Nathaniel (NLW) Whittemore

And Neil Dash wrote a long post called The Majority AI View, where he argues, we're in an unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the tech industry is barely ever mentioned.

Most people who have technical roles within the tech industry like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs.

They aren't the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all tech.

But what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency in their feelings about AI

which can be pretty succinctly summed up.

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been overhyped, the fact that they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

Now, to be clear, I hate the framing of this as the majority AI view.

This being the majority AI view does not at all resonate with my lived experience of dealing with a lot of folks in this same industry.

And anytime someone tries to paint an entire group of people with a broad brush, I tend to bristle.

But it is certainly the case that a lot of people feel like this.

Whether it's a majority or not doesn't matter.

The point is that there is a large constituency of people in the know who feel like the hype and hyperbole crowds out exciting but rational progress.

And what's more, it should be noted that some of this group have identified the potentially damaging effects of hyperbole that have nothing to do with AI bubbles.

I had a discussion with a friend about a headline from a couple of years ago on this show where Ahmad Mustaq, who was then the CEO of Stability AI, had said that AI would replace all coders in five years.

I turned that into a broader discussion with the headline, Will AI Replace All Coders?

Or something along those lines.

And while the purpose for me was opening up the conversation, the person that I was talking to said that there's a reasonable chance that at various parts in their journey when they had been intimidated to get into coding,

That's the kind of headline that would have contributed to them staying away and that they might never have made it into the conversation.

So bringing it back to the Andre conversation, the point is simply that there are a lot of people who share this view who feel like they haven't had a loud representative voice.

That group, I think, intersects with another group who are responding to this, who are the technologists who are pushing AI and agents to their limits.