines become intelligent, they'll have no use for us and only see us as a threat." So many brainworms to sift through, from colonialist thinking to buying into "AI" hype. I did my best to disabuse her of this belief to begin with partly just to help her sleep better at night, though I admit I did remind her there are many many other real things to worry about regarding the world her grandkids will be inheriting. But she's sticking to it vehemently. She's been going off on me about how "all the top thinkers on the subject" agree with her, going on about how even Stephen Hawking thought AI would be a disaster (she thought that was an ace in the hole because I used to like discussing theoretical physics with her and never had the heart to differentiate for her the real but niche contributions Hawking made from his celebrity). Rather than think about what I said as someone who tends to know more about this kind of thing, she has decided I don't actually know anything.

It really has been a trip watching how the propaganda/hype mill and the shoehorning of "AI" into everything has broken so many brains who only 5 years ago would have laughed at anyone else for thinking the plot of Terminator was really happening.

Have any of the other three made a return?

I find they have practical uses once you spend the time to figure out what they can do well. For example, for coding, they can do a pretty good job of making a UI from a json payload, crafting SQL queries, making endpoints, and so on. Any fairly common task that involves boilerplate code, you'll likely get something decent to work with. I also find that sketching out the structure of the code you want by writing the signatures for the functions and then having LLM fill them in works pretty reliably. Where things go off the rails is when you give them too broad a task, or ask them to do something domain specific. And as a rule, if they don't get the task done in one shot, then there's very little chance they can fix the problem by iterating.

They're also great for working with languages you're not terrible familiar with. For example, I had to work on a Js project using React, and I haven't touched either in years. I know exactly what I want to do, and how I want the code structured, but I don't know the nitty gritty of the language. LLMs are a perfect bridge here because they'll give you idiomatic code without you having to constantly looks stuff up.

Overall, they can definitely save you time, but they're not a replacement for a human developer, and the time saving is mostly a quality of life improvement for the developer as opposed to some transformational benefit in how you work. And here's the rub in terms of a business model. Having what's effectively a really fancy autocomplete isn't really the transformative technology companies like OpenAI were promising.

The most useful application is in making garbo marketing images for products that used to be 100% photoshopped instead. Cool your fake product has an "AI" water splash instead of one from Getty. Nothing of value gained or lost except a recognition of how meaningless it is.

Also, the reason all the hype and 'culture' around these products focus on individual end users (write me a poem, be a chatbot, make me Pixar art etc) is because they're good at being flexible, at applying the algorithm to different shallow tasks. But when it comes to specific, repeated, reliable use cases for businesses they're much much worse. The error rates are high, it's actual ability for 'institutional memory' and reliable repetition is poor, and if you're replicating a known process previously done by people you still have to train or recruit new people to get the best out of the tech.

Yeah, the next nightmare is starting to get tired of waiting.

come to think of it, "the market responded to an MIT study suggesting that the technology is worthless" is far too coherent for the stock market. The crash/bubble pop will come because a black cat crossed someone's path or a meteor is seen in the sky over the Bay Area.