As ChatGPT’s third anniversary approaches, AI hype is hard to escape.
Tech companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to enormous data center buildouts, while industry leaders are promising an inevitable future in which superintelligent machines will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity.
But many tech insiders are quietly singing a very different tune, expressing a growing conviction that’s been circulating for a while now: that AI is immensely overhyped.
In an illuminating blog post, tech entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash reports that “most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry” share an “extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI.”
Unlike their CEOS, Dash reports, these workers believe that “technologies like [large language models] have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been overhyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.”
Dash says these workers are afraid to speak up and call for a more moderate and realistic approach to the tech that respects “commitments to environmental sustainability” and that isn’t “centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies.”
It’s not an abstract threat. We’ve already seen thousands of tech workers being laid off as companies continue to double down on their AI investments. Meanwhile, tech leaders are actively threatening to fire employees who are unwilling to embrace AI at any cost.
“People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity within tech,” Dash wrote, “especially as tech leaders are collaborating with the current regime to punish free speech, fire anyone who dissents, and embolden the wealthy tycoons at the top to make ever-more-extreme statements, often at the direct expense of some of their own workers.”
“Very few agree with the hype bubble that the tycoons have been trying to puff up,” Dash concluded in his blog post, arguing that the “mainstream of tech culture is thoughtful, nuanced and circumspect.”
Even OpenAI cofounder and inventor of “vibe coding,” Andrej Karpathy, believes the tech has been massively overhyped. During a recent appearance on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, he said that AI agents, or AI models that are designed to autonomously perform a series of tasks, are failing to live up to the industry’s lofty promises.
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