There is no such thing as “artificial intelligence.” Since the term was coined in the 1950s, it has never referred to any particular technology. We can talk about specific technologies, like General Problem Solver, perceptrons, ELIZA, Lisp machines, expert systems, Cyc, The Last One, Fifth Generation, Siri, Facebook M, Full Self-Driving, Google Translate, generative adversarial networks, transformers, or large language models — but these have nothing to do with each other except the marketing banner “AI.” A bit like “Web3.”

This is 100% true. AI = software.

The only lasting effect of the current "AI boom" will be a tightening of the labor market for computer programmers. People are reading those breathless "coding is dead" puff pieces (written by business or liberal arts majors) and deciding not to learn computer programming.

The same thing happened with "muh outsourcing to India," which was overblown. Muh AI is even worse than that: it's not even "real.'

The era of the $250K-per-year mid-level C# developer cometh.