AI Wave – The What and the How (alearningaday.blog)

Many dismiss current AI excitement as another tech fad like mobile or cloud, but this piece argues the AI wave is different: unlike mobile/cloud, which changed what products looked like but not how they were built, AI is closer to the internet era in that it will reshape both products and development practices. The author acknowledges debate about a financial bubble but focuses on product impact, asserting AI will enable new categories of software and new engineering paradigms rather than merely layering intelligence onto existing apps. For the AI/ML community this matters because it signals systemic shifts — not just model improvements, but how systems are designed, delivered and maintained. Expect architectures that center models and data (model-first apps, inference pipelines, continuous fine-tuning), new operational disciplines (MLOps for continuous feedback, privacy-aware deployment, latency-optimized serving), and composable, agentic components accessed via APIs. Because AI builds on the scale of the mobile internet, adoption and disruption could be rapid and broad, affecting UX, business models and infrastructure. The change will take time to play out, but its combination of new product types and new engineering workflows implies deep, long-term disruption for software and AI practitioners.