I think we'll continue to see anything be automated that can be automated in a way that reduces head count. So you have the dumb AI as a first line of defense and lay off half the customer service you had before.

In the meantime, fewer and fewer jobs (especially entry level), a rising poor class as the middle class is eliminated and a greater wealth gap than ever before. The markets are going to also collapse from this AI bubble. It's just a matter of when.

It could very well that the current generation of AI has poisoned the well for any future endeavors of creating AI. You can't trivially filter out the AI slop and humans are less likely to make their handcrafted content freely available for training. In fact violating GPL code to train models on it might be ruled to be illegal as well generally stricter rules on which data you are allowed to use for training.

We might have reached a local optimum that is very difficult to escape from. There might be a long, long AI winter ahead of us, for better or worse.

> the world isn’t going back to what it was before AI. This is it, forever.

I feel this so much. I though my longing for the pre-smartphone days was bad but damn we have lost so much.

1) LLMs have failed to live up to the hype.

Maybe. Depends upon's who's hype. But I think it is fine to say that we don't have AGI today (however that is defined) and that some people hyped that up.

2) LLMs haven't failed outright

I think that this is a vast understatement.

LLMs have been a wild success. At big tech over 40% of checked in code is LLM generated. At smaller companies the proportion is larger. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly active users.

Students throughout the world, and especially in the developed world are using "AI" at 85-90% (from some surveys).

Between 40% of professionals and 90% (depending upon survey and profession) are using "AI".

This is 3 years after the launch of ChatGPT (and the capabilities of chatGPT 3.5 were so limited compared to today that it is a shame that they get bundled together in our discussions). I would say instead of "failed outright" that they are the most successful consumer product of all time (so far).

"it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations"

"works very well if you do know what you are doing"

If you know what you are doing it works kind of mid. You see how anything more then a prototype will create lots of issues in the long run.

Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

You have decades upon decades of experience on how to approach software development and solve problems. You know the right questions to ask.

The actual non-programmers I see on Reddit are having discussions about topics such as “I don’t believe that technical debt is a real thing” and “how can I go back in time if Claude Code destroyed my code”.

Is there really a clear-cut distinction between the two in today's VC and acquisition based economy?

"We just cured cancer! All cancer! With a simple pill!"

"But you promised it would rejuvenate everyone to the metabolism of a 20 year old and make us biologically immortal!" New headline: "After spending billions, project to achieve immortality has little to show..."

Pretty much all tech progress is like this now because the hype is always pushed to insane levels.

With LLMs we have, at the very least, solved natural language processing on computers. This is absolutely huge. We've also largely solved the "fuzzy input problem" that is intrinsic to pretty much all computing.

You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough.