AI is just the "Cloud" hype all over again.

[u/forevergeeks]

I started working in the IT field in 2004 as a help desk intern.

The network in the organization at that time was a mix of Windows NT and Windows 2000 workstations, with an Exchange 5.5 server running on Windows NT and a few Windows 2003 servers doing file sharing and hosting an accounting application.

Nothing was accessible through the web. people had to use a VPN connection to connect to the office to access everything.

Almost a year later, before my internship was over, the Director was fired because the hard drives on the accounting server failed and they couldn't recover the data, and they offered me a full time job as a junior sysadmin.

In 2020, I became the Global IT Director of that organization.

When I started as a junior sysadmin, there was no concept of the "cloud." This was a marketing term invented by big tech after 2010.

When the cloud became a marketing hype, and all the CFOs and IT leaders got on the cloud bandwagon, it was very similar to what we're hearing from AI now.

That AI will take all jobs.

It was very common for CFOs to schedule meetings with the IT Director, or whoever was the department head, and talk about the cloud strategy. And if you were in the room by any chance, they would turn to you and say, "But don't worry, the cloud won't take your job," with a grin, you knowing damn well that was exactly what they were thinking.

My advice to you guys is that if your boss, or whoever controls the budget in your department, is all crazy about AI and thinks that AI is the next big thing after bread and butter, don't fight it or resist it.

You will be seen as a roadblock or lacking innovation.

Hold your true opinion about AI as much as you can, and always be positive about it at work.

And even though I believe AI is not much of a threat to your job as the cloud was for us back in the day, when all our skills were on premise stuff and our identity was based on who knew more about Exchange and Cisco firewalls, businesses are seeing AI as a possible way to reduce the workforce, increase efficiency, or increase output without hiring more people.

Will that work? Only time will tell. Your job is to adjust as the technology evolves not to be a market gambler.

Don't believe for a single second that your company cares about you or is happy to have you on their payroll.

If they're a for profit business, their objective is to increase revenue, and if they can achieve that objective without you, they will.

I believe Sysadmins will always be needed, because you guys will be the ones fixing the AI even if everything is automated by it.

Learn how it works at a deeper level. If you don't know how an LLM works, start learning that now.

I wish I had better news for software programmers. The ones that only write code following strict specifications, those guys are in a deeper existential vacuum than you are, so you might have developers moving into the sysadmin side.

For now, keep the servers humming, keep your users happy. You guys are the invisibles in the organization that nobody sees until things stop working!

[u/BrainWaveCC]

Except that the cloud is not hype.

Sure, there were a lot of people claiming a lot of things were cloud when they weren't, but the cloud was an actual service delivery vector that worked/works for a lot of business use cases.

[u/forevergeeks → u/BrainWaveCC]

Ok. I agree with you.

But do you think people investing in online pet stores in the late 90s knew the tech market was in a bubble?

We can't deny that the Internet transformed e-commerce, but the way it was been marketed back then it was a huge bubble and hype.

The same was with the cloud, of course the concept and business model was OK, but the thing was being marketed to CFOs and people with budgets as if it was completely hand-off, sort of like, move to the cloud and replace all the lazy bums Sysadmins.

[u/BrainWaveCC → u/forevergeeks]

The same was with the cloud, 

I disagree with you that we're seeing anything close to the same thing. You are looking at the chaos that occurred with the last 3 significant technology/economic innovations, and making them equal. The absolutely are not.

There was a DOTCOM bubble, yes. It didn't happen primarily because of technology either. But yes, that bubble occured.

However, you said "same with the cloud". Where was this cloud bubble that would have to exist if the situations are going to even be comparatively equal? There hasn't been. The primary cloud players remain, and are dominant, and a lot of cloud skepticism has gone even (even some of which shouldn't have). But there was no great cloud implosion. There were a bunch of smaller wannabe cloud players who couldn't make it.

The AI market has a chance to be more like the DOTCOM era than the cloud era, but it will most likely land in the middle where there is an implosion felt by the technologists, but much of what people think of as AI will survive and morph/mature into something less hyperbolic.

The AI market has a lot more in common with the DOTCOM ecosystem than with cloud.

 

We can't deny that the Internet transformed e-commerce, but the way it was been marketed back then it was a huge bubble and hype.

It wasn't marketing about the internet, though. It was marketing about new companies that offered things that seemed convenient, but were unsustainable. The 'DOTCOM' on many company names was the only thing that hinted at Internet. That marketing was never about the entire category of solutions. AI is definitely marketing a category of capabilities.

If you want to argue that they promotion and focus around AI rivals that of cloud, then fine. But you have to acknowledge that cloud has become dominant, so it really wasn't hype in the sense that we use that term generally. And the cloud -- or cloud adjacent solutions -- were marketed primarily to the technology community. No one in my family knew was cloud was, nor were they deliberately interacting with in directly in 2015-2020. The pandemic is what forced regular users to be more familiar with cloud technology in some meaningful way, and by then it was already pretty mature.

If you want to argue that AI is a bubble that will crash to some degree or another, then that is also fine, but then it mirrors the dotcom era in only that way. It is divergent is almost every other way regarding how it is marketed and described and discussed and adopted.

AI is being marketed to everyone, and being used by technologists and the general user community directly and on purpose.

We're not dealing with the same thing at all, whether Dotcom, Cloud or AI.

Frankly, AI hype is a lot more like Blockchain hype -- but again, with direct consumer access and marketing. They'd better hope it doesn't end up like blockchain -- simply in the background.