But here's the truth. I believe most people, intuitively, have doubts about AI. But they are afraid to say so. Nobody wants to be the outcast.
If you are in tech, this is the game. This is theatre. So we perform our little part. We quietly nod and agree, and then assign a team to "figure out how we can apply AI." Even if it doesn't make a ton of sense, and we quietly know that it will probably amount to nothing. But my gut says that many people (including me) are growing increasingly skeptical. I predicted that the AI bubble would burst this year, and I think we are starting to see it. Alex Karp recently went on a rant about pricing vs. value, calling out OpenAI and Anthropic for charging businesses heavily for tokens that deliver little to no value while harvesting their proprietary data and "alpha" to improve their own models. He called it a "wealth tax" on businesses. Now obviously, Alex Karp has his own motives here. But I do believe that more people are growing suspicious of the actual value being delivered. Whenever I ask one of these AI-pilled dorks to explain how AI is changing their life... they always answer with the same, vague response: I build an agent for everything, and the agent does the work. YEAH. I get it. But what, exactly, is the agent doing? And then they go on to say something like, "It reads all my email and tells me what to respond to" or "It helps me prepare for meetings." Or worse, they will show a shitty dashboard or a half-baked product they vibe-coded. The product is almost always unusable and already exists (usually a much shittier version of Notion or another SaaS tool).
*The donkey hat is a corporate corrective action for anyone who shows doubt about an AI initiative. Every company has one.