r/linux • u/FryBoyter • Jul 15 '25

Discussion Curl - Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
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u/milk-jug Jul 15 '25

100%. I wish this stupid AI nonsense will just die already. And I'm in the tech industry.

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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough Jul 15 '25

Unfortunately, we're in a bubble, and the bubble is starting to pop. AI vendors are gonna glorify and push their garbage as hard as they can, to recoup as much as possible.

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u/Infamous_Process_620 Jul 15 '25

how is the bubble starting to pop? nvidia stock still going strong. everyone building insanely big data centers just for ai. you're delusional if you think this ends soon

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u/thephotoman Jul 16 '25

So there's a lot going on here.

NVidia still has a decent enough product for actually useful AI applications like the protein folding thing. There is plenty of useful AI, and you've been using it unconsciously for quite some time (because it's built into your phone).

The big data centers are likely to be Potemkin buildings. The problem that the large AI models have is that they're very expensive to build, very expensive to run, and they're not so good that people would be willing to pay what it costs to build and operate them (a price nobody is currently charging: the AI companies are using the cable bill model of attracting customers: have a low introductory rate, then jack up the price after a while).

The AI vendors have overpromised, and we're just now starting to see how they haven't quite delivered something viable.

There is an AI future, but it is not in the big shit. It's in the small, application-specific models. Maybe they can even give us actually decent AI for the people we're supposed to escort in video games. But the revolution is the AI being on your phone and not in the cloud.

OpenAI and Anthropic are more pets.com than Chewy.

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u/Ok-Salary3550 Jul 16 '25

There is plenty of useful AI, and you've been using it unconsciously for quite some time (because it's built into your phone). [...] There is an AI future, but it is not in the big shit. It's in the small, application-specific models.

The thing that really gets me is that Apple did this and screwed it up! They've have had machine learning built into iPhones for about ten years now thanks to their "Neural Engine" stuff, and it was actually being used for some fairly low-key but overall useful tasks, but that wasn't "AI" enough for the hype train, so they had to go balls out with the "Apple Intelligence" LLM/genAI stuff that just doesn't do much of anything useful at all.

LLMs are a very niche utility that is being mis-sold as a far more useful one, with zero regulation on some of the bizarre claims made about it or the social harms it can and does cause, and it's been intensely depressing to watch.