Google’s John Mueller posted his thoughts on AI, which were two fold. (1) AI is not going away, so he doesn’t recommend you take a stance against AI and (2) he isn’t a fan of all the hype around AI, because it is making many feel insecure about their future.
Let’s start with the AI not going away.
He wrote on LinkedIn, “AI is not going to go away.” “You can’t be “I hate AI and will never use it” if you want to work in a tech-related field,” he added.
John does predict that the hype will die down a bit. He wrote, “The hype *will* die down a bit, people will get tired of it, and some of the stupid uses of AI / LLMs will hopefully be reduced, but there are a ton of amazing advances out of the technologies over the past years which make a lot of sense that will remain & evolve further.”
I mean, this is not much of a prediction, but it is a good heads up that we need to be more accepting of it, even if we don’t like how it is working right now. We should continue to play with it, see how it works, and experiment with it so we are not left behind.
Then he spoke about the hype and how it can be a bit too much for many. He wrote, “What I noticed is that there’s wild & crazy hype being pushed by many of the makers / sellers / promoters of the tools, and it’s easy to feel insecure by thinking that the hype is right.”
John said that for him “it settled down a bit once I had a chance to work out how these technologies work (similar to when you know how crawling a website works, and suddenly it’s no longer magic) and used them enough to get a feeling of what’s real & what’s just hype. It’s not easy, the pressure from the hype is immense, and even after removing the hype, things are evolving quickly.”
How did this happen for John? He said the more he understands the systems, the more secure he feels about them. “If understanding how the systems work is too much (it’s not easy, not everyone has the luxury of time & background), I’d try to find some trusted folks who can help you to see what’s behind the smoke,” he wrote.
I remember feeling a lot of the buzz when Bing Chat came out, then Google SGE/AI Overviews, of course ChatGPT. But yea, in the past several months, things do seem to be calming a bit – at least with all the hype…
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Simchat Torah.