More on AI as normal technology
Anil Dash: The Majority AI View
What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.
I said this exact same thing back in April:
This idea that LLMs are just "normal technology" is something I've had simmering in my brain for a while now, and it's becoming more clear to me by the day that this seems to be where we're heading.
LLMs are really remarkable technology, but it's more like other technical advancements we've seen in the past than I think many expected.
This part also stood out to me:
Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren't the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.
Ding ding ding! Execs and billionaires who are invested in this shaking things up are over the moon, but people using these tools to do actual work have a more nuanced option because we can't live on hype, we have shit to get done.
