The AI convergence

Having been deep inside the bubble that is tech/AI Twitter, I've been witnessing an interesting phenomenon in the last year or so. I call it the AI convergence: a noticeable shift of many creators toward talking more and more about AI. I see this as an indicator of AI’s ubiquity in everyday life, though I suspect it's also due to the algorithm doing its part to confirm my bias. Still, that alone can’t explain why so many people who didn't talk about AI before have started doing so. And I've been following most of these people for much longer than generative AI has been around.

One of the most obvious examples is Theo, who started out somewhat skeptical about AI in programming and in the couple of weeks went almost full AI bro on us. He even created his own AI chat platform with t3.chat which seems to be the fastest/smoothes chat experience out there. Granted, as a technical YouTube channel focussing on web development it's probably impossible not to talk about AI in some capacity but this evolution is still remarkable.

Even The Primeagen who to this day remains somewhat reserved about the perceived benefit of AI for coding can't stop making videos about it. InternetOfBugs has also increasingly started covering AI in programming albeit with a different viewpoint that many others, which I really appreciate. Dreams of Code has also admitted to changing his mind about using AI in programming recently. But what about creators that are not programmers?

Rick Beato, the music producer turned YouTuber, who is one of the best sources for learning about music, has also started to talk about AI (in music). Or take Jeff Geerling, who is the pope of homelabbing and now has multiple videos about self-hosting AI models in your home lab. I could name many more who have started exploring AI but I think you get the point.

You could attribute this to pure hype but I don't think this is a sufficient explanation. I view this rather as an indicator of the diffusion of a base technology that is increasingly impacting all aspects of our lives. Some compare this to the transistor or the iPhone (and by extension smart phones in general). I am convinced that if YouTube had existed at the time the transistor was invented, people from many different interest groups would have started to talk about it in some capacity, albeit diffusion was much, much slower back then.*

What I like about this trend is that you get exposed to many different takes. You get to step out of your bubble for a moment and consider how AI is being perceived by people that are not glued to tech twitter for a third of the day. And this exposure to different takes is what helps me better process the tsunami of progress we are being promised by the master hypers every day. Reality is complex and there are almost infinite niches you can learn about. And not everyone is viewing AI as the be-all-end-all solution like the tech bubble. I urge you to start considering the many different views on the topic and listen to how others are experiencing this transformation. Because after all, we are all experiencing this transformation together to some degree.

*I now have to suppress the sudden urge to create transistor related fake 1950s era YouTube videos.