But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product now just to be seen as a viable product.
Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being left with a more rational view of AI and what it can (and can not) do.
(Like those people that casually assume that everyone has a therapist or a lawyer.)
it was making money off those idea at the valuations expected that was problem.
the Internet really did revolutionize things, in substantial ways, but not to the tune of millions of dollars for pets.com
The difference now is that this is all (or mostly) idle cash being invested. The massive warchests built up by FAANG over the last decade are finally being deployed meaningfully rather than sitting in bonds or buying back stock. Much different scenario than companies with non-viable business models going IPO on a wish and a dream.
Will the contagion be limited to a few companies, or will the S&P crumble under the bubble's collapse?
And everybody used them.
Nowdays everybody see them as useless.
Not web chat rooms.
Discord is not.
Chats did not evolve to social media.
Facebook is a descendant of hotornot not icq or chats.
Ws was seen as free sms.
AI is more useful than social media. This is not financial advice, but I lean more toward not a bubble.
Communication is a fundamental human need.
Generating slop isn't.
The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead companies with billions of dollars on the off chance they replicate OpenAI’s success.
Some other company, that doesn't have a giant pile of debt will then pick up the pieces and make some money though. Once we dig out of the resulting market crash.
Some marginal investors know this but they are okay because the music is still playing - but when they think its time to leave the bubble will pop.
People seem to forget that its not about whether or not its actually a bubble, its really about when will certain people who set these stock prices for valuations, decide its time to exit and take their profit.
Uber and Amazon are really bad examples. Who was Amazons competition? Nobody. By the time anyone woke up and took them seriously it was too late.
Uber only had to contend with Lyft and a few other less funded firms. Less funded being a really important thing to consider. Not to mention the easy access to immense amounts of funding Uber had.
Every company seems to be putting all their eggs in the AI basket. And that is causing basic usability and feature work to be neglected. Nobody cares because they are betting that AI agents will replace all that. But it won't and meanwhile everything else about these products will stagnate.
It's a disasterous strategy and when it comes crashing down and the layoffs start, every CEO will get a pass on leading this failure because they were just doing what everyone else is doing.
Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API" product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI? That is going to be here indefinitely.
The dotcom bubble was not about "the internet" itself. The Internet was fine and pretty much already proven as a very useful communication tool. It was about business that made absolutely no sense getting extremely high valuations just because they operated - however vaguely - over the internet.
Generative AI have never reached the level of usability of the Internet itself, and likely never will.
The "it'll make all your devs 6x as productive by the end of the year" types of promises. But those probably explain the valuations
They already had many "explanations" and models for why the planets were seemingly moving back and forth in the sky during the year. Their models were more complicated than necessary simply because they didn't want to consider the different premise.
The technology - for what it is being used vs what is invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring swathes of people onto the internet.
So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.
The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers so they they could transform from just computational beasts to communication. There was a tremendous amount of potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff - as is going on today.
What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.
S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as shopping for information and shopping for good and services.
Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody at all. That is a big problem.
I found the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s
It was more of web 2.0 company.
> The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an information architecture consultant, in her January 1999 article "Fragmented Future" [...] her "2.0" designation refers to the next version of the Web that does not directly relate to the term's current use.
> The term Web 2.0 did not resurface until 2002.
Google's first big Web 2.0 products were GMail (beta launched in 2004, just before Google's IPO) and Google Maps (2005).
Ultimately it doesn't matter who survives the AI bubble, because they are all more or less equivalent, proposing the same technical solution.
A lot of us clocked the crypto bullshit waaaay before the crash.
A Money Market Fund gives you interest if you are able to access it.
This is kind of a pattern:
1. There is some regulation that is inefficient ( e.g. taxi medallions, KYC, copyright protection ...)
2. New technology comes about which allows startups to claim that they have invented a new area that should be regulated differently
3. Turns out (2) is not true and new technology can easily be mapped to existing regulation but it would look bad for the regulator to take away the punchbowl
4. There is some down-turn (bubble pops) and the regulator takes away the punchbowl OR investors have accumulated so much money/power that they corrupt the government to have new rules for their businesses
I'm sorry what crash are you talking about?
As an owner of a web host that probably sees advantage to increased bot traffic, this statement is just more “just wait AI will be gigantic any minute now, keep investing in it for me so my investments stay valuable”.
(title fixed now)
Title needs to be changed to something like
"Bezos says AI is in industrial bubble yet promises huge benefits"
There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.
I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down, on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.
As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy.
Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking.
This guy gets it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxLCTA5wQow
Instead of plainly jumping on the bubble bandwagon he actually goes through a thorough analysis.
The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the bubble bursts.
The trenches for the cables even longer than that.
In 2002 I was woking making webs and setting up linux servers and I did not have internet at home.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/189349/us-households-hom...
Low Global Penetration: Only 361 million people had internet access worldwide in 2000, a small fraction of the global population. Specific Country Examples United States: The US had a significant portion of the world's internet users, making up 31.1% of all global users in 2000. Its penetration rate was 43.1%.
It had the Microsoft network or whatever it was called.
I guess another example of the same thing is power generation capacity, although this comes online so much more slowly I'm not sure the dynamics would work in the same way.
It's hugely expensive, which is why the big cloud infrastructure companies have spent so much on optimizing every detail they can.
To give a different example, right now, some of the most prized sites for renewable energy are former coal plant sites, because they already have big fat transmission lines ready to go. Yesterday's industrial parks are now today's gentrifying urban districts, and so on.
Evnn moreso for carrier lines of course. Nimbyism is a strong block on right-of-way needs (except the undersea ones obviously).
Markets for electronics have momentum, and estimating that momentum is how chip producers plan for investment in manufacturing capacity, and how chip consumers plan for deprecation.
Of course this does make some moderate assumptions that it was a solid build in the first place, not a flimsy laptop, not artificially made obsolete/slow, etc. Even then, "install an SSD" and "install more RAM" is most of everything.
Of course, if you are a developer you should avoid doing these things so you won't get encouraged to write crappy programs.
- better weather forecasts
- modeling intermittent generation on the grid to get more solar online
- drug discovery
- economic modeling
- low cost streaming games
- simulation of all types
Not to mean that we're still nowhere near close to solving the broadband coverage problem, especially in less developed countries like the US and most of the third world. If anything, it seems like we're moving towards satellite internet and cellular for areas outside of the urban centers, and those are terrible for latency-sensitive applications like game streaming.
This is not particularly true.
Even top of the line AAA games make sure they can be played on the current generation consoles which have been around for the last N years. Right now N=5.
Sure you’ll get much better graphics with a high end PC, but those looking for cloud gaming would likely be satisfied with PS5 level graphics which can be pretty good.
Just as I'm getting to the point where I can see retirement coming from off in the distance. Ugh.
The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people that have gained control of everything.
Even for the average person in America, the ability to do so many activities online that would have taken hours otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government activities, etc). The fact that we see negative consequences of this like social network polarization or brainrot doesn't negate the positives that have been brought about.
In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking and screaming to open up networks to everybody. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (back then) mandated rural <> urban parity of sorts. This eventually forced telcos to share infrastructure costs (share towers etc.) The total call and data volumes are eye-watering, but low-yield (low ARPU). I could go on and on but it's just batshit crazy.
Now UPI has layered on top of that---once again, benefiting from Reserve Bank of India's mandate for zero-fee transactions, and participating via a formal data interchange protocol and format.
Speaking from India, having lived here all my life, and occasionally travelled abroad (USAmerica, S.E. Asia).
We, as a society and democracy, are also feeling the harsh, harsh hand of "Code is Law", and increasingly centralised control of communication utilities (which the telecoms are). The left hand of darkness comes with a lot of darkness, sadly.
Which brings me to the moniker of "third world".
This place is insane, my friend --- first, second, third, and fourth worlds all smashing into each others' faces all the time. In so many ways, we are more first world here than many western countries. I first visited USAmerica in 2015, and I could almost smell an empire in decline. Walking across twitter headquarters in downtown SF of all the places, avoiding needles and syringes strewn on the sidewalk, and avoiding the completely smashed guy just barely standing there, right there in the middle of it all.
That was insane.
However, it wasn't just that, and the feeling has only solidified in three further visits. It isn't rational, very much a nose thing, coming from an ordinary software programmer (definitely not an economist, sociologist, think tank).
Now we need X*0.75 people to do meet Y demand.
However, those savings are partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners.
There is only so much marginal propensity to spend that rich people have, so that additional wealth is not resulting in an increase in demand, at least commensurate enough to absorb the 25% who are unemployed or underemployed.
Ideally that money would be getting ploughed back into making new firms, or creating new work, but the work being created requires people with PHDs, and a few specific skills, which means that entire fields of people are not in the work force.
However all that money has to go somewhere, and so asset classes are rising in value, because there is no where else for it to go.
Or, the returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth (r > g), if you like Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century.
One of the central points is about how productivity and growth gains increasingly accrue to capital rather than labor, leading to capital accumulation and asset inflation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/97806742...
This is how GDP/person has increased 30x the last 250 years.
What always happens is that the no longer needed X*0.25 people find new useful things to do and we end up 33% richer.
It's actually, "they end up" and the 33% gains you're talking about aren't realized en masse until all the coal miners have black lung. It's really quite the, "dealy" as Homer Simpson would say. See, "Charles Dickens" or, "William Blake" for more. #grease
For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But…
Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware of other peoples’ personal space, see their family dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder to shoulder with the crowd before the event began… Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to socialise.
Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably mostly for the better. But… some kinds of research were mingled with the “shopping” socialisation described above.
Admin: the happy path is now faster and functioning bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it’s the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face. Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they’re open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training and are harder to intuit without that training; they’re ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).
The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by the users, or even the admins of these systems. The savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.
Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less able to tolerste others’ differences and the wealth gap is widening.
Be careful about making narratives that don’t line up with industry data.
There’s a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It just doesn’t look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure of the 1970s-1980s.
"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
If you had a huge pile of money but still lived in a shack in a slum, you’d still have a terrible quality of life.
If you argument were true, and people are saving time (or money) due to these new systems, why is the wealth gap widening?
You are describing platform capture. Be it Google Search, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, X, App Store, Play Store, Amazon, Uber - they have all made themselves intermediaries between public and services, extracting a huge fee. I see it like rent going up in a region until it reaches maximum bearable level, making it almost not worth it to live and work there. They extract value both directions, up and down, like ISPs without net-neutrality.
But AI has a different dynamic, it is not easy to centrally control ranking, filtering and UI with AI agents. You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta. Now it is AI agents that got the "ear" of the user base.
It's not like before it was good - we had a generation of people writing slop to grab attention on web and social networks, from the lowest porn site to CNN. We all got prompted by the Algorithm. Now that Algorithms is replaced by many AI agents that serve users more directly than before.
You can download a model. That doesn't necessarily mean you can download the best model and all the ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service. Just like you can download a web index but you probably cannot download google's index and certainly can't download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to date.
In poor countries, they may not have access to clean running water but it's almost guaranteed they have cell phones. We saw that in a documentary recently. What's good about that? They use cell phones not only to stay in touch but to carry out small business and personal sales. Something that wouldn't have been possible before the Internet age.
That 40% has a very long shelf life.
Unfortunately, the energy component is almost entirely fossil fuels, so the global warming impact is pretty significant.
At this point, geoengineering is the only thing that can earn us a bit of time to figure...idk, something out, and we can only hope the oceans don't acidify too much in the meantime.
Honestly I think the most surprising thing about this latest investment boom has been how little debt there is. VC spending and big tech's deep pockets keep banks from being too tangled in all of this, so the fallout will be much more gentle imo.
I am using x86 chips though.
AI is already making us wildly more productive. I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries over the last month or so. This would have taken me maybe years before when I was manually coding as an MLE.
We have clearly hit the stage of exponential improvement, and to not invest basically everything we have in it would be crazy. Anyone who doesn’t see that is missing the bigger picture.
Why is it all these kinds of posts never come with any attachments? We are all interested to see it m8.
I had been mostly opposed to vibe coding for a long time, autocomplete was fine but full agentic coding just made a mess.
That’s changed now, this stuff is genuinely working on really hard problems.
You can see that all across this discussion.
And there will also be software infrastructure which could be durable. There will be improvements to software tooling and the ecosystem. We will have enormous pre-trained foundation models. These model weight artifacts could be copied for free, distilled, or fine tuned for a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps the most famous implosion of all was AOL who merged (sort of) with TimeWarner gaining the lion's share of control through market cap balancing. AOL fell so destructively that it nearly wiped out all the value of the actual hard assets that TW controlled pre-merger.
Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a bit central to business.
To all those betting big on AI before the crash:
Careful, Icarus.
What does that even mean?
pets.com was a fat loser only telling telling people that were going to fly.
Amazon was Icarus, they did something.
Vs weak commentators going on about the wax melting from their parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
Most of Y Combinator are not using AI they just say that and you're worried about the people who do things?
Icarus drowned in the sea.
Even if you want to put the world into only two lumps of cellar dwellers and Icaruses it is still a group of living people on one side and a floating/semi-submerged pile of dead bodies that are literally only remembered for how stupid their deaths were on the other.
The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening. Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the technology is capable of.
The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not commensurate to the risk in regards to the money invested.
Past bubbles leaving behind something of value is indeed no guarantee the current bubble will do so. For as many times as people post "but dotcom produced Amazon" to HN, people had posted that exact argument about the Blockchain, the NFT, or the "Metaverse" bubbles.
This is because many people have mistaken LLMs for AI, when they’re just a small subset of the technology - and this has driven myopic focus in a lot of development, and has lead to naive investors placing bets on golden dog turds.
I disagree on AI as a whole, however - as unlike previous technologies this one can self-ratchet and bootstrap. ML designed chips, ML designed models, and around you go until god pops out the exit chute.
It will become so valuable so fast we struggle to comprehend it.
First were the models. Then the APIs. Then the cost efficiencies. Right now the tooling and automated workflows. Next will be a frantic effort to "AI-Everything". A lot of things won't make the cut, but absolutely many tasks, whole jobs, and perhaps entire subsets of industries will flip over.
For example you might say no AI can write a completely tested, secure, fully functional mobile app with one prompt (yet). But look at the advancements in Cline, Claude code, MCPs, code execution environments, and other tooling in just the last 6 months.
The whole monkeys typewriters shakespeare thing starts to become viable.
Elsewhere in AI however progress has been enormous, and many projects are only now reaching the point where they are starting to have valuable outputs. Take video gen for instance - it simply did not exist outside of research labs a few years ago, and now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually useful - and that’s just a very visible example, never mind the models being applied to everything from plasma physics to kidney disease.
The claim is "exponential" progress, exponential progress never seems "slow" after it has started to become visible.
I've worked in the research part of this space, there's neat stuff happening, but we are very clearly in the diminishing returns phase of development.
2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines.
2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were just boring to write.
2024-2025 My day to day usage has decreased. The models seem better at fact finding but worse for code. None of those "cool" prototypes from myself or anyone else I knew seemed to be able to become more than just that. Many of the cool companies I started learning about in 2022 started to reduce staff and are running into financial troubles.
The only area where I've been impressed is the relatively niche improvements in open source text/image to video models. It's wild that you can make sure animated films on a home computer now.
But even there I'm seeing no signs of "exponential improvement".
My experience has been that it was. I was using AI last year to build ML models about as well as I have been this year.
I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the progress certainly looks to be sigmoid not exponential in growth. By far the biggest year for improvement was 2022-2023. Early 2022 I didn't think any of the code assistants were useful, by 2023 I was able to use them more reliably. 2024 was another big improvement, but I honestly haven't felt the change (at least not for the better).
Some of the tooling may be better, but that has little do to with exponential progress in AI itself.
And before it didn’t seem to understand the fundamentals of Torch well, not well enough to do novel work. Now with Codex in high it absolutely does, and MLE bench reflects that
It's certainly possible that AI will improve this way, but I'd wager it's extremely unlikely. My sense is that what people are calling AI will later be recognized as obviously steroidal statistical models that could do little else than remix and regurgitate in convincing ways. I guess time will tell which of us is correct.
If the model is doing meaningful research that moves along the state of the ecosystem, then we are in the outer loop of self improvement. And yes it will progress because thats the nature of it doing meaningful work.
That's a lot of vague language. I don't really see any way to respond. I suppose I can say this much: the usefulness of a tool is not proof of the correctness of the predictions we make about it.
> And yes it will progress because thats the nature of it doing meaningful work.
This is a non sequitur. It makes no sense.
And I never said there's anything bad about or wrong with statistical models.
It did, but not for the better. Quality of life and standard of living both declined while income inequality skyrocketed and that period of time is now known as The Great Divergence.
> He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct.
He's got no downside if he's wrong or doesn't deliver, he's promising an analogy to selling you a brand new bridge in exchange for taking half of your money... and you're ecstatic about it.
It’s different enough that it probably isn’t relevant.
"AI is in a bubble but billionaires will get 'gigantic' benefits"
I see no benefit to anyone unless you can live off your stock portfolio and can easily ride through periods where your portfolio can suffer a 50% loss.
Everyone not directly involved seems to want AI to pop. I'm not sure if that says anything about its longevity. Not very fun to have a bubble that feels bad on both sides.
Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts.
My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.
There is no reality in which LLMs go away (shy of being replaced).
If it costs $10B to add 1 year of data to an existing model, every year, that doesn’t sound too good.
I don't think we can assume that people producing what appear to be addictive services are going to do that, especially when they seem to be addicted themselves.
If it's just to catch up with newly discovered knowledge or information then that's not the model, they can just train again with an updated dataset and probably not need to train from scratch.
Life. A great example can be seen in the AI-generated baseball-related news articles that involve the Athletics organization. AI articles this year have been generating articles that incorrectly state that the Atlanta Braves played in games that were actually played by the Athletics, and the reason is due to the outdated training model. For the last 60 years before 2025, the Athletics played in Oakland, and during that time their acronym was OAK. In 2025, they left Oakland for Sacramento, and changed their acronym to ATH. The problem is that AI models are trained on 60 years of data where 1. team acronyms are always based on the city, rather than the mascot of the team, and 2. acronyms OAK = Athletics, ATL = Atlanta Braves, and ATH = nothing. As a result, an AI model that doesnt have context "OAK == ATH in the 2025 season" will see ATH in the input data, associates ATH with nothing in it's model, and will then erroneously assume ATH is a typo for ATL.
That was literally what everybody said would happen.
If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
Uber regularly doesn’t show up, just playing with “4… 3… 6… minutes left”. I always have to wait half an hour at a certain location, with a message “Just book a few minutes before your trip.”
I’ve had a friend miss his flight because of Uber not showing up!
Ive noticed similar shenanigans with Uber eats - they are definitely playing around with stuff to increase profitability its clear as day.
LLMs have already changed how software can be written and a thousands of other business/consumer usecases, these companies are just battling it out and finding the most profitable niches. It will be a major business for a long time and the technology will mature and plateau pretty quickly. If R&D doesn't scale economically, it will just slow down and existing models will be heavily optimized to be cheaper to run.
The dot com boom resulted in very few real industries and comparing the two is not very useful.
They didn't. They innovated, practically implemented ideas that resulted in the introduction of new goods and services [1]. This is a meaningful difference.
Uber didn't invent anything. But they did pull ridesharing out of a hat.
Ummm taxis aren't everywhere like NYC or something. Broadly speaking Uber will pick you up in an arbitrary place and take you anywhere.
It's still quite possible that Uber doesn't make that up in the near future.
So the question, at least to me, is how these AI companies will find a product or service that makes them profitable. Other than becoming actual monopolies in their current domains.
The lie is that LLMs are the product itself rather than the endless integration opportunities via APIs and online services.
Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it for you?
> and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff.
And what are they using it for?
> Sounds like a real industry to me.
Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy anecdotes.
I believe LLMs will be niche tools like databases, you pay for the product not 'gpt' vs 'claude'. You choose the right tool for the job.
I have a feeling coding tool with be separate a niche like Cursor, which LLM it uses doesn't matter. It's the integration, guard rails, prompt seeding, and general software stuff like autocomplete and managing long todos.
Then I pay for ChatGPT because that's my "personal" chat LLM that knows me and knows how I like curt short responses for my dumb questions.
Finally I pay for https://www.warp.dev/terminal as a terminal which replaced Kitty terminal on macos (don't use it for coding) which is another niche. Cursor could enter that arena but VSCode terminal is kinda limited for day-to-day stuff given it's hidden in an larger IDE. Maybe a pure CLI tool will do both better.
If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).
There will be point where ai will consistently write better prs - you can already start to see it here and there - finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring, writing tests, writing and updating documentation and prototyping are some examples of areas where it often surpasses human contribution.
In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and not just the physicality of the human in regards to productivity.
These companies are burning cash to support the current formulation of AI services.
These services will survive because they are useful but probably not at its current cost
For example:
- Dotcom bubble. Of course making website was and is a real industry.
- Japanese real estate bubble. Of course building houses was and still is a real industry. It's so real people call it real estate, right.
That would cause a lot of pain for those shareholders, but would that be somewhat contained given the public "AI" companies for the most part have strong businesses outside of AI? Or are these market caps at this point so large for some of these AI public companies that anything that happens to them will cause some kind of contagion? And then the follow up is if the private AI companies collapse en masse is that market now also so big that it would cause contagion beyond venture capital and their investors (fully aware that pensions and the such are material investors in VC funds, but they're diversified so even though they'd see those losses maybe the broader market would keep them from taking major hits).
Not giving an opinion here, though my knee jerk is to think we're due for a massive drop, but I've literally been saying that for so long that I'm starting to (stupidly) think this time is different (which typically is when all hell breaks loose of course).
Also keep in mind that the biggest companies during that bubble had peak market caps of ~500B and then lost ~90%, so 400-500B in losses each and total internet related losses of a couple trillion. If NVDA lost 90%, it would be down 4 trillion dollars, or twice that total just by itself.
AI company valuations collapsing would have meaningful impacts on the broader market. Big pension/mutual funds are important sources of capital across every sector, and if they're taking big losses on NVDA, GOOG, and a portfolio of privates, it will have a chilling effect on their other activity.
Theres also plenty of money washing around in private markets so no need to go public. Staying private is an advantage.
However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for the reason you describe.
There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce which is making a big AI pivot.
Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is so much private capital available that it isn't necessary. I believe the bubble is in VC, which some would think is find because it protects public markets from the crash, but I'm not sure that is correct.
When the VC money stops flowing into AI, I think it will send a shockwave through the public markets. The huge valuations of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will be repriced, which will probably force a re-pricing of public darlings like Palantir, Microsoft, NVIDIA.
If VC funds aren't buying NVIDIA chips and building data centers, everyone will feel the need to re-price.
It's emotional, not logical.
The big advantage of staying private is controlling the narrative.
Then you have the busts that follow public equity fueled bubbles (Dotcom crash). Nowhere near as bad as the former, but still a moderate impact on the economy due to the widely dispersed nature of the equity holdings and the resulting wealth effect.
What we have now is more of a narrowly held private equity bubble (acknowledging that there's still an impact through the SP500 given widespread index investing). If OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and a bunch of AI startups go bust, who loses money and what impact does it have on the rest of the economy?
Also, there s no need to invent new tech names anymore. Marketing can add "AI" to the company name, or (as they say), change the wording from "Loading..." to "Thinking.."
AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just be slightly better. Who knows.
The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc.
Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.
I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.
If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.
The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.
Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.
Safety is another real concern. People have died doing stuff solo that wouldn’t have been particularly dangerous with minimal supervision.
> Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.
A lot of today's news footage with experts etc. these days is also not shot from studios but from online calls. Actually flying somebody out onto location is pretty uncommon; and I would say with the rise of filmed podcasting, that podcasters are more likely to have people on set than television news is.
Do we, though?
I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the quality of the choreography stood out to me as something you would never see in a movie today. Certainly not in one take.
It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of touch and dismissive.
or does it have to do with:
- how often their boss bugs them after hours
- how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on them, their friends, their political views
- how often random strangers might get mad at them and SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc
- how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting up a school
- how hard they find it to talk to a real person to resolve an issue with a company or government service vs being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot?
etc?
Most of the world is not rich people getting swatted by teenagers they’re playing call of duty with.
I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug.
Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become.
The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a group of older friends and we still get together in-person but Zoom calls are a nice adder.
I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the year.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n...
It’s always been the reactionary’s argument: immigrants cause crime, inter-racial marriage causes poverty, etc, etc.
The real collapse we’re seeing is the liberal / progressive adoption of these fallacies. Social media causes fascism (nevermind the absence of social media in previous collapses into fascism), etc.
Many of the people rightfully dismayed by trends are unwittingly contributing to the changes they dislike.
The correct answer to “I think social media leads to fascism” is not “let’s ban social media”. The correct answer is “let’s study the problem and see what science says”. Abandoning that is giving up.
I’ll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged people who were always going to have an easy time (which frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag.
But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor countries, who can now access all of the world’s information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it’s a pretty clear win.
I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in the world. Even if we can sit back and say “oh, but they also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content”
Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations.
We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin.
TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then.
There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all.
Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential.
What exactly was so bad about the 90's?
Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc…
That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up
Much of the same dynamics apply to Europe, too
~ 120 to 190 million daily active users
~ 800 million weekly active users
~ 450 million to over 800 million depending on the data source and methodology.
Get a grip. Hundreds of millions of people are using it, most of them for free. I would say "society" has benefited.
This has to be peak HN.
Create the fastest growing consumer product in history.
HN anon: yes, but who will benefit?
The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.
Perhaps _you_ don’t know.
It’s quite notorious for being the place to organise the genocide over in Myanmar.
IMO, that should disqualify every executive or engineer who knew (and did nothing) from ever again being involved with widely-used infrastructure.
This is extremely naive and akin to asking "why do people drink if it’s bad for you then??" Popular != healthy
Almost everyone would give you a response similar to mine. They use it because its easy way to plan events since so many people are on it, or a small business can easily create a website, sell something or just kill some time on the can.
Give it a rest.
To consider the other side of this, read "The age of surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read it though, not chatgpt the summary :).
All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without surrendering all agency to those who can't be held accountable?
Everyone's talking vaguely about the costs but no one actually makes a concrete case, where I made a concrete case of the benefits.
No, this is peak HN
Both are terrible for society but I use facebook tools so Chinese app bad, USA app good i guess? Is that what you’re trying to say?
Was modern web a benefit?
Why do everyone get sick and eventually die if it's harmful?
Why? They are making money through all of it. It’s called rent extraction. You OWN something valuable. You no longer have to produce something of value. You can just charge people money for what you own. Rent. It’s various forms of rent. Sucking out money and souls into it. One of countless ways we’re leeched on by these companies and their billionaire owners.
Do the benefits outweigh the harms? Facebook and the VC playbook is boiling a frog and we are the frog.
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-economic-...
https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_duri...
Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)
It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance that current civilian power can reform and keep collecting the money from the people and funding the army then the army sides with them and help quell the rebellion.
Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor against the rich.
Every time a government or military force has decided they were unstoppable or untouchable, history has proven them wrong. Hell we spent 2 decades in Iraq and Afganistan with the most powerful military and military tech the world has ever known backed by the strongest economy in the world against guys with 60+ year old bolt actions and guns filed out by hand in caves living in mostly desert landscapes, and we still ended up abandoning it because it was too costly. How would the military fair any better against the best armed population in the world with direct access to their supplying economy and logistics networks?
Yeah sure masses of people aren't making aircraft carriers, but you don't need aircarft carriers to win a war at home. We have modern engineering and chemistry text books in every library across the US that will tell you how military technology works and its flaws, what technology you can utilize find or make yourself, and a supply of nearly any material someone could possibly want or need sitting in scrapyards across the nation.
That's sheer fantasy.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9AdZVQuITM/?utm_source=ig_we...
Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?
The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.
No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where does either part of that come from?
If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is always the job of governance.
It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so the rich can compete between themselves at how much each can scoop back up.
Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete with your friends at who can hunt better.
When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can from the poor.
Probably not this time though
This time there will be no revolution but it will be televised. :P
The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.
Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor. People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots.
Why? What critical materials do robots need that will always be more expansive than raising a human?
Also, from the point of "the rich" - the benefit of a robot is, that it will (stupidly) do as command, unlike a human. They don't have a family they want to take care first.
Whether it's gladiators or bum fights, the poor will ultimately be given a job. Robot wars was fun, but UFC has stayed.
That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).
My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.
If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?
People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?
--
The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse
I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way
Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"
Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel
Come on, be serious
Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.
If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.
It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are
The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population
This should work
Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.
Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.
So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.
Which you will always have some need for, because resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite, services aren't infinite, etc
You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.
You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..
There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.
The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.
Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.
And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.
They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.
If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.
What you wrote is not that.
Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a benefit!
The population of developed countries is already at least 75% robocops
Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar luxury yachts.
Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets and have the yacht meet them there.
People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on.
Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was normal, only later to find and compare with others to see how such childhood was... abnormally uncommon. But I very much prefer seeing them few times a year only, even though we love when they help with kids. Some of their opinions are very outdated, their ramblings are often out of touch with reality, they tend sometimes to spoil kids (even after setting boundaries), and overall generational gap is absolutely massive. It is a form of freedom. Make that 10x more in much more strict societies where pressure and expectations from parents on kids are massive and then they wonder why kids stay the heck away from them once adults.
And fuck local communities, for every good-hearted neighbor who just wants to socialize and help out and otherwise stays away from one's life, there is easily 5 or 10 who are the epitome of nimbyism, voyeurism or similar hobbies of people with empty lives, clueless on how world and people actually work but always with very strong opinions on everything and will to push those on everybody else.
Meanwhile, you dont care about them except for them being potential resource of free work.
And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.
So, I dont think that is much of an argument here.
When it seems to you like everyone around you is the problem, you may actually be the problem.
But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a thing, no matter how much people like you try to force their righteous values that are the only proper true way (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.
Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.
Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont care about competition unless it is someone not them competing to provide for them on lower price.
As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy as a "middle class and lower class doing good". They want the "our wealth goes up, we are getting tax breaks, if lower class pays for it cool" kind of economy.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chatbot+suicide
14-year-old Sewell Setzer III https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...
16-year-old Adam Raine https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
- net benefits to the average person (considering drawbacks)
- overall relative benefits compared to income groups
- benefits in certain areas of society and topics
I think there’ll be some “benefits for all” in terms of things like medical advances and health technology. There will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but as a parent poster said it’ll benefit equity holders most and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we’ll have access to much better information and entertainment but it may also affect the overall employment rate). It’s a very nuanced picture and it’s probably disingenuous of some tech leaders to say “we’ll all benefit) but some do believe that will be the future.
See the work of recent Nobel prize laureates in economics. Many argue for redistribution and investment back to the society.
I really don't see how one can separate the industrial revolution from colonialism, considering we have chiefs of government in colonial countries on the record saying that colonies are a necessary outlet for industrial goods [1].
Once you've established that link, it's hard to explain that "everyone" benefitted from the industrial revolution.
Even disregarding that, the working conditions created by industrialization allowed for situations that can hardly be described as "beneficial" [2][3][4].
> digital revolution.
[5] provided without comment.
---
[1]: for instance, Jules Ferry: https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/hi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Thailand and China would like a word.
colonized => successful
not_colonized => unsuccessful
People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.
I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of areas where some development happened as a result of that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.
But you would also have to consider other places' experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen would almost certainly have been better off now.
If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse, it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth has approximately doubled since 1870.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071021/life-expectancy-...
I’m not just talking about Baroness Mone either. PPE Medpro was the tip of the iceberg.
Practically possible? No. People (and countries) own land. Raw materials for robots comes from land. Energy for robots consumes land. Farming food requires massive inputs beyond just the land and energy (but also needs those).
I don’t imagine we’ll get to a world where my great-great-great^20-grandkids can hold out their hand and have a plate of steak and potatoes (or the then-equivalent) placed into it for free, anytime they want.
The expense of production and on-demand delivery of just a simple plate of steak and baked potato will not ever get to zero. If we can’t even get that simple of thing for free, I don’t believe in a world without the notion of money.
Expand that to even better dining, vacation, and leisure/recreational activities and I think the argument becomes even more solid that some form of rationing/limiting will be in effect and there will be a unit/notation of ration and trade that will be indistinguishable from money.
The overwhelmingly most likely "end of money for humans" comes from the extinction of humans.
A practically possible path to both: Starship is perfected and mining companies begin operations in space. Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics to become practicable. Automation is then as follows: robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by robots. Mining is performed by robots. General manufacturing performed by robots. Potential manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes. Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role can money have at that point, other than sitting on a shelf as a memento of a vanished system?
*excluding sex workers.
You're calculating the expense of returning mined resources using past metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids.
Nothing in the near future is superceding the tyranny of the rocket equation. It'll still be extremely expensive to send equipment to and retrieve material from space even if the spacecraft and mining equipment were literally free.
[1] https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2023-03-15-Issue-210/
[2] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50157.0
The rich already have a diminishing returns situation with money. Everyone else has much more upswing.
The only thing you have to worry about are not non-rich people, but people without any motivation. The difference of course is that the framing you're using makes it easy to blame "The System", while a motivation-based framing at least leaves people somewhat responsible.
Wealth may get you a seat closer to the table, but everyone is already invited into the room.
I'd love to see the people's lives saying how bad it is now. My guess is they have every luxury afforded to them. There is strong negativity bias.
People are literally quitting CS majors because of this BS. Hopefully only the people who aren't meant to do it in the first place, but anyway.
You’re imagining the world we have today, but with AI.
In reality it’ll be a world that’s completely different, and most likely in a worse way, and AI is the tool used to make it worse.
And this is all wild negative speculation by you. And if you deny that, you're lying. It may be different, but not unmanageably different.
So imagine my lack of sympathy when people complain about things being literally free (as long as you don't mind signing away your social media profile data)
Now, ask yourself, what happens when workers lose the only leverage they have against the owner class: their labor? A capitalist economy can only function if workers are able to sell their labor for wages to the owner class, creating a sort of equilibrium between capital and work.
Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers, 99% of humans on Earth become redundant in the eyes of the owner class, and even a threat to their future prosperity. And they own everything, the police and army included.
Fair enough. True.
> Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers
But it won't do that. It's going to shift people around a lot, like literally every other technological development in the history of mankind, sure. But there's literally no evidence that it's going to do what you're claiming, which means you're arguing against a spooky strawman. It's not like people are going to just sit around doing nothing and going homeless, dude. Ideas (and activity that ends up being economically-tangible) will fill the vacuum.
When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slop, deepfakes and laziness enabler that we have today. There are niche applications of AI that already show great potential. Like developing new medicines to devising new treatments for dangerous diseases, solving long standing mathematical problems, creating new physics theories. And who knows? Perhaps even create viable solutions for the climate crisis that we are in. They don't receive as much attention as they deserve, because that's not where the profit lies in AI. Solving real problems require us to forgo profits in the short term. That's why we can't leave this completely up to the billionaires. They will just use it to transfer even more wealth from the poor and middle classes to themselves.
;)
1. How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...
This is about DeepMind's AlphaFold 2. It's arguably a big deal in medical science. How do you propose humans do it?
2. Code vulnerability detection across different programming languages with AI Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11710
> What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI?
I'm not a mathematician. I cannot give a definitive answer. But I read somewhere that some proofs these days fill an entire book. There is no way anybody is creating that without machine validation and assistance. AI is the next step in that, just like how programming support is advancing from complex tools to copilots. I know that overuse of copilots is a reason for making some developers lose quality. But there are also experienced developers who have found ways to use them optimally to significantly increase their speed without filling the code base with AI slop. The same will arguably happen with Mathematics.
The point ultimately is, I don't have definitive answers to any of the questions you ask. I'm not a domain expert in any of those fields and I can't see the future. But none of that is relevant here. What's relevant is to understand how LLMs and AI in general can be leveraged to augment your performance in any profession. The exact method may vary by domain. But the general tool use will be similar. Think of it like "How can a computer help me do accounting, cook a meal, predict weather, get me an xray or pay my bills?" It's as generic as that.
I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.
Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?
I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...
The truth is that with a few more innovations, even Terence Tao will have little to add to an AI's problem solving ability. I will personally enjoy having mathematics explained to me by the AI, but it will be in relative poverty and material insecurity caused by the AI.
A recent AI data point occurred this last weekend with many coming together to answer MathOverflow post, because Terence Tao answered it with some tedious parts done by AI. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115325229364313459
I think his tone is optimistic, but falsely so.
AWS and Facebook have extremely low running costs per VPS or Ad sold. That IMO is one of the major reasons tech has received its enormously high valuation.
There is nuance to that, but average investors are dumb and don't care.
Add in a relatively high fixed-cost commodity into the accounting, and intuitively the pitch of "global market domination at ever lower costs" will be a much harder sell. Especially if there is a bubble pop that hurts them.
How are you defining rich, Billionaires? It's sad that your comment is the top post.
Society with a capital S are the beneficiaries of the bubble.
1. Amazon files the most petitions for H1-B work visas after Indian IT shops. 2. Amazon opposed minimum wage increase to $15/hr until 2018! 3. Amazon not only fires union organizers, it's claiming National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional!
AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter
This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.
Another area where this is begging questions is around resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty years ago, professional translators made a modest white collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn’t “learn to leverage” AI, they had to find new jobs in different fields and anyone who didn’t have the financial reserves to do that might’ve ended up in a retail job questioning whether it’s even possible to re-enter the professional class. That’s great for people like Bezos until nobody can afford to buy things, but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.
Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code, you’re increasingly going to ask whether it’s in your best interests to literally train your replacement.
Totally agree with this
>The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software
I'm mixed on this, ultimately its the responsibility of individuals to adapt. AI makes people way more capable than they have ever been. It's on them to make something of it
> but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.
I'm not sure this is true, it enables individuals like they never have been before. Yes there are the model infrastructure providers, but they are in a race to the bottom
Could some let Bezos know that he doesn’t truly represent society in any way?
You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.
On the more junior end, that $250k goes about as far as $100k in a less expensive region. Keep in mind that the average 1-bedroom rent is $3k+/mo, the average home for a family with kids is $2M, the average PG&E bill for a house is probably $400+, any repairs or remodels will cost you 2x as much as in most other places... and state income taxes are 10% on top of federal.
Most CoL estimates put the cost of living in San Jose at 2x the national average. And that's San Jose.
When you're in your 50s or 60s, the mortgage is repaid, and if nothing blew up, you probably also have a million or two in your 401k, so at that point, it's actually not that hard for a person who had a decent career in the SF Bay Area to be worth $4M+. And many FAANG retirees will probably flirt with $10M+ if they don't spend too much.
And that's what causes bubbles but at this point it should be clear that AI will make a substantial impact - at least as great as the internet, likely larger
And again I'm baffled on how they would light such good will and functionality on fire.
Also, the cost of most of the stuff I (have to) buy (i.e. rent, groceries, ...) is not dominated by the wage of knowledge workers.
Or to put it differently: If AI makes me lose my job but doesn't decrease my rent, I'm in a really bad position.
Agreed. So I don't think it's a bubble.
Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.
I'm not arguing it's a bubble. I'm arguing it's not going to be a "gigantic benefit" for society.
> Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.
Medicine and tech that knowledge workers won't be able to pay for without a job. I also don't think "new tech" is necessarily a good thing societally.
The calculus is easy, really: AI makes 100% of my income worth less but only decreases the cost of a fraction of my expenditures. AI is bad for anyone that works for a living. That's pretty much all of society except for the top x%.
The hard trades and manual labor services we consume for everything that matters daily? That's not going to be made cheaper by AI.
See how that works? A few nerds think it's great while everyone else gets screwed by it.
I would use AI to create extensions for my use than trust someone else's.
Yes. Cheap, second hand, datacenters.
(oh, and keep on eye on all those 'internet scanners', 'script kiddies' using AWS for scans/attacks, honey pot time?).
Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality.
If the investors aren't the gurus we make them to be, we might as well do with a planning committee. We could actually end up with more diversified research.
"Under socialism, a lot of experimental ideas get funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And the planning committee have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is happening isn't real."
Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money.
We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States, central Banks with central planning expending over half the money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia.
As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians, specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent on their own companies of friend and family).
Except for the "institutional investors".
The whole point of capitalism is that one is entitled to the consequences of their own stupidity or the lack thereof. The investors are more willing to take the risks because their losses are bounded - they are risking only as much as they are willing, rather than their status in an organization. Of course once all investors ends up investing into the same bubble there is no real advantage over a committee.
A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs time and money to determine goodness, and that deserves funding.
Governments can also do that funding. The most pivotal technologies in recent history have been a result of government investment.
Private capital has a role, but it's mostly at the productization phase, not fundamental research.
Early stage investors generally fund a portfolio of multiple ideas, where each idea faces great uncertainty - some investments will do tremendously well, some won't. Invstors don't need every investment to do well due to the assymmetry of outcomes (a bad investment can at worst go down 100%, a good investment can go up 10,000%, paying off many bad investments).
> The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better align with the needs of the society and the current technological reality.
This is not the premise of capitalism, it's the justification for it - it's generally believed that capitalism leads to better outcomes over time than communism, but that doesn't mean capitalism has 0 wasteage or results in 0 bad decisions.
Take that for what it is.
The company I reviewed didn't seem like a great investment, but I don't even think that matters right now.
The marginal investor is the price setter, you, I and everyone else are just price takers in the market.
If enough marginal investors decide assets are over-valued, you have no choice but to accept it.
This is the blind spot that will cause many to lose their shirts, and is also why people are wrong about AI being a bubble. LLMs are a bubble within an overall healthy growth market.
Machine learning is a perfectly valid and useful field, traditional ML is super useful and can produce very powerful tools. LLMs are fancy word predictors that have no concept of truth.
But LLMs look and feel like they're almost "real" AI, because they talk in words instead of probabilities, and so people who can't discern the distance between and LLM and AGI assume that AGI is right around the corner.
If you believe AGI is right around the corner and skip over the bit where any mass application of AGI to replace workers for cheaper is just slavery but with extra steps, then of course it makes sense to pour money into any AI business.
I agree about ML.
At the end of the day though it’s how the system is designed. It’s the needed forrest fire that wipes out overgrowth and destroys all but the strongest trees.
Don't they think everyone is a pawn in their money moving games?
Would you mind elaborating on that? I’m not quite sure what you mean.
Yeah, sure some side benefits to people. AI is still a nuclear weapon against labor in the capital - labor (haves - haves not), and will start pushing wealth inequality to the Egyptian pharoah.
The only good news for plebians is that virtual reality entertainment means you just need a little closet to live in.
Overall, this just leads up to further demographic decline, which as an environmental malthusian I would welcome in the initial stages to get us down from our current level, but I also suspect it would turn into an economic downward spiral, especially with AI, where the oligarchs have such total authoritarian control and monopoly on resources that humanity basically stops having kids at all.
This is what he acknowledges.
mattnewton•4mo ago
Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming “suring” is “during”, does cnbc proofread their content?
mistrial9•4mo ago
DonsDiscountGas•4mo ago
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Loughla•4mo ago
One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard. You just look for dashes in their writing."
I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use those, right?"
Blank stares.
I hate it.
baobun•4mo ago
Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.
robotresearcher•4mo ago
Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/04/18/51-west-...
edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it under the rug even when properly documented and passed up two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and demoralizing for all concerned.
smj-edison•4mo ago
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Loughla•4mo ago
Use it as a peer review. Use it during brainstorming. Use it to clarify ambiguous thoughts. Use it to challenge your arguments and poke holes in your assumptions.
baobun•4mo ago
BTW if you haven't, I encourage reading this.
https://zenodo.org/records/17065099
Loughla•4mo ago
I'm not saying throw the doors open and let loose. I'm saying that we need to find places where using these tools makes sense, follows a sense of professional ethics, and encourages (rather than replaces) critical thinking.
And the problem with your cited paper is that people who kick and scream the loudest about this at my institution (again, this is just at mine and is in no way indicative of any other institution) are the ones who have not updated their courses since I was in college. I mean that quite literally. I attended the institution I currently work at. Decades later and I could turn in papers that I wrote for their classes my freshman year and pass their classes.
Three of them sent me that same linked article. But instead of seeing the message "we need to think about how to use these things responsibly" they just read "you can do what you've done for years and nothing needs to change."
That "research" article isn't as impactful as the faculty at my institution thought.
I'm all for the thoughtful integration or rejection of these technologies based on sound pedagogical practices rooted in student learning theory. At my institution, and I want to stress n=1, they literally do not want to take time updating lessons, regardless of the reason. Llm's are just a convenient scapegoat right now.
I would argue that it's more unethical to not update your classroom lessons in over 2 decades than it is to use llm's to supplement learning.
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