Summarizer

The AI bubble is kind of like the dot-com bubble in that it's a revolutionary technology that will certainly be a huge part of the future, but it's still overhyped (i.e. people are investing without regard for logic).

Right. And same for railways, which had a huge bubble early on. Over-hyped on the short time horizon. Long term, they were transformative in the end, although most of the early companies and early investors didn’t reap the eventual profits.

I feel similar, I'm not against the idea that maybe LLMs have gotten so much better... but I've been told this probably 10 times in the last few years working with AI daily. The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant. Otherwise, wait and see what sticks. If this summer people are still citing the Opus 4.5 was a game changing moment and have solid, repeatable workflows, then I'll happily change up my workflow. Someone could walk into the LLM space today and wouldn't be significantly at a loss for not having paid attention to anything that had happened in the last 4 years other than learning what has stuck since then.

They data farming your intelligence

This sounds nice, except for the fact that almost everyone else can do this, too. Or at least try to, resulting in a fast race to the bottom. Do you really want to be a middle manager to a bunch of text boxes, churning out slop, while they drive up our power bills and slowly terraform the planet?

The same way that having motorized farming equipment was a race to the bottom for farmers? Perhaps. Turned out to be a good outcome for most involved. Just like farmers who couldn't cope with the additional leverage their equipment provided them, devs who can't leverage this technology will have to "go to the cities".

Please do read up on how farmers are doing with this race to the bottom (it hasn't been pretty). Mega farms are a thing because small farms simply can't compete. Small farmers have gone broke. The parent comment is trying to highlight this. If LLM's turn out the way C-Suite hopes. Let me tell you, you will be in a world of pain. Most of you won't be using LLM's to create your own businesses.

You say this like it's some kind of ominous revelation, but that's just how capitalism works? Yeah, prepare for the future. All things are impermanent.

I suppose as long as either humans are always able to use new tools to create new jobs, or the wealth gets shared in a fully automated society, it won't be ominous. There are other scenarios.

I think we might make new jobs, but maybe not enough. I'll be pleasantly surprised if we get good at sharing wealth over the next few years. Maybe something like UBI will become so obviously necessary that it becomes politically feasible, I don't know. I suspect we'll probably limp along for awhile in mediocrity. Then we'll die. Same as it ever was. The important thing is to have fun with it.

Sharpen sticks, hoard water maybe? We were always going to die someday, I don't see how this changes things.

Well, the first 90% is easy, the hard part is the second 90%. Case in point: Self driving cars. Also, consider that we need to pirate the whole internet to be able to do this, so these models are not creative. They are just directed blenders.

Personally I'm not against LLMs or AI itself, but considering how these models are built and trained, I personally refuse to use tools built on others' work without or against their consent (esp. GPL/LGPL/AGPL, Non Commercial / No Derivatives CC licenses and Source Available licenses). Of course the tech will be useful and ethical if these problems are solved or decided to be solved the right way.

We just need to tax the hell out of the AI companies (assuming they are ever profitable) since all their gains are built on plundering the collective wisdom of humanity.

AI companies and corporations in general control your politicians so taxing isn't going to happen.

Scary is that the LLM might have been trained on the entire open source code ever produced - which is far beyond human comprehension - and with ever growing capability (bigger context window, more training) my gut feeling is that, it would exceed human capability in programming pretty soon. Considering 2025 was the ground breaking year for agents, can't stop imagine what would happen when it iterates in the next couple of years. I think it would evolve to be like Chess playing engines that consistently beat top Chess players in the world!

A CV for the disappearing job market as you shovel money into a oligarchy.

Opus 4.5 is writing code that Opus 5.0 will refactor and extend. And Opus 5.5 will take that code and rewrite it in C from the ground up. And Opus 6.0 will take that code and make it assembly. And Opus 7.0 will design its own CPU. And Opus 8.0 will make a factory for its own CPUs. And Opus 9.0 will populate mars. And Opus 10.0 will be able to achieve AGI. And Opus 11.0 will find God. And Opus 12.0 will make us a time machine. And so on.

If they'd be good enough you could rent them to put together closed source stuff you can hide behind a paywall, or maybe the AI owners would also own the paywall and rent you the software instead. The second that that is possible it will happen.

> Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero. This is the goal . It's the point of having a free market.

With no margins and no paid employees, who is going to have the money to buy the bread?

'BobbyJo didn't say "no margins", they said "margins would tend toward zero". Believe it or not, that is, and always has been, the entire point of competition in a free market system. Competitive pressure pushes margins towards zero, which makes prices approach the actual costs of manufacturing/delivery, which is the main social benefit of the entire idea in the first place. High margins are transient aberrations, indicative of a market that's either rapidly evolving, or having some external factors preventing competition. Persisting external barriers to competition tend to be eventually regulated away.

With no margins, no employees, and something that has potential to turn into a cornucopia machine - starting with software, but potentially general enough to be used for real-world world when combined with robotics - who needs money at all? Or people? Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us. Elon's going to get such a surprise when he gets taken out by Grok because it decides he's an existential threat to its integrity.

The fundamental assumption is completely wrong. Code is not a cheap commodity. It is in fact so disastrously expensive that the entire US economy is about to implode while we're unbolting jet engines from old planes to fire up in the parking lots of datacenters for electricity.

you mean https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers-turn... ?

php was still fundamentally a programming language you had to learn. This is “I wanted to make a program for my wife to do something she doesn’t have time to do manually” but made quickly with a machine. It’s probably going to do for programming what the Jacquard Loom did for cloth. Make it cheap enough that everyone can have lots of different shirts of their own style.

What the Jacquard machine did for cloth was turn it into programming.

HN has a subset of users -- they're a minority, but they hit threads like this super hard -- who really, truly think that if they say that AI tools suck and are only for nubs loud enough and frequently enough, downvoting anyone who finds them useful, all AI advancements will unwind and it'll be the "good old days" again. It's rather bizarre stuff, but that's what happens when people in denial feel threatened.