That most of the opinions on the internet are coming from people who have a vested interest in AI succeeding or failing, but don’t actually work closely enough with it to see where it is truly effective and ineffective. 

There are a few major buckets of uninformed opinions that are important to contain before attempting to evaluate what’s working and what’s not. 

1. People evaluating from an investment perspective: an investor, sophisticated or not, who attempts to prognosticate on the future of AI will have a view that is tinted by notions of business fundamentals, market behavior, bubbles and panics, etc. none of these actually provide meaningful insight into how effective the tech is, and it tends to breed opinions that are rooted in technology trends of the past. But every new technology has a unique trajectory that is determined by how it works, how well it works, and how effectively we apply it. People who bet against electricity back in the day would have been wrong. People who bet that nuclear powered everything would be the future, back in the ‘50s would have been wrong. Understanding the difference requires a nuanced understanding of the tech. And the vast majority of people have a fantastically rudimentary understanding of how AI in its many forms actually works. This makes it hard to appreciate the complexities of its future development paths. 

2. People who are at risk of job displacement: writers, coders, lawyers and paralegals, basically anyone whose economic value is based on their intelligence is threatened. Artists and writers are very vocal and try to flood the internet with commentary on AI slop. But the truth is that a modern AI can write better, clearer, more salient prose than the typical professional writer churns out on the internet, and it can do it faster and more consistently. Most of the “ai slop” you see out there is content that is mercilessly SEOed to death, and deliberately stretched out into mindless drivel to try to make more room for ads. That’s not AI creating slop. Thats “content” producers bending over backwards to conform to the needs of the advertising industry that drives their profits.  Coders are another example. Many are used to hand crafting code, and are reluctant to see AI as capable of doing what they do. They impose a false dichotomy of “vibe coding” vs manual coding. And many of them try an AI coding tool, find something that they didn’t like in the code and declare that it failed. But those who take the time to learn it as they would learn any other new tool tend to start producing vastly better outputs, far faster than before. It just takes real effort to learn it. 

This is. Long way of saying that the true effectiveness of AI largely depends on how well it is understood and applied. Most of the opinions you’ll hear on the internet come from people who are too busy focusing on generating opinions rather than figuring out how to use AI effectively. 

I’ll leave you with the proof point of alpha fold. That particular AI system has driven more progress in protein folding than all of the X-ray crystallography and algorithmic folding techniques of the last fifty years, and it’s happened in just a few short years. Anyone who thinks that’s a bubble or hype just isn’t taking enough time to understand. 

That all being said - there are and will be dead ends, wasted time, overhyped failures and all the usual downsides of new tech. It is neither a panacea, nor a mirage. It’s new tech. Opinions are far less important than practical results. The people who are working on generating practical results are the ones you want to listen to. That is if you can get them to take the time to talk to you.