Comment by johndhi
7 days ago
I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions:
(1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors.
(2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy.
(3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential."
The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.
(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
> (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)
It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old.
Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
Also in the amount of data.
Ever remember waiting something like hour to watch a 60-second movie preview over dialup?
I get a reminder every time I load a modern website in an area with very poor reception. Appears to not load at all —- not due to lack of connectivity but rather due the speeds and latencies being too slow for the amount of crap being fetched.
GPRS and EDGE were many times faster than dialup — must have been a dream — but now utterly unusable.
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It is a valuable and relevant lesson - when something wide and structural manifests (personal computing, the internet, smartphones, AI), lots of people will be able to see the coming future with high fidelity, but will tend to underestimate the speed of change. Because we gloss over all the many, many small challenges to get from point A to B.
Yes, now it feels like something like smartphones came of age overnight and was always inevitable. But it really took more than a decade to reach the level of integration and polish that we now take for granted. UI on phone apps was terrible, speeds were terrible, screens resolutions were terrible, processing was minimal, battery didn't last, roaming charges/3g coverage, etc. For years, you couldn't pinch to zoom on an iPhone, stuff like that.
All these structural problems were rubbed away over time and eventually forgotten. But so many of these small tweaks needed to take place before we could "fill in the blanks" and reach the level of ubiquity for something like an Uber driver using their phone for directions.
UI on phone apps still is terrible. Have you ever used a desktop with high-end gaming peripherals (fast monitor/keyboard/mouse), running a light desktop environment such as LXQt on Xorg, with animations disabled? The feeling of responsiveness leaves all mobile devices in the dust. Any modern CPU+SSD is fast enough, but good peripherals are still rare and make a huge difference. Most phones are still running 60Hz displays. A touchscreen is inherently clumsy compared to mouse+keyboard. Mobile UI feel is worse than desktop computers from the 90s.
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> And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii.
I mean, we could totally have done that. There's nothing stopping you from delivering an experience like modern Amazon or Facebook or whatever in server-rendered HTML4. CSS3 and React get you fancy graphics and animations, and fast, no-repaint page transitions, but that's pretty much all they get you; we had everything else 25 years ago in MSIE6.
You could have built a dynamically-computed product listing grid + shopping cart, or a dynamically-computed network-propagated news feed with multimedia post types + attached comment threads (save for video, which would have been impractical back then), on top of Perl CGI-bin scripts — or if you liked, a custom Apache module in C.
And, in fact, some people did! There existed web services even in 1998 that did [various fragments of] these things! Most of them built in ASP or ColdFusion, mind you, and so limited to a very specific stack; but still, it was happening!
It was just that the results were all incredibly jank, with no UX polish... but not because UX polish would have been impossible with the tools available at the time. (As I said, HTML4 was quite capable!)
Rather, it was because all the professional HCI people were still mostly focused on native apps (with the few rare corporate UX vanguards "doing web stuff", working on siloed enterprise products like the MSDN docs); while the new and growing body of art-school "web design" types were all instead being trained mainly on the application of vertically-integrated design tools (ActiveX, Flash, maybe web layout via Photoshop 9-way slice export).
I agree with most of this post, except the part where you could actually do it. I’ll be the first to admit that I was not in server rooms back then but I’ve heard from those who were. The biggest advantage Amazon had, for many years, over their competitors, is that they would take your order and tell you it was completed and wait to charge your card until it shipped because it was cheaper to write your order down than to spend expensive session compute waiting for the payment to go through. That kind of optimization was necessary because all the networks were slower or flaky then, including payment processing, and often relied on batch processing overnight that has become less visible today.
Meanwhile on the client side, web technologies had a lot of implicit defaults assuming pages on sites rather than apps and experiences. For example, we didn’t originally have a way for JS to preserve back/forward buttons functionality when navigating in a SPA without using hash tags in the URL. Without CSS features for it, support for RTL and LTR on the same website was basically nonexistent. I won’t even get started on charset, poorer support for dates that persists to this day, limited offline modes in a time when being offline was more common, and how browsers varied tremendously across platforms and versions back then with their own unique set of JS APIs and unique ideas of how to render webpages.
It took the original acid test and a bunch more tests that followed before we had anything close to cross browser standards for newer web features. I still remember the snowman hack to get IE to submit forms with UTF-8 encoding, and that wasn’t as bad as quirks mode or IE 5.
Actually maybe I disagree with most of this post. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could have been done, but it’s reductive to the extreme to say the only reason web services were jank is because UX polish didn’t exist. If anything, the web is the reason UX is so good today - apps and desktop platforms continuously copied the web for the past 28 years, from Windows ME with single-click everywhere to Spotify and other electron apps invading the OS. I’m not going to devalue the HIG or equivalent, but desktop apps tended to evolve slowly, with each new OS release, while web apps evolved quickly, with each new website needing to write its own cross platform conventions and thus needing its own design language.
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.
What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard.
Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
> They can clearly do things that involve reasoning
No.
> but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data.
The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter.
Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
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> "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet"
... who can also type at superhuman speeds, but has no self-awareness, creativity or initiative.
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience
Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100
And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
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That reminds me of this post, here, from a couple of weeks ago[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615801
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy.
A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.
> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.
Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification.
If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.