The key difference between AI and the initial growth of the web is that the more use cases to which people applied the web, the more people wanted of it. AI is the opposite - people love LLM-based chatbots. But it is being pushed into many other use cases where it just doesn't work as well. Or works well, but people don't want AI-generated deliverables. Or leaders are trying to push non-deterministic products into deterministic processes. Or tech folks are jumping through massive hoops to get the results they want because without doing so, it just doesn't work.
Basically, if a product manager kept pushing features the way AI is being pushed -- without PMF, without profit -- that PM would be fired.
This probably all sounds anti-AI, but it is not. I believe AI has a place in our industry. But it needs to be applied correctly, where it does well. Those use cases will not be universal, so I repeat my initial prediction. It will endure and contract.
In the last month I personally used (as in, it was useful) AI for this:
- LLM-powered transcription and translation made it so I could have a long conversation with my airport driver in Vietnam.
- Helped me turn 5-10x ideas into working code and usable tools as I used to.
- Nano Banana restored dozens of cherished family photos for a Christmas gift for my parents.
- Help me correctly fix a ton of nuanced aria/accessibility issues in a production app.
- Taught/explained a million things to me: difference between an aneurysm/stroke, why the rise of DX12/Vulkan gaming engines killed off nVidia SLI, political/economic/social parallels between 1920s and 2020s, etc...
Maybe everyone isn't using it yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. Way too many people find real use every day in a lot of AI products. Just because MS Office Copilot sucks (and it does), doesn't mean it is all useless.
I think you're exaggerating a little, but aren't entirely wrong. The Internet has completely changed daily life for most of humanity. AI can mean a lot of things, but a lot of it is blown way out of proportion. I find LLMs useful to help me rephrase a sentence or explain some kind of topic, but it pales in comparison to email and web browsers, YouTube, and things like blogs.
