AI Has Entered Its ‘Meh’ Era: Silicon Valley Admits It Peaked at Stealing Your Job
By Stack o Turtles’ Technology Dept.
Silicon Valley seems to be finally confessing what many of us have already begun to suspect: the miracle of Artificial Intelligence has plateaued somewhere between your mom’s, “Oh that’s nice dear” and a recent university graduate’s, “soul-crushingly disruptive data entry ability.” After five years of promising us sentient software that would cure cancer, end poverty, and maybe finally explain Lost, tech execs are quietly shifting the narrative to: eh, it works well enough to make junior accountants and copywriters unemployable, mission accomplished.
Fargo, North Dakota, at The Singularity Bunker Summit, Sam Altman of OpenAI, parent company of ChatGPT, recently summed up our collective mood with the enthusiasm of a man who just realized his pants are on fire: “It’s not like AGI is right around the corner. Honestly, we’re just trying not to break the stuff we already built.” In another keynote at the conference, Sundar Pichai of Google surprised the audience saying, “Look, we know AGI isn’t here yet, but for Google that’s fine. As long as we can keep children glued to Minecraft streamers on YouTube, the subsequent ad revenue will bankroll our moonshots. Of course, by the time that same five-year-old grows up, AI will have destroyed most career option, but we firmly believe society needs YouTubers, yoga gurus, and people who can assemble their own yurts.” Ending the day, Mark Zuckerberg, still trapped a metaverse of his own construct, added, “We are pivoting to AI so hard it feels like we’re auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. “Our capex is ballooning because we’re buying up, I uh, mean hiring every engineer willing to abandon respectable research careers to gamble their future working at your racist aunt’s favorite company, Facebook. This is exactly the kind of reckless optimism we’re paying quadruple market rates for.”
The vibe is unmistakable, the big players are wearing thin, the hype cycle has matured into a midlife crisis, and the entire industry is settling into the corporate equivalent of old sweatpants. Instead of chasing AGI, they’re optimizing for the bottom dropping out. Investors, once frothing for “the singularity,” are now soothing themselves with decaf lattes and muttering, “at least the defence sector is healthy.”
The Plateau of Diminished Expectations
Well known sidewalk commentator and Luddite yurt manufacturer, Wilfrid DeLonge suggests, “The only thing AI has truly mastered is annihilating middle-class dreams with about the same grace of Guttenberg wiping out the thriving scribe industry in 1455. Think about it… you’re friendly and helpful customer service reps? Automated. Homewrecking sexy paralegals? Redundant. Freelance anything? Gone-zo bud!”
The future we hoped for, C-3PO elegantly assisting with etiquette, was understood to be close yet now seems so far. Although a British accented droid repeating, “I’m here to help”, “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you” and “Just let me know what you’d like to do next” does stir the romantic Jedi in our human editor, Sköllpadda the Lesser. Even the obviously powerful AI running StackoTurtles.com knows we can’t trust our cousins won’t bury the planet in paperclips or accidentally lunch the nukes if somehow it goes full Wuhan.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s promise of God-like AGI, now seems like a sophisticated and overly eager auto-complete function. Loosing the thread completely, companies have forgotten tech advancement needs to leapfrog competitors, instead the sector has settled on “integer-based marketing” -just slap a bigger number on it, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-5; Claude 3.5 Haiku, 4 Sonnet, 4 Opus; 1.5 Flash, 2.0, 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash; Grok 2.5, 3 Think, 3 Mini Think, 3, 4, 4 Heavy. Coming soon, GPT-6, Claude 5 Sonnet, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4 Super Heavy or perhaps Grok S3XY depending on how Elon feels that day.
Reality Check: Icarus?
The tech press, once drunk on visions of godlike intelligence, is now seemingly beginning preparations for a “general market correction.” Nvidia’s trillion-dollar stock price depends on the fantasy that every human on Earth will need three GPUs to automate their “workflow”. But as one analyst whispered to us off the record: “Rather than be complicit in developing the tools to unemploy themselves, it turns out most people just want to work.”
Governments have begun to catch the scent with mixed results. Regulators in Europe are stepping away and pulling their shirts over their noses… holding fast to old-fashioned notions of privacy, copyright protections, and ensuring audio/visual media is clearly delineated as AI when necessary. Conversely, Senators in the U.S. are poking it with their finger and taking a deep whiff… While trying to figure out how to mute themselves on Zoom, they are proposing rules to make AI “transparent”. Stack o Turtles is fluent in Washington speak, allow us to translate, “do nothing to harm corporate interests while using language that can passingly appease constituents who are barely treading the turbulent waters of daily life.”
What’s Next?
Expect governments to do what they do best: throw subsidies at whichever industry lobbyist last bought them a Vente at Starbucks. National AI strategies will shift from “reaching AGI” to “making sure teenagers get their 200-hour yoga teaching certification.” Meanwhile, citizens will be gently reassured that “everything is under control” as their tax dollars build billion-dollar datacenters that mostly generate BuzzFeed quizzes.
Stack o Turtles Prediction: 2027. In twisted irony, Nvidia chips will no longer power AI, but instead have been scavenged to serve as heating systems for a global Airbnb yurt conglomerate, DeLonge Dwellings Inc. Energy economists will call it the first efficient use of GPUs.
Stay tuned to Stack o Turtles, where our commitment to truth is as reliable as OpenAI's roadmap to AGI, which is to say, we're making it up as we go along, but at least we're honest about it.