AI versus Marshy - A Counterpoint to the AI Hype Machine

I’ve been following the AI hype machine for a while now, and I’ve seen a lot of excitement and misinformation. In this article, I want to share with you a counterpoint to all the hype, and it comes from a software developer named Carl. He’s got 35 years of experience and a refreshingly skeptical view on AI. Let’s dive in and see what he has to say. Carl is a software developer with 35 years experience that popped into my YouTube algorithm the other day. My algorithm is fairly (I quote my beloved Georgie here) - “quite nerdy” - as you can imagine. Carl’s video called AI Hype is completely out of control - especially since ChatGPT-4o is what caught my attention and it was refreshing. The video is 22mins of detailed nerdy proselytising, so let me break down for you what’s interesting about it instead. Carl is coming at the AI wave through the lens of a software developer. He’s employing cold, rational data to his opining - starting with research and peer-reviewed papers, and then cycling down to less robust sources of information. All information is fallible over time but he’s leading with evidence Carl dismisses a lot of the hype about “human-level artificial intelligence” as nonsense and highlights that nearly all of the tech demos we’ve seen are staged Carl and I agree that nobody knows what’s going to happen, and what to look out for: What’s going to happen with AI is one of the bigger questions and software careers right now. In tech. Maybe even in the world, and I’d really love to know what’s going to happen. And if I did, I would tell you, but I don’t. And honestly, nobody does. and And what we really know for definite sure is that many of the people that are telling us how great it’s going to be, not only have a financial incentive to lie about that, they’ve been lying about it for years and have been lying so obviously about it that they’ve been caught lying about it over and over. There’s some other interesting points about ChatGPT 4o being worse than 4 in some tests, and many cited examples where all the big tech companies have lied. Originally appeared in newsletter : AI versus Marshy #51: counterpoints, that voice survey, and building an AI business from scratch