Wait, we have AI flying planes now?
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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I know you're joking, but for those who don't, the headline means "startups" and they just wanted to avoid the overused term.
Also, yeah actually it's far easier to have an AI fly a plane than a car. No obstacles, no sudden changes, no little kids running out from behind a cloud-bank, no traffic except during takeoff and landing, and those systems also can be automated more and more.
In fact, we don't need "AI" we've had autopilots that handle almost all aspects of flight for decades now. The FA-18 Hornet famously has hand-grips by the seat that the pilot is supposed to hold onto during takeoff so they don't accidentally touch a control.
Conversely, AI running ATC would be a very good thing. To a point.
It's been technically feasible for a while to handle 99% of what an ATC does automatically. The problem is that you really want a human to step in on those 1% of situations where things get complicated and really dangerous. Except, the human won't have their skills sharpened through constant use unless they're handling at least some of the regular traffic.
Trick has been to have the AI do, say, 70% of the job, but having a human step in sometimes. Deciding on when to have a human step in is the hard problem.
what do you think an autopilot is?
A finely refined model based on an actual understanding of physics and not a glorified Markov chain.
To be fair, that also falls under the blanket of AI. It’s just not an LLM.
No, it does not.
A deterministic, narrow algorithm that solves exactly one problem is not an AI. Otherwise Pythagoras would count as AI, or any other mathematical formula for that matter.
Intelligence, even in terms of AI, means being able to solve new problems. An autopilot can't do anything else than piloting a specific aircraft - and that's a good thing.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Well, I guess I do. AI marketing has ruined the meaning of the word to the extent that an if statement is "AI".
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Someone will be around to say "not real AI", and I think that's the wrong way to look at it.
It's more "real AI" thank the LLM slop companies are desperately trying to make the future
Mild height and bearing corrections.
That's terrifying, but I don't see why my regional train can't drive on AI in the middle of the night.
It took me a while to realize it is an Otto pilot...
It's a bubble. This article is by someone realizing that who has yet to move their investments.
Yeah, 95% of AI companies either have no functional product or a chatGPT token account and a prompt.
Most of them could be replaced by a high school student and an N8N instance.
You mention N8N. Last week I had a sales VP mention it as well. Could you elaborate on your perspective? I've been building databases in BigQuery for the past month and will start utilizing ML for a business need so I probably missed some write up about it.
I'm a program manager, have some small coding experience.
N8n is like Legos of API access you can generate tons of integrations that would have otherwise been imposible with just a few hours of work. We have an issue where people don't complete their slack profiles. Using n8n I made an integration between our HR software and slack so that it automatically populates most fields without having to bug people.
And after that, it runs a check for what manual thing they are missing and sends them a message.
You put an http block, behind a filter block, behind a slack blog and it handles everything for you.
Would recommend you give it a try, I have it running on the work instance but I also have a local one running in my raspberry that I plan to use to fool around.
N8N is like IFTTT (if this then that)
It's a mostly codeless solution for wiring things together, meaning you can use semi-non-skilled labor to do somewhat difficult things.
This guy can be a little hard to stomach for some, but he goes into great depth on setting up some n8n use cases, and he doesn't waste a lot of time doing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONgECvZNI3o
Right now, we use it so that if IT puts a certain emoji on a slack message, it makes a jira ticket, letting us know that work has been triaged and created, but if a user does it, it fails.
You could have N8N read a slack channel, or load an RSS feed, or take input from a website, send that data through an LLM prompt to transform the data and then have it or an agent do some work or respond to the input, with minimal need to write code. Really the limits are what services it supports (or your ability to add that API) and your imagination.
In Chuck's example, he had N8N load several RSS feeds, make thumbnails from them, read the description, and use an LLM to shorten the text without losing meaning and provide a clean list of media to a Discord channel.
https://n8n.io/integrations/google-bigquery/and/openai/
You could define a trigger, say have a chatbot or Slack channel, have it hit your BigQuery, send the data to GPT to make it human-readable, and respond to requests in the channel with some futzing around in logins, flowcharting, and JavaScript variable names..
Have you talked to the average high school student these days? Not that the typical AI LLM response is much better, but I honestly feel sorry for the kids.
Probably highly subjective to Schools, States and Families. I'm around a lot of kids in GT and Engineering classes.
Yeah every single day the top 5 new products on ProductHunt are AI trash. It's wild what the bubble has become
Today:
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Most of them could be replaced by a high school student and an N8N instance.
Not really sure if the high school students have cheated their way out with ChatGPT.
At the moment, there are probably doing pretty good. Kind of like using calculators, when we got out of school we all had a calculator.
Were the rubber is going to meet the road It's when the AI bubble bursts and there's no over generous evaluations and free venture capital, and we actually need to pay a sustainable fee for the tokens.
They're going to need some really expensive calculators
Well, I didn’t think about it like that!
Hopefully there’s still students that use it as a mere tool rather than as a way to pass by without actually learning.
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This sounds about right. Figure 50% are just screaming at their employees to use ai and at managers to lower headcount and make it up with ai and such. Then like 25% more buy some companies ai solution and expect sorta the same from there. Then like 15% actually try to identify where ai could be helpful but don't really listen to feedback and just doggedly move forward. Eventually you get to the ones that identify where it might help and offer options to employees to use it much like any other software where they can request a license and let it grow and help organically and look more to just improve results or productivity.
Feels very much like the push in the 90's for every company to have a website before companies understood what websites were for.
How'd that end up? Totally fine, right?
Completely agree.
I've got clients who I can see immediate benefits right now, and I've got clients where I don't think it's a good idea yet. Most of those that could benefit it's small tweaks to workflow processes to save a few FTE here and there, not these massive scale rollouts we're seeing.
Unfortunately Microsoft, along with other companies, are selling fully scale sexy to executive when full scale sexy isn't actually ready yet. What's available does work for some things, but it's hard to get an executive team to sign off on a project for testing to save only 10 employees worth of work in a 2000 person company when they're simultaneously a) worried about it going horribly wrong, and b) worried about falling behind other companies by not going fast enough.
Figure 50% are just screaming at their employees to use ai and at managers to lower headcount and make it up with ai and such.
Immediately imagined it being screamed in this voice:
"Use AI and make it lame!"
Shocked that LLM wrapper slop that isn't deterministic only has limited use cases. Sam Altman is the biggest con artist of our time
He’s the second coming of Joseph Smith.
JS was a charismatic grifter by nature and upbringing who sold folks on the existence of a magic gold book that had extra-special info about American Jesus. He told them he found it after G*d told him where to dig.
This was just a few years after he had been hauled into court to face charges of running a ‘treasure hunting’ scheme on local farmers.
Now that I think about it more, the parallels are many.
In conclusion, shysters gonna shyst.
A few years ago we haf these stupid mandatory AI classes all about how AI could help you do your job better. It was supposed to be multiple parts but we never got passed the first one. I think they realized it wouldn't help most of the company but did leave our bespoke chatbot up for our customers/sales people. It is pretty good at helping with our products but I assume a lot of tuning has been done. I assume if we fed a local AI our data we could make it helpful but none of them have more than a basic knowledge of anything I do on a day to day basis.
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Good. How do we fix the surviving 5%?
And the other 5% are bullshitting.
"Sir how is that going to help me do my job faster?" "Just ask it 'how do I put in fries I'm the bag faster' and then do what it says.'
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