>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?
This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:
i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution
Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?
Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:
" I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease."
Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed."
Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?
The last time I remember the hype being even remotely real was Web 2.0. And most of everything that made that hypeworthy is long gone (interoperability and open standards like RSS or free APIs) or turned out to be genuinely awful ("social media was a mistake") or has become far worse than what it replaced (SaaS).
It is an interesting comparison. Databases are objectively the more important technology, if we somehow lost AI the world would be equal parts disappointed and relieved. If we somehow lost database technology we'd be facing a dystopian nightmare.
If we cure all disease in the next 10-15 years, databases will be just as important as AI to that outcome. Databases supported a technology renaissance that reshaped the world on a level that is difficult to comprehend. But because most of the world doesn't interact directly with databases, as a technology it is not the focus of enthusiastic rhetoric.
LLMs are further along tech-chain and they might be an important part of world-changing human achievements, we won't know until we get there. In contrast, we can be certain databases were important. I imagine the people who were influential in their advancement understood how important the tech would be, even if they didn't breathlessly go on about it.
I’m not sure how hyped up databases were during their advent, but what do you mean “by partly because they are old?” The phonograph prototypes that were made by Thomas Alva Edison are old and they were hyped in a way. People called him the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his work because they were seeing machines that could talk (or at least reproduce sounds in the same way photographs let you reproduce sights.)
Even blockchain didn't have the degree of hype as this AI stuff.
The CEO of Google said that AI would be as profound as fire in revolutionizing humanity. People are saying that it will replace all intellectual labor in the near term and then all physical labor soon afterwards.
Which of those things claimed it would be "like the renaissance" or that we'd cure all diseases?
In the clip I link above Hassabis says he hopes that in 10-15 years' time we'll be looking back on the way we do medicine today like the way they did it in the middle ages. In 10-15 years time. Modern medicine - you know, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, radiotherapy, anti-retrovirals, the whole shebang, like medieval times.
Are you saying - what are you saying? Who has said things like that ever before in the tech industry? Azure? Facebook? Ethereum? Who?
The use of semantic web and linked data (a type of distributed database and ontology map) for protein folding (therefore, medical research too) was predicted by many and even used by some.
Databases were of key interest. Namely, the problem of relating different schemas.
So, yes. _It was claimed_ that database tech could help. And it probably did so already. To what extent I really don't know. Those consortiums included many big players.
It never hyped, of course. It did not stood the test of time either (as far as I know).
Claims, as you can see, don't always fully develop into reality.
LLMs now need to stand a similar test of time. Will they become niche and forgotten like semweb? We will know. Have patience.
You're taking a sliver of truth as though it dismantles their entire argument. The point was, nobody was _claiming_ databases would cure all diseases. That's the argument around the hype of AI here.
The thing is, the dot com hypesters were right about the impact of the Internet. Their timing was wrong, and they didn't pick the right winners mostly, but the one thing they were right about was that the Internet would change the world significantly and drive massive economic transformation.
I was too young to remember databases but I vividly remember people (sometimes even myself) thinking “the web”, “smart phones”, “e-commerce“,“social media” and “cloud computing” all being “hype”.
Thinking about this was ultimately what led me to giving up my AI skepticism and diving into the space.
At this point I actually don’t know how people sincerely think AI is “hype”. For me, and many people I know, there are multiple AI tools that I’m not sure how I would get by without.
They did not say database was hyped. Although I think computers(both enterprise and personal) were hyped and so was internet and smartphone, long before they began to deliver value. It takes a decade to say which hype lives up to expectation and which doesn't.
> Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"?
I doubt anyone claimed 10-15 years specifically, but it does actually seem like a pretty reasonable claim that without databases progress will be a snails pace and with databases it will be more of a horses trot. I imagine the human body requires a fair amount of data to be organised to analyse and simulate all the parts and I'd recommend storing all that in some sort of database.
This might count as unsatisfying semantics, but there is a huge leap going from physical ledgers and ad-hoc formats to organised and standardised data storage (ie, a database - even if it is just excel sheets that counts to me). Suddenly scientists can record and theorise on order(s) of magnitude more raw material and the results are interchangeable! That is a big deal and a necessary step to make the sort of progress we can make in modern times.
Regardless, it does seem fair to compare the AI boom to the renaissance or industrial revolution. We appear to be poking at the biggest thing to ever be poked in history.
> but it does actually seem like a pretty reasonable claim that without databases progress will be a snails pace and with databases it will be more of a horses trot.
Database hype was relatively muted and databases made a massive impact on our ability to cure diseases. AI hype is wildly higher and there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases - it is going to have a much bigger impact than databases did.
The 10-15 year timeframe is obviously impossible for logistic reasons if nothing else - but the end goal is plausible and the direction we need to head in next as a society is clear. As unreasonable claims go it is unobjectionable and I'd rather be standing with Hassabis in the push to end disease than with naysayers worried that we won't do it as quickly as an uninformed optimist expects.
> there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases
This is complete nonsense. AI might help with the _identification_ of diseases, but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable.
Perhaps AI can help find cures, but the idea that it can cure every human ailment deserves to be mocked.
> I'd rather be standing with Hassabis in the push to end disease than with naysayers worried that we won't do it as quickly as an uninformed optimist expects.
> but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable.
There is; we can conceivably cure everything we know about right now. There isn't a law of nature that says organisms have to live less than centuries and we can start talking seriously about brain-in-jar or consciousness uploading now that we appear to be developing the computing tech to support it.
Everything that exists stops eventually but we're on the cusp of some pretty massive changes here. We're moving from a world with 8 1-in-a-billion people wandering around to one with an arbitrary number of superhuman intelligences. That is going to have a major impact larger than anything we've seen to date. A bunch of science fiction stuff is manifesting in real time.
I think you're only reinforcing the contrast. Yes databases are massivly useful and have been self evidently so for decades; and yet, none of the current outlandish AI claims were ever made about them. VCs weren't running around 30 or 40 years ago claiming that SQL would cure disease and usher in a utopia.
Yes LLMs are useful and might become vastly more useful, but the hype:value ratio is currently insane. Technologies that have produced like 9 orders of magnitude more value to date have never recieved the hype that LLMs are getting.
Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?
This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:
https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518
Whence I quote:
Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:
https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233
Whence I quote:
Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?