This has to be one of the best pieces of writing on the out of control AI hype I have read lately. What he says about the data science gold rush days is all true for AI these days:
The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders
As some who has worked with Postgres for nearly as long as it has existed and never once thought it had turned irrelevant, I am highly sympatico with the author when he says:
spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly.
I am routinely aghast at the quality of engineering talent that fills the ranks in the companies I have worked in over the years - some of whom claim to attract the best and brightest in the world. These folks have no sense of what data is all about and manage to write horrific, underperforming code when all they are required to do is call miscellaneous APIs. They simply cannot be trusted do anything more intellectually demanding than that. Given my lived experience, I felt infinitely validated when I read this line:
Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget.
In all my years I have only seen one team accomplish this feat - deploy a CRUD application on time and under-budget. That has also got to be the most high-functioning team I ever worked with.
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