With the recent revelation of DeepSeek, an AI thinger that apparently does what OpenAI and other big tech AI thingers do, but using cheaper hardware, less energy and via open source, the whole mad rush to AI for all and forever seems to have hit its first bump. This is one of those “will be interesting to see where things stand in five years” stories, but from the consumer perspective, it seems like:
- There is interest in AI in a very general, Google search sort of way (the DeepSeek app is currently #1 and ChatGPT’s LLM app is a perennial top download)
- Beyond the above, there seems to be as much interest in avoiding AI, with people trying to disable AI summaries in Google search, or turn off Microsoft’s Copilot, for example.
I’m in the latter camp. I dabbled in AI art for a bit over the last year (mostly for the lulz, as the kids used to say) or as a way to generate prompts for drawing or writing. It’s been pretty mediocre at both. I don’t have a compelling case for it, and a lot of what it does (especially with implementations like “Apple Intelligence” with its notification summaries and offers to rewrite your words) are things I specifically don’t want. And, in a rare case, it seems I am actually part of the crowd instead of standing outside of it.
I’m not anti-AI or anything, but it feels like too many people are relentlessly pushing it without having any reason to, other than a desperate need to have something be The Next Big Thing in tech that makes the lines keep going up. And to that, I say: Bah. Try making File Explorer crash less in Windows 11. That’l improve my life more than error-filled notification summaries will.
