I think they'll be on this for a while, since unlike NFTs this is actually useful tech. (Though not in every field yet, certainly.)
There are going to be some sub-fads related to GPUs and AI that the tech industry will jump on next. All this is speculation:
- Floating point operations will be replaced by highly-quantized integer math, which is much faster and more efficient, and almost as accurate. There will be some buzzword like "quantization" that will be thrown out to the general public. Recall "blast processing" for the Sega. It will be the downfall of NVIDIA, and for a few months the reduced power consumption will cause AI companies to clamor over being green.
- (The marketing of) personal AI assistants (to help with everyday tasks, rather than just queries and media generation) will become huge; this scenario predicts 2026 or so.
- You can bet that tech will find ways to deprive us of ownership over our devices and software; hard drives will get smaller to force users to use the cloud more. (This will have another buzzword.)
In this thread: people doing the exact opposite of what they do seemingly everywhere else and ignoring the title to respond to the post.
Figuring out what the next big thing will be is obviously hard or investing would be so easy as to be cheap.
I feel like a lot of what has been exploding has been ideas someone had a long time ago that are just becoming easier and given more PR. 3D printing was invented in the '80s but had to wait for computation and cost reduction. The idea that would become neural network for AI is from the '50s, and was toyed with repeatedly over the years but ultimately the big breakthrough was just that computing became cheap enough to run massive server farms. AR stems back to the 60s and gets trotted out slightly better each generation or so, but it was just tech getting smaller that made it more viable. What other theoretical ideas from the last century could now be done for a much lower price?
I genuinely find LLMs to be helpful with a wide variety of tasks. I have never once found an NFT to be useful.
Here's a random little example: I took a photo of my bookcase, with about 200 books on it, and had my LLM make a spreadsheet of all the books with their title, author, date of publication, cover art image, and estimated price. I then used this spreadsheet to mass upload them to Facebook Marketplace in bulk. In about 20 minutes I had over 200 facebook ads posted for every one of my books; I only had to do a quick review of the spreadsheet to fix any glaring issues. I also had it use some marketing psychology to write attractive descriptions for the ads.
I remember trying to investigate using crypto as a replacement for international bank transfers. The gas fees were much larger than the greatly inflated fee my bank was charging. Another time, I used crypto to donate to a hacker I liked the work of. I realized the crypto transfer was actually more traceable when accounting for know your customer laws and the public ledger. That was when I realized crypto was truly useless. AI is mildly useful when coding, to point me to packages I wouldn't have heard of, provide straightforward examples. That's the only time I use it. The tech industry and investor class are desperate for it to be the next world-changing thing which is leading them to slap it on everything. That will eventually wear off.
I'm waiting for the cheap graphic cards
AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.
That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.
What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.
Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they 'think' like us.
Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.
Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.
What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.
Guesses at next tech bro stuff (some already in the wild) unfortunately, we're not done with AI yet
AI Teachers and Tutors
Full AI video commercials.
3D AI experiences in VR.
AI medical diagnosis for both consumer and insurance
AI pricing for insurance
AI shopping assistants, clothes, styling, decorating
AI mid-level management to rat out on people not working 60hrs a week.
Killing the poor
The AI hype will pass but AI is here to stay. Current models already allow us to automate processes which were impossible to automate just a few years ago. Here are some examples:
- Detecting anomalies in roentgen and CT-scans
- Normalizing unstructured information
- Information distribution in organizations
- Learning platforms
- Stock photos
- Modelling
- Animation
Note, these are obvious applications.
You know what pisses me off?
My so-called creative peers generating AI slop images to go with the music that they are producing.
I’m pretty sure they’d be up in arms if they found out that an AI produced tune got to the top 10 on Beatport.
One of the more popular AI movements right now is DJs creating themselves as action figures.
The hypocrisy is hilarious.
OP here to clarify: With AI Hype Train I meant the fact that so many people are slapping AI onto anything just to make it sound cool like at this point I wouldn't be surprised if a bidet company slapped AI into one of their bidets...
I'm not saying AI is gonna go anywhere or doesn't have legitimate uses but currently there is money in AI and everybody wants to get AI into their things to be cool & capitalize on the hype:
Same thing with NFT's and blockchains. The technology behind it has it's legitimate uses but not everyone is slapping it onto things like a few years ago just to make fast bank.
It will eventually, when people realize it's just a giant and complex statistical response machine. It's really just giving you the words and/or set of pixels back that are the usual response to the words you provided. If there was no training data, there would be no AI.
It's like a parrot, but more complex and requires nuclear power plants to generate enough power to keep it going.
Not a tech bro but have watched a few channels of people who are:
First off a lot of people have jumped on ai in comments. So I will too. But to the question raised - if you are taking about "establishment/established tech bros" and if by 'jump on' you mean innovate then I say nothing. If you look at a lot of leading lights in all sort of fields a person often gets one idea and that makes their fortune - and the rest of their ideas are shit. Zuckerburg's metaverse anyone? This is true of companies too that appear to become ossified. Because, like you know - Widows 11 is orgasmic. So what orgasmic idea will come to the fore from some unknown: it is not possible to say because it will come from the unknown. All the sci-fi of 70 years ago thought it would be talking watches, no one guessed the phone would be the utilitarian tech.
However there are fads and forcing use and so on. So tech bros will jump on whatever is the next fad or thing that is forced into use (implanted microchips for id, 24 hour tracking, payments... social credit scores anyone? I mean its what the mobile phone is doing anyway).
To ai: imo we need to separate general ai, ie Chat GTP, deepseek etc from more narrowly trained ai use cases. The general ai have (almost) run out of data to (freely) train upon: in fact there is a worry that it's starting to eat itself - that is, ai is consuming ai generated content to train itself (ie mad ai): also the line on the graph is flattening as far as performance is concerned. AI that is trained for specific tasks however I feel is a different animal: think material sciences or cancer research. However in everyday use with a few years I can see you asking for a song that "is heavy with a punkish sound using violins about the folly of using a rotating wire brush as a masturbation tool" and there it is (though is it here now? I can't keep up). Depending on where these are (freeware, open commons, closed propriety) depends on what happens: Spotify/the music distributors could become totalising monopolies of music, or they could implode. In ten years you could be saying "make a film about a man scarred for life by said wire brush": sure it's take days and only be 360p to start ---- to start. Again creative commons or monopolies?
So: "It's a bit hard" DIY on personal computers, or "easy as the cloud" and marketed and convenient and just pay a monthly subscription: I think we all know the answer - because we are lazy and stupid:
That is why we will welcome the chip into our wrists.
I very sadly don't see it going anywhere because of how much money has been invested by big tech corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Reason they're willing to put so much money into these corporations is because they're being built on their cloud infrastructure, which the different AI companies pay for. So either way, they end up getting more money and becoming more influential, even if the AI hype eventually dies out.
Oh, it's gonna be so much worse. NFTs mostly just ruined sad crypto bros who were dumb enough to buy a picture of an ape. Companies are investing heavily in generative AI projects without establishing a proper use case or even its basic efficacy. ChatGPTs newest iterations are getting worse; no one has a solution to hallucinations; the energy costs are astronomical; the entire process relies on plagiarism and copyright infringement, and even if you get by all of that, consumers hate it. AI ads are met derision or revulsion, and AI customer service is universally despised.
This isn't like NFTs. It's more like Facebook and VR. Sure, VR has its uses, but investing heavily in unnecessary and unwanted VR tools cost Facebook billions. The difference is that when this bubble bursts, instead of just hitting Facebook, this is going to hit every single tech company.
AI is both overhyped crap and a revolution.
I do feel that, unlike Crypto, AI (or, to drop the buzzwords, LLMs and other machine-learning based language processors and parsers) will end up having a place in the world.
As it is NOW, the AI hype train is definitely an investment bubble and it will definitely explode in a glorious fashion eventually. Taking a lot of people down with it.
But unlike Crypto, AI does -- It like does things, you know? Even if I personally feel like it's mostly only good for a toy, all my attempts to use it for anything society would deem "valuable" were frustrated, but at least I can RP with it when my friends aren't available. It is a thing that exists and can be used.
Crypto was funny because it was literally useless. Just an incredibly wasteful techno-fetishistic speculative vehicle with precisely zero shame about being that.
As for what's next, I think Quantum Computing might be it. That is, assuming the Tech Industry even survives the bubble's burst in its current form. Because everyone in the industry is putting all their eggs including theoretical eggs that haven't even been laid, and in fact there's not even a chicken in this AI hype train. And even with AI becoming part of people's lives, as I predict it indeed will, when the bubble does burst it might end up hitting the reset button on who is truly in charge of things.
You're assuming there will be a next time. When the AI bubble bursts, and it will, the whole economy will go down with it. AI companies are massively in debt and have a product that ranges from utter shit to kinda okay, and absolutely no sane way to monetize it. Everyone outside of tech, you know, the customers, fucking hate AI. It has stolen their work, jeopardized their livelihoods, wasted their resources and made the most insufferable asshats in history very wealthy.
Just like that ridiculous "internet" hype train from a couple of years ago
I mean much of the hype is warranted I just wish every man and his dog would spare us their personal revelations about it on LinkedIn.
Quantum computing, probably.
Problem is, it has the potential to be actual reality. Tech bros need their products to be 99% blue-sky hype to get their financing, and they can't risk some nerd going "well actually what you're suggesting can't be done any more efficiently on a quantum computer than you can do now".
Reminds me of Blockchain
According to new research from Deloitte, 74 percent of large companies (with sales over $500 million) see a “compelling business case” for blockchain technology.
Indeed, from supply chain management and regulatory monitoring to recruiting and healthcare, organizations are applying blockchain to their business models to revolutionize how they track and verify transactions.
It's not a fake or fundamentally useless technology, but everyone who doesn't understand it is rushing to figure out how they're gonna claim to use it.
TBH, the AI hype is much more annoying. I don't get the point on NFTs either, but at least it was easy to avoid.
The difference is that AI is actually quite useful in some areas like medical research. Language models like Chatgpt are also useful when used right. It's the stable diffusion stuff (image generation) that is crap and the fact that companies keep shoving AI features that no one asked for down our throat.
Me waiting for some nuance to the false equivalences.
The difference is that tech bros are selling the promise of replacing expensive skilled labour, to business owners, who keep funding it because they'd rather pay one of their own than pay a living wage to a normal person.
So the money keeps coming which let's them keep working on it
Hey, A1 is great so long as you have it on the right dish. I dunno that I'd call it a "hype train" either, because it's been around for years!
/s
I really wish we could retire the phrase "tech bro".
It actively alienates allies that we desperately need.
The average techie does NOT fit the mold of "tech bro".
They tend to be very liberal https://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/122582/web.345435/#/summary They tend to be more LGBTQ friendly than most industries https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/diversity-inclusion/guest-article/top-lgbtq-friendly-industries-in-the-us/There's a loud minority of tech leaders who qualify as "tech bros" and they're not representative of the industry. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-02-20/california-silicon-valley-andreessen-zuckerberg-musk-donald-trump
If we continue to lump that large majority of nerds in with that group; at best we're wasting time yelling at allies, at worst we're driving them to the other side.
Well, all they have to do is teach the AI to do one task decently and consistently, then go on to the next task, until it takes 99% of human jobs, and then they can kill off an increasing amount of humans.
They're trying with "Quantum Computers" and "Humanoid Robots". One promises magic and the other slaves, so you see the appeal for investors.
These are amazing years to take notes on who is saying "this will disappear" or "this will be the future" and making sure to stop listening those who assured something as certain and that did not end up happening.
The main difference is that crypto/NFTs actually exist and work as advertised while "AI" doesn't exist.
It's pretty incredible to see people be so critical of crypto/NFTs while pumping phony "AI" hype at the same time.
Next is quantum computing
Agents
You're going to be waiting until you are dead.
ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) =/= AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
These "AI" are all ANI, and are useless.
AGI, however, could be used to win wars.
I don't think civillians even have access to anything resembling AGI, and I'm not sure any government even have a fully developed AGI yet.
NFT, AI, "the blockchain", 3D TVs, SaaS... I know I'm forgetting some more tech trends that have been annoying from start to finish in the past ten or twenty years.
(Sadly SaaS seems to be doing OK right now, and I suspect our Windows friends are not too far from OSaaS)
The 3d tvs were quick to die compared to this.
given the state of the world, I would say... weapons or drinkable water.
Biotech is still on the waiting list with vat grown meat.
The next big thing that will change everything.
AI is going to eventually begin to replace people's real-world relationships, and it will be so sophisticated that you won't be able to tell the difference.
Biochem
A raging bonfire with any luck.
