The Influentists: AI hype without proof

Summary

Last week, the developer community was busy discussing about a single tweet: The author is Jaana Dogan (known as Rakyll), a highly respected figure in the Google ecosystem, in the open-source world, and in my heart (thank you Rakyll for your great Go blog posts). At first glance, the tweet suggests an enormous shift in the software industry: the ability to build in just one hour what previously required weeks or months for a team of sofware engineers, using just the description of the problem. The tweet was too-much dramatic in my own opinion, but actually impressive! The post triggered an immediate wave of “doom-posting,” with many fearing for the future of software engineering (as each week since a year now). However, as the conversation reached a high number of replies and citations on social networks, Rakyll released a follow-up thread to provide context: This response thread revealed a story far less miraculous than the original tweet suggested. Let’s analyze it. Crucially, the foundational “thinking” had already been performed by Rakyll herself, who guided the AI using architectural concepts (honed over several weeks or months of prior effort) rather than the AI thinking and inventing the “product” from scratch. Furthermore, the resulting project was strictly a proof-of-concept that falls far short of a production-ready system capable of managing real-world complexity. And finally, this success hinged on the Rakyll’s implicit domain knowledge and deep expertise. The last point is often (strategically?) omitted from these “magic” viral demonstrations in order to make the tool appear way more autonomous than it truly is. Hmm. Now, this is far less exciting… Under influence # This pattern of “hype first and context later” is actually part of a growing trend. I call the individuals participating to that trend “The Influentists”. Those people are members of a scientific or technical community, and leverage their large audiences to propagate claims that are, at best...