GenAI in two words: ”Success Theater”
Success Theater
Amazing snippet in Jon Victor’s newsletter today at The Information:
The most underreported story in AI right now
Also, a link to my own new essay in Fortune, which might help to explain why in many applications success has been so elusive, despite a half trillion dollar investment: The most underreported and important story in AI right now.
Tech industry has always been somewhat vulnerable to success theater. I worked through the service oriented architecture mania where our company turned FTP batch scripts into services running on IBM's BPEL monster that was about .001% as efficient as the original FTP script.
This was done only so the company had marketing material to claim "success" with these expensive tools.
Now we have the AI mania, but it is the biggest mania of them all. Nothing compares. The collapse is going to be equally devastating.
Companies have always engaged in "success theater". It's a big part of the game. For the bigger companies, it is practically the CEO's only job. What is perhaps different in the AI realm is the gullibility of the audience. A car company that claimed its new model will reach 500 mph would be laughed out of town. When an AI company hints that their next version might be AGI, they can get away with it because AGI is a vague concept and the media environment is full of loose talk about how AI is going to take our jobs, cure cancer, etc.