If such a bubble popping means that only coding agents survive and we can get away from talking baby videos, I'm all for it.
> if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?
Probably. If you're not gaining at least $1000 a month in productivity now, then you're doing it wrong. I suspect however they may become an enterprise only offering, with limited availability to "normies"
> I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who lived through 2000 or 2008. Does a postbubble world mean we just abandon the tech entirely or is it a move toward expensive solutions?
In the late 90s you could get 100k a year for being able to spell HTML, and then the bubble pop pushed all the grifters back to whatever they were doing before. Those with real skill stuck around, even though it did suppress salaries for a while.
I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?
If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.
Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.
AI is here to stay but not in the way big corporations dream of it. People will continue using AI but when the AI bubble pops, sooner than later, things will stabilize and adapt to real usage with a different business model.
As you correctly state, the cost of AI as a Service (AIaaS) will increase for end users, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It will allow the "real" users to continue having access to it and sieve out the ones who are just playing around. Prices for RAM, GPUs, SSDs will normalize a lot and more people will move towards local models.
Similarly to what happened with the dot-com bubble (I saw it happening), it doesn't mean that everything will disappear, but that it will change/adapt. All of us AI realists are currently being treated like technophobes when we say things like that ;-)
When the dot com bubble popped, the internet and websites did not go away. (I'm posting this to a website ending in .com) When the mortgage crisis happened, mortgages certainly didn't go away.
When the AI/LLM bubble pops, LLMs will still exist and be used. They just won't be hyped and pushed everywhere.
If such a bubble popping means that only coding agents survive and we can get away from talking baby videos, I'm all for it.
> if a tool like Claude Code (or any other LLM) suddenly cost $1,000 a month to reflect what it actually costs to run, would people keep paying for it out of pocket? Would their companies?
Probably. If you're not gaining at least $1000 a month in productivity now, then you're doing it wrong. I suspect however they may become an enterprise only offering, with limited availability to "normies"
> I’m especially curious to hear from anyone who lived through 2000 or 2008. Does a postbubble world mean we just abandon the tech entirely or is it a move toward expensive solutions?
In the late 90s you could get 100k a year for being able to spell HTML, and then the bubble pop pushed all the grifters back to whatever they were doing before. Those with real skill stuck around, even though it did suppress salaries for a while.
I think even if AI can help developer productivity, there are a lot of other elements to software delivery and speeding up developers isn't necessarily going to speed up overall project delivery. A hard question to answer then is, what is the ROI if an organization is spending $10k/month on AI tools but project deliveries are mostly the same as before?
If the AI tool companies increase their rates 2x, 5x, 10x, is it worth it? They aren't going to lower prices.
Consumer AI tool usage isn't going to get a lot of adopters that will pay, people outside of a work environment will see it as a fun toy, much like social media and will be fine with being served ads and letting their loss of privacy be the cost.
You can run smaller models locally that are pretty good at code gen.
Give it a try.
To get started: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/12/qwen25-coder/
or https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-33-70b/
They are already increasing the pricing gradually.
Your assumption is wrong.
The LLM companies are profitable on the current gen models. Inference is profitable, rather than subsidized.
They are raising the biggest chunk of capital to buy data center compute that will come online ~2 years from now and be an order of magnitude larger.
The bear case for the labs is that they're Cisco, not Pets.com.
AI is here to stay but not in the way big corporations dream of it. People will continue using AI but when the AI bubble pops, sooner than later, things will stabilize and adapt to real usage with a different business model.
As you correctly state, the cost of AI as a Service (AIaaS) will increase for end users, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It will allow the "real" users to continue having access to it and sieve out the ones who are just playing around. Prices for RAM, GPUs, SSDs will normalize a lot and more people will move towards local models.
Similarly to what happened with the dot-com bubble (I saw it happening), it doesn't mean that everything will disappear, but that it will change/adapt. All of us AI realists are currently being treated like technophobes when we say things like that ;-)
When the dot com bubble popped, the internet and websites did not go away. (I'm posting this to a website ending in .com) When the mortgage crisis happened, mortgages certainly didn't go away.
When the AI/LLM bubble pops, LLMs will still exist and be used. They just won't be hyped and pushed everywhere.