I’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, diverting money from infrastructure and social programs, putting more debt stress on society, etc.
I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, so I appreciate the benefits of AI - it is just that I hate the almost religious tech belief that real AI will happen from exponential cost increases for LLM training and inference for essentially linear gains.
I get that some lazy ass people have turned vibe coding and development into what I consider an activity sort-of like mindlessly scrolling social media.
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.
Where are they?
Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing.
When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'?
It's not your main point, but I can't help but point out that artificial diamonds ARE diamonds. Cubic zirconia is a different mineral. Usually the distinction is "natural" vs "lab grown" diamonds.
When computers have super-human level intelligence, we might be making similar distinctions. Intelligence IS intelligence, whether it's from a machine or an organism. LLMs might not get us there but something machine will eventually.
What? Nobody says cubic zirconia is an artificial diamond, it’s just a different shiny crystal. We have loads of actual artificial diamonds, so cheap you can get a cutting disc made fr9m them for $10 at home depot.
And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be no way to tell if an AI is conscious because we haven’t yet managed to reliably tell if humans, or dogs, or chimpanzees or whales are conscious.
The claim that is often made is that more work on the current generation of AI tech will lead to AGI at a human or better level. I agree with Yann Lecun that this is unlikely.
AGI is completely orthogonal to consciousness. Crows seem pretty conscious to me, as does my cat, but I have no way to test or prove it. They are intelligent though.
But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like steering a super tanker, the effects take time to percolate through economies as large and diversified as the US. This is the Solow paradox / productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
> The term can refer to the more general disconnect between powerful computer technologies and weak productivity growth
I keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.
There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.
> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.
That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.
When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it will be comparable to the broadband internet connection you mentioned. Possibly a whole lot more.
>That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.
Isn't that a huge red flag? If customers are being given this product at a discount and it still isn't showing a positive ROI for them, what makes people think it will improve once we're charged full price?
> Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
They're spending more than they're making. For the foreseeable future, saying "we could be profitable if we stopped training" if goofy, because they can't stop. If they do, no one will want to use their product because it will be overtaken by competitors within three months.
I get it that in 10 years all of this might peak and we're gonna be content using old models, but that'll be a very different landscape and Anthropic might not be a part of it anymore.
Well, training isn't going to end soon if these companies keep on competing with one another whilst being neck-and-neck, so I'm not sure why you would ignore the cost of training in the ROI calculation.
Amodei says yes - each model pays for its training. But they're scaling up investment for each new run, so they're still happily in the red.
And also that may be the case for Anthropic who have fewer free users, a large enterprise business, and less generous rate limits on their subscriptions. I don't know if OpenAI or Google have commented. I suspect OpenAI is in a worse position given their massive non-paying consumer base.
I would argue that the leadership and financial support behind AI (in its current form) does not have the patience or level-headedness to treat it as a long-term change, and is very much trying an all-or-nothing approach to making a long shift happen in a few years instead, or burn through nation-level budgets trying.
To my eyes, the problem is not the productivity gain arriving slowly, but the immediate draining of funding from virtually all other areas of innovation.
"The Productivity Paradox" is what they called it when people were skeptical that computer would end up finding a place in the office. There are articles from the 90s complaining about how much people are spending on buying computers for no real impact on productivity https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/163298.163309
All of the technologies mentioned eventually made things better.
In order to work, gen AI requires a general acceptance of widely spread mostly mediocre outcomes.
I don’t see how the comparison stands.
This article seems to have "basically zero" content.
Today you have to be blind to not see the change that is coming.
World has its own (massive) inertia, burocracy present in businesses accounting for a big part in it.
AI itself is moving fast but not at infinite speeds. We start to have good enough tooling but it's not yet available to everyone and it still hangs on too many hacks that will need to crystalize. People have a lot of mess to sort out in their projects to start taking full advantage of AI tooling - in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it and "using ai" doesn't mean that "you can copy paste code to/from copilot 365".
As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan. We're only now going to start seeing noticable changes and changes themselves will start speeding up as well. But it all takes time.
> As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan
Yes, Anthropic decided they wanted to IPO and got the hype machine in full swing.
Don’t get me wrong LLMs are here to stay but how we’re currently using them is likely going to change a lot. Stuff like this:
> in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it
Is not needed to get a lot out of AI, and is mostly snake oil. Integrating them with actionable feedback is, but that takes a lot of time and rethinking of some existing systems.
I don’t like the Internet analogy cause that’s like producing a new raw material, but AI is gonna be like Excel eventually (one of the most important pieces of software in the world).
Nothing changed in Dec/Jan. Everything changed in 2023 with someones first openAI chat and things are slowly getting adopted into everything with high, marginal and negative benefits.
Things are actually slowing down. And society will still see AI adding little to next years report. The costs still outweigh the benefits.
We're still 6-12+ months away from a "killer" AI product. OpenClaw showed what's possible-ish, but it breaks half the time, eats tokens like crazy, and can leak all kinds of secrets. Clearly there's potential there, and a lot of people are working on products in the AI space (myself included), but anyone that's seriously tried to wrangle these models will agree with the reality that it's very hard to reliably get them to do what you want them to do.
It's not that the technology is not there yer, it's all the ethical concerns and the mental barrier that nobody wants to spend their day begging AI for solutions.
I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI.
It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos.
There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may people are saying too conflicting things and chaos is never good for clear long-term growth.
Either that 20 years is completelly inapplicable to AI, or we're in for a world of hurt. There's no in between given the kinds of bets that have been made.
AI companies don’t have 20 years, they have max 5 years where they have to turn to profit.
They don’t have time to wait for all the companies to pick up use of AI tooling in their own pace.
So they lie and try to manufacture demand. Well demand is there but they have to manufacture FOMO so that demand materializes now and not in 20 or 10 years.
This outlook is as short-sighted as the 2000 fiber optic bust. Critics then thought overcapacity meant the end, yet that infrastructure eventually created the modern internet. Capital does not walk away from a fundamental shift just because of one market correction. While specific companies may fail, the long-term value of the technology ensures that investment will continue far beyond a five-year window.
The massive investment in power grids and data centers provides a permanent physical backbone that outlives any specific silicon generation. This infrastructure serves as a durable shell for the model design knowledge and chip architectural IP gained through each iteration. Capital is effectively funding a structural moat built on energy access and engineering mastery.
How much capital was wiped out for it to be cheap after the bust? Someone is going to eat the exuberance loss in the near term, even if there is long term value.
It's a "Motte and Bailey" system [0], where the extreme "AI will do everything for you" claim keeps getting thrown around to try to get investors to throw in cash, but then somehow it transmutes into "all technologies took time to mature stop being mean to me."
To be fair, it isn't necessarily the same people doing both at once. Sometimes there are two groups under the same general banner, where one makes the big-claims, and another responds to perceived criticism of their lesser-claim.
> the problem is that people from OpenAI/Anthropic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI.
I'm going to be honest, you can feel the AGI when you use newer agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude. It's an entirely different world from GPT-4.0. This is serious intelligence.
Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.
Researchers looked at GPT-3 in 2023 and saw “sparks of AGI”. The saying “feel the AGI” became widespread not long after, if I’m remembering right. We’ve been saying AGI is right around the corner for a while now. And of course, if you predict the end of the world every day, you’ll eventually be right. But for the moment, what we have is an exceptionally powerful coding assistant that can also speed up entry-level work in various other white collar industries. That is earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting. But given how competitive and expensive the AI game has become, that is not enough, so it needs to be “superintelligence” - and it’s just not.
What does that mean? By what metric do you measure "AGI", whatever that means? Industry definitions are incredibly vague, perhaps intentionally so, with no benchmarks to define how a model, harness, or other technology might achieve "AGI". They have no intelligence, and can't even reason that you need to take your car to the car wash to have it washed[0].
If somehow Claude became sentient that would be sci-fi. One day it’s wrangling CSS and Spring Boot Controllers and the next it’s telling you opinions it developed through its own experiences on programming languages. Not sure that’s on the near horizon, but it’s definitely impressive technology.
> Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.
Yeah? So you must have a clear idea of where "there" is, and of the route from here to there?
Forgive me my skepticism, but I don't believe you. I don't believe that you actually know.
Not to mention the investment is on another level. We've got companies with valuations in the hundred-billions talking about raising trillions to buy all of the computers in the world, before establishing whether they can even turn a profit, nevermind upend the economy.
I wonder how many actually beneficial projects will not be financed by investors too scared to try anything risky after the AI buble crashes and burns to the ground. :P
the investments are being made by massively profitable companies (our biggest and brightest ones, the ones that have been carrying the economy for quite some time now, even before "AI"). even just in recent history we have seen companies making large investments and being very unprofitable until they weren't anymore (e.g. Uber). and it is always the same story, everyone is up in arms "this is not sustainable etc..."
whether or not these companies can turn a profit - time will tell. but I am betting that our massively profitable companies (which are biggest spenders of course) perhaps know what they are doing and just maybe they should get the benefit of the doubt until they are proven wrong. but if I had to make a wager and on one side I have google, microsoft, amazon, meta... and on the other side I have bunch of AI bubble people with a bunch of time to predict a "crash" I'd put my money on the former...
The fact that the companies that have already shoveled billions of dollars at this are continuing to do so is equally consistent with AI improvement and adoption stalling as it is with infinite improvement and widespread adoption. Yes, it’s irrational to chase sunk costs - but unlike the VC funds that backed Uber and its competition, may of the players in this game are exposed to public markets, which are not known for being rigorously logical. If you pull back on your AI investments, the markets will punish you - probably vigorously - and if your only concern is the value of your stock options, it is entirely rational for you to act in a way that keeps the market from punishing their value. We’re 3 years in without showing any ROI, and who’s to say we can’t get 3 or 5 or 10 more? Plenty of time to cash out before the eventual reckoning.
There is definitely growing hesitancy in the market, but pulling back at this juncture could set off a full-on race to the bottom, because it would disprove the original point (“all the smart tech companies are all-in, so there must be profit at the end of the tunnel”). Right now, they can point to the skeptics as bears or doomers or whatever. The first big tech company to drop its capex will pierce the aura of invincibility and make the moderate retreat from the exuberant highs of late 2025 look like a blip on the radar.
I'd maybe think twice about assuming Meta knows what they're doing after they just pissed $75 billion up the wall on a Metaverse dream that went nowhere.
Pissed it away, but Zuckerberg is richer than ever and so are his stockholders it seems. I can’t imagine doing it, but also can’t imagine running Meta.
I am certainly not saying that this can’t all come crashing down for the big boys, surely it can. I just am putting a little more weight on them than on people on the internet and doomsdayers hunting for clicks is all
I just keep thinking about SGI and, to an extent, Sun. Couple missteps and a couple innovations in the commodity direction and it will start having a negative effect.
I think this paragraph from the wikipedia article captures it nicely:
>Many observers disagree that any meaningful "productivity paradox" exists and others, while acknowledging the disconnect between IT capacity and spending, view it less as a paradox than a series of unwarranted assumptions about the impact of technology on productivity. In the latter view, this disconnect is emblematic of our need to understand and do a better job of deploying the technology that becomes available to us rather than an arcane paradox that by its nature is difficult to unravel.
For the U.S. economy, productivity is defined as (output measured in $)/(input measured in $). Typically, new technologies (computers, internet, AI) reduce input costs, and due to competition in the market, companies are required to reduce their prices, thereby having an overall deflationary effect on the economy. It's entirely possible that AI will have a small or no effect on productivity as measured above, but society will benefit by getting access to inexpensive products and services powered by inexpensive AI. Individual companies won't use AI to improve their productivity but will need to use AI just to stay competitive.
Yep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI.
It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
Sure, but you have to consider Carl Sagan's point, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Some truly useful technologies start out slow and the question is asked if they are fads or bubbles even though they end up having huge impact. But plenty of things that at first appeared to be fads or bubbles truly were fads or bubbles.
Personally I think AI is unlikely to go the way of NFTs and it shows actual promise. What I'm much less convinced of is that it will prove valuable in a way that's even remotely within the same order of magnitude as the investments being pumped into it. The Internet didn't begin as a massive black hole sucking all the light out of the room for anything else before it really started showing commensurate ROI.
All those racks of Nvidia machines might not pay off for the companies buying them, but I have a hard time believing that people are still questioning the utility of this stuff. In the last hour, Opus downloaded data for and implemented a couple of APIs that I would’ve otherwise paid hundreds a month for, end to end, from research all the way to testing its implementation. It’s so, incredibly, obviously useful.
> What I'm much less convinced of is that it will prove valuable in a way that's even remotely within the same order of magnitude as the investments being pumped into it.
I think there are two layers of uncertainty here. One is, as you say, if the value is worth the investment. The other and possibly bigger issue is who is going to capture the value and how.
Assuming AI turns out to be wildly valuable, I'm not at all convinced that at the end of this money spending race that the companies pouring many billions of dollars into commercial LLMs are going to end up notably ahead of open models that are running the race on the cheap by drafting behind the "frontier" models.
For now the frontier models can stay ahead by burning heaps of money but if/when progress slows toward a limit whatever lead they have is going to quickly evaporate.
At some point I suspect some ugly legal battles as some attempt to construct some sort of moat that doesn't automatically drain after a few months of slowed progress. Google's recent complaining about people distilling gemini could be an early signal of this.
I have no idea how any of that would shake out legally, but I have a hard time sympathizing with commercial LLM providers (who slurped up most existing human knowledge without permission) if/when they start to get upset about people ripping them off.
Columbus was not a genius. He was an idiot who believed the earth was smaller than the scientists of his day, and the scientists were right. Columbus became successful through pure luck, genocide and cruelty.
I mean, it's an apt comparison, given that the Venn diagram between the pro-NFT hucksters and the pro-AI crowd is a circle. When you listen to people who were so publicly and embarrassingly wrong about the future try to sell you on their next hustle, skepticism is the correct posture.
Also no particular reason to group it in with those two. There are plenty of things that never showed up at all. It's just not a signal It's kind of like "My kid is failing math, but he's just bored. Einstein failed a lot too you know". Regardless of whether Einstein actually failed anything, there are a lot more non-Einsteins that have failed.
That seems a tad reductionist. Why not just say the iPhone was completely inconsequential because afterall it's simply another "computer". Why not go even back further and start the timer at the first physical implementation of a Turing machine?
The iPhone killer UX + App store release can be directly traced to the growth in tech in the subsequent years its release.
It’s a grift being perpetuated by the folks at the top, who then sweep along in their slipstream folks under them, and so on. The folks who “need to hear this” are helpless to go against and so can’t back down, and the folks who don’t need to hear this because they’re driving it have their paychecks aligned to it, so they’re not backing down.
Why do I get the feeling that AI skeptics will treat it as definitive and irrefutable proof that they were right all along even though it’s one data point in an industry that’s hasn’t even been around for 5 years.
You're right, it is tempting to dunk on AI boosters every time an article like this comes out and puts a damper on their sci fi fan fiction fantasies. There's just something about a grown person getting all excited like a child that makes it really satisfying.
You must have a really bleak view on life to think an adult should never get excited like a child.
Adult life doesn’t have to be boring drudgery, you know. I mean, it mostly is, but the rare moments of childlike joy and excitement are some of the best parts.
As far as the putting a damper on anything, nope it doesn’t. And it never will.
The people excited about AI are excited because of the impacts they see on their own jobs and daily lives. We don’t care what Goldman Sachs has to say about productivity.
Andrej Karpathy said that major revolutions like the Internet, smartphones, and AI often don’t show up clearly in GDP statistics, even when they radically change how people work. GDP measures total spending, not productivity or usefulness. These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life, but GDP mostly continued along its long-term trend.
"These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life"
I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.
True. The point remains the same. GDP isn’t measuring “meaningfulness,” and it also doesn’t measure “stress” very well either. Tech can change daily life massively in either direction without moving GDP much.
Besides, AI has barely started to be productive to Developers. The rest of the workforce are still untouched for the most part. The tools that assist the bulk of knowledge work out there is still in the works.
I have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.
Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.
I've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced
the measurement problem here is real. GDP captures output, not latent capacity or quality. an ops team that responds to 200 requests/week with AI at 2x speed doesn't show up in GDP if headcount stays flat. the value is captured in retention, fewer escalations, faster revenue ops cycles -- none of which hit a GDP line directly. the reason AI added zero isn't that it didn't work. it's that we're measuring the wrong thing.
Trickle down effect reversal:
> “A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP”
Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy.
With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough.
I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance.
And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment.
It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
The same underlying magic that enables LLMs to be faster than a brute force SQL query on all the worlds data while producing "good enough" results appears to be the very thing that is creating hallucinations and finite context windows. ie there is no free lunch. It seems to be the theory in many in the field (ilya included?) that the obstacle might not be overcome without an LLM-level breakthrough in AI research, or maybe more likely, a breakthrough in hardware. Big tech until at least recently seems to have thought they can brute force it with energy (nuclear). But who's paying?
What about social media, did that evolve into something sane and useful or has it remained owned by the cash grabbers? Have we not yet internalized that they've permanently captured control of technological advances?
The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.
I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
Given that the first communication between a web server and client was in December 1990 (and that was private to Tim B-L's environment), and it was released to the public in 1991, I bet we actually couldn't find such stories in the 1980s :)
I assume you mean technology, not the www (didn't exist). And, until around the second half of the 90s those papers were right. Most papers you'll find arguing that it wasn't contributing much to productivity were saying just that, that it wasn't, not that it won't. At the time, they were right. Productivity had stagnated despite heavy spending in technology.
But now we have something else happening. It's hard to find an application for something that makes a lot of mistakes. That's not the same issue. The issue then was that no one had written the software yet. Everyone knew what software needed writing. The future was obvious. Here, not so much. We can't see how to make it not make mistakes.
We have to hope someone will come up with a solution to that. Otherwise their big bets on something non-productive won't pan out the same way that the computer did, and we're all going to suffer for it.
I've been using claude code to code my own gpt model from absolute scratch in type script with c code it generates for the gpu. Anytime it wants to use cuda or some lib to do things faster I can keep telling it to write it in typescript or c etc lots of fun and it actually works lol
Just so we're on the same page, you don't think that an llm is going to achieve AGI right? Like you're thinking some sort of combination between world models, llms, visual models and others. Right?
A lot of jobs that can be automated haven't been because it's not worth it is because the people with domain knowledge can't imagine automating it is other related problems.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. For most things, checking if a solution is correct is much easier than implementing it (page looks wrong, can't login etc...)
I’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, diverting money from infrastructure and social programs, putting more debt stress on society, etc.
I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, so I appreciate the benefits of AI - it is just that I hate the almost religious tech belief that real AI will happen from exponential cost increases for LLM training and inference for essentially linear gains.
I get that some lazy ass people have turned vibe coding and development into what I consider an activity sort-of like mindlessly scrolling social media.
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.
Where are they?
Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'?
Incidentally, this comment was written by AI.
It's not your main point, but I can't help but point out that artificial diamonds ARE diamonds. Cubic zirconia is a different mineral. Usually the distinction is "natural" vs "lab grown" diamonds.
When computers have super-human level intelligence, we might be making similar distinctions. Intelligence IS intelligence, whether it's from a machine or an organism. LLMs might not get us there but something machine will eventually.
What? Nobody says cubic zirconia is an artificial diamond, it’s just a different shiny crystal. We have loads of actual artificial diamonds, so cheap you can get a cutting disc made fr9m them for $10 at home depot.
And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be no way to tell if an AI is conscious because we haven’t yet managed to reliably tell if humans, or dogs, or chimpanzees or whales are conscious.
The claim that is often made is that more work on the current generation of AI tech will lead to AGI at a human or better level. I agree with Yann Lecun that this is unlikely.
> But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.
I saw someone on the news claiming this recently, but he ran an AI consultancy firm so I suspect he was trying to drum up business.
>LLMs will become sentient or conscious.
People who declare that AGI is coming.
AGI is completely orthogonal to consciousness. Crows seem pretty conscious to me, as does my cat, but I have no way to test or prove it. They are intelligent though.
I just want to call out how much I appreciate the comparison of “vibe coding” to the endless scroll.
I guess this is trend now because it's a contrarian / attention grabbing headline. See:
- "Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity..." https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-s...
- “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like steering a super tanker, the effects take time to percolate through economies as large and diversified as the US. This is the Solow paradox / productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
I keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.
There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.
> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.
That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.
When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it will be comparable to the broadband internet connection you mentioned. Possibly a whole lot more.
>That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.
Isn't that a huge red flag? If customers are being given this product at a discount and it still isn't showing a positive ROI for them, what makes people think it will improve once we're charged full price?
Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
> Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
They're spending more than they're making. For the foreseeable future, saying "we could be profitable if we stopped training" if goofy, because they can't stop. If they do, no one will want to use their product because it will be overtaken by competitors within three months.
I get it that in 10 years all of this might peak and we're gonna be content using old models, but that'll be a very different landscape and Anthropic might not be a part of it anymore.
Well, training isn't going to end soon if these companies keep on competing with one another whilst being neck-and-neck, so I'm not sure why you would ignore the cost of training in the ROI calculation.
Then why are they stopping people from having multiple max plans? If they are making such good margins on inference.
Does the cumulative earnings from inference on a single model exceed its training costs?
That’s.. kinda the question.
Amodei says yes - each model pays for its training. But they're scaling up investment for each new run, so they're still happily in the red.
And also that may be the case for Anthropic who have fewer free users, a large enterprise business, and less generous rate limits on their subscriptions. I don't know if OpenAI or Google have commented. I suspect OpenAI is in a worse position given their massive non-paying consumer base.
I would argue that the leadership and financial support behind AI (in its current form) does not have the patience or level-headedness to treat it as a long-term change, and is very much trying an all-or-nothing approach to making a long shift happen in a few years instead, or burn through nation-level budgets trying.
To my eyes, the problem is not the productivity gain arriving slowly, but the immediate draining of funding from virtually all other areas of innovation.
This. They created an innovation black hole and we will all pay the long-term consequences of it
This isn't new.
"The Productivity Paradox" is what they called it when people were skeptical that computer would end up finding a place in the office. There are articles from the 90s complaining about how much people are spending on buying computers for no real impact on productivity https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/163298.163309
Even the source article in the first link, https://www.nber.org/papers/w34836
the same firms "predict sizable impacts" over the next three years
late 2025 was an inflection point for a lot of companies
How to reconcile this with all the narratives of how powerful AI is, how it can perform right now at the same level of engineers and so on?
Once confronted with reality we have a "productivity paradox"?
All of the technologies mentioned eventually made things better. In order to work, gen AI requires a general acceptance of widely spread mostly mediocre outcomes. I don’t see how the comparison stands.
This article seems to have "basically zero" content.
Today you have to be blind to not see the change that is coming.
World has its own (massive) inertia, burocracy present in businesses accounting for a big part in it.
AI itself is moving fast but not at infinite speeds. We start to have good enough tooling but it's not yet available to everyone and it still hangs on too many hacks that will need to crystalize. People have a lot of mess to sort out in their projects to start taking full advantage of AI tooling - in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it and "using ai" doesn't mean that "you can copy paste code to/from copilot 365".
As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan. We're only now going to start seeing noticable changes and changes themselves will start speeding up as well. But it all takes time.
> As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan
Yes, Anthropic decided they wanted to IPO and got the hype machine in full swing.
Don’t get me wrong LLMs are here to stay but how we’re currently using them is likely going to change a lot. Stuff like this:
> in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it
Is not needed to get a lot out of AI, and is mostly snake oil. Integrating them with actionable feedback is, but that takes a lot of time and rethinking of some existing systems.
I don’t like the Internet analogy cause that’s like producing a new raw material, but AI is gonna be like Excel eventually (one of the most important pieces of software in the world).
Nothing changed in Dec/Jan. Everything changed in 2023 with someones first openAI chat and things are slowly getting adopted into everything with high, marginal and negative benefits.
Things are actually slowing down. And society will still see AI adding little to next years report. The costs still outweigh the benefits.
We're still 6-12+ months away from a "killer" AI product. OpenClaw showed what's possible-ish, but it breaks half the time, eats tokens like crazy, and can leak all kinds of secrets. Clearly there's potential there, and a lot of people are working on products in the AI space (myself included), but anyone that's seriously tried to wrangle these models will agree with the reality that it's very hard to reliably get them to do what you want them to do.
It's not that the technology is not there yer, it's all the ethical concerns and the mental barrier that nobody wants to spend their day begging AI for solutions.
> This article seems to have "basically zero" content.
Why? It’s descriptive of the “past”. While you’re trying to predict the near/far “future” and project your assumptions. Two different things.
Change is always coming. It's cute when someone thinks this time it's going to be special.
Can't even spell bureaucracy while you're making big predictions like this.
It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI.
It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos.
There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may people are saying too conflicting things and chaos is never good for clear long-term growth.
Either that 20 years is completelly inapplicable to AI, or we're in for a world of hurt. There's no in between given the kinds of bets that have been made.
AI companies don’t have 20 years, they have max 5 years where they have to turn to profit.
They don’t have time to wait for all the companies to pick up use of AI tooling in their own pace.
So they lie and try to manufacture demand. Well demand is there but they have to manufacture FOMO so that demand materializes now and not in 20 or 10 years.
This outlook is as short-sighted as the 2000 fiber optic bust. Critics then thought overcapacity meant the end, yet that infrastructure eventually created the modern internet. Capital does not walk away from a fundamental shift just because of one market correction. While specific companies may fail, the long-term value of the technology ensures that investment will continue far beyond a five-year window.
But fiber optic created in 2000 is still very usable in 2026. AI hardware purchases in 2026 is going to out of date very quickly by comparison.
The massive investment in power grids and data centers provides a permanent physical backbone that outlives any specific silicon generation. This infrastructure serves as a durable shell for the model design knowledge and chip architectural IP gained through each iteration. Capital is effectively funding a structural moat built on energy access and engineering mastery.
How much capital was wiped out for it to be cheap after the bust? Someone is going to eat the exuberance loss in the near term, even if there is long term value.
Try 3
It's a "Motte and Bailey" system [0], where the extreme "AI will do everything for you" claim keeps getting thrown around to try to get investors to throw in cash, but then somehow it transmutes into "all technologies took time to mature stop being mean to me."
To be fair, it isn't necessarily the same people doing both at once. Sometimes there are two groups under the same general banner, where one makes the big-claims, and another responds to perceived criticism of their lesser-claim.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
> the problem is that people from OpenAI/Anthropic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI.
I'm going to be honest, you can feel the AGI when you use newer agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude. It's an entirely different world from GPT-4.0. This is serious intelligence.
Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.
> I'm going to be honest, you can feel the AGI when you use newer agentic tools like OpenClaw or Claude.
You're right. I can feel how far away it is and how these tools will in no way be capable of getting us there.
Researchers looked at GPT-3 in 2023 and saw “sparks of AGI”. The saying “feel the AGI” became widespread not long after, if I’m remembering right. We’ve been saying AGI is right around the corner for a while now. And of course, if you predict the end of the world every day, you’ll eventually be right. But for the moment, what we have is an exceptionally powerful coding assistant that can also speed up entry-level work in various other white collar industries. That is earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting. But given how competitive and expensive the AI game has become, that is not enough, so it needs to be “superintelligence” - and it’s just not.
Minor correction: "sparks of AGI" was in reference to GPT-4, which came out 5 months later in 2024. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712)
iirc, when Eliza came out, many people briefly believed it was sentient
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-lam...
Have you ever tried to trick an LLM? Did you have trouble?
It’s amazing that economic analysis can be dismissed by “feeling the AGI”.
You might as well be telling people to “HODL”
What does that mean? By what metric do you measure "AGI", whatever that means? Industry definitions are incredibly vague, perhaps intentionally so, with no benchmarks to define how a model, harness, or other technology might achieve "AGI". They have no intelligence, and can't even reason that you need to take your car to the car wash to have it washed[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580
A link to a page where the top comment talks about how a major model doesn’t get stuck on the question doesn’t seem like much of a flex.
Have you even used Claude?
You can feel it coming.
You seem to be doing a lot of feeling, have you tried thinking? It's pretty cool when you need a break from feeling.
If somehow Claude became sentient that would be sci-fi. One day it’s wrangling CSS and Spring Boot Controllers and the next it’s telling you opinions it developed through its own experiences on programming languages. Not sure that’s on the near horizon, but it’s definitely impressive technology.
> Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.
Yeah? So you must have a clear idea of where "there" is, and of the route from here to there?
Forgive me my skepticism, but I don't believe you. I don't believe that you actually know.
The GO may be talking about Wordpress or something less than embedded code running on the hadron collider.
Sure but the issue with AI is results vs money burned.
The difference being that AI's marketing has been significantly more prevalent than any early computing efforts.
Not to mention the investment is on another level. We've got companies with valuations in the hundred-billions talking about raising trillions to buy all of the computers in the world, before establishing whether they can even turn a profit, nevermind upend the economy.
I wonder how many actually beneficial projects will not be financed by investors too scared to try anything risky after the AI buble crashes and burns to the ground. :P
More than the last few crashes. Same players on different teams.
the investments are being made by massively profitable companies (our biggest and brightest ones, the ones that have been carrying the economy for quite some time now, even before "AI"). even just in recent history we have seen companies making large investments and being very unprofitable until they weren't anymore (e.g. Uber). and it is always the same story, everyone is up in arms "this is not sustainable etc..."
whether or not these companies can turn a profit - time will tell. but I am betting that our massively profitable companies (which are biggest spenders of course) perhaps know what they are doing and just maybe they should get the benefit of the doubt until they are proven wrong. but if I had to make a wager and on one side I have google, microsoft, amazon, meta... and on the other side I have bunch of AI bubble people with a bunch of time to predict a "crash" I'd put my money on the former...
The fact that the companies that have already shoveled billions of dollars at this are continuing to do so is equally consistent with AI improvement and adoption stalling as it is with infinite improvement and widespread adoption. Yes, it’s irrational to chase sunk costs - but unlike the VC funds that backed Uber and its competition, may of the players in this game are exposed to public markets, which are not known for being rigorously logical. If you pull back on your AI investments, the markets will punish you - probably vigorously - and if your only concern is the value of your stock options, it is entirely rational for you to act in a way that keeps the market from punishing their value. We’re 3 years in without showing any ROI, and who’s to say we can’t get 3 or 5 or 10 more? Plenty of time to cash out before the eventual reckoning.
> If you pull back on your AI investments, the markets will punish you - probably vigorously
quite the opposite is happening as evidenced from last earnings reports…
There is definitely growing hesitancy in the market, but pulling back at this juncture could set off a full-on race to the bottom, because it would disprove the original point (“all the smart tech companies are all-in, so there must be profit at the end of the tunnel”). Right now, they can point to the skeptics as bears or doomers or whatever. The first big tech company to drop its capex will pierce the aura of invincibility and make the moderate retreat from the exuberant highs of late 2025 look like a blip on the radar.
I'd maybe think twice about assuming Meta knows what they're doing after they just pissed $75 billion up the wall on a Metaverse dream that went nowhere.
Pissed it away, but Zuckerberg is richer than ever and so are his stockholders it seems. I can’t imagine doing it, but also can’t imagine running Meta.
if it was just Meta perhaps I’d think twice but it is not just Meta, it is all of them
"The lemmings can't be wrong, they're all doing it". I think you're overlooking the incentive structures here.
I am certainly not saying that this can’t all come crashing down for the big boys, surely it can. I just am putting a little more weight on them than on people on the internet and doomsdayers hunting for clicks is all
I just keep thinking about SGI and, to an extent, Sun. Couple missteps and a couple innovations in the commodity direction and it will start having a negative effect.
More than Apple, on relative scale. Personally I don’t think that.
This seems false to me. Commodore and Apple were blitzing every advertising medium and especially TV ads in the early 1980s.
Worryingly revisionist to compare 1980s media advertising budgets to what's going on now (even if they were 'high' for the time).
Atari too
I think this paragraph from the wikipedia article captures it nicely:
>Many observers disagree that any meaningful "productivity paradox" exists and others, while acknowledging the disconnect between IT capacity and spending, view it less as a paradox than a series of unwarranted assumptions about the impact of technology on productivity. In the latter view, this disconnect is emblematic of our need to understand and do a better job of deploying the technology that becomes available to us rather than an arcane paradox that by its nature is difficult to unravel.
For the U.S. economy, productivity is defined as (output measured in $)/(input measured in $). Typically, new technologies (computers, internet, AI) reduce input costs, and due to competition in the market, companies are required to reduce their prices, thereby having an overall deflationary effect on the economy. It's entirely possible that AI will have a small or no effect on productivity as measured above, but society will benefit by getting access to inexpensive products and services powered by inexpensive AI. Individual companies won't use AI to improve their productivity but will need to use AI just to stay competitive.
Yep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI.
It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
Sure, but you have to consider Carl Sagan's point, "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Some truly useful technologies start out slow and the question is asked if they are fads or bubbles even though they end up having huge impact. But plenty of things that at first appeared to be fads or bubbles truly were fads or bubbles.
Personally I think AI is unlikely to go the way of NFTs and it shows actual promise. What I'm much less convinced of is that it will prove valuable in a way that's even remotely within the same order of magnitude as the investments being pumped into it. The Internet didn't begin as a massive black hole sucking all the light out of the room for anything else before it really started showing commensurate ROI.
All those racks of Nvidia machines might not pay off for the companies buying them, but I have a hard time believing that people are still questioning the utility of this stuff. In the last hour, Opus downloaded data for and implemented a couple of APIs that I would’ve otherwise paid hundreds a month for, end to end, from research all the way to testing its implementation. It’s so, incredibly, obviously useful.
> What I'm much less convinced of is that it will prove valuable in a way that's even remotely within the same order of magnitude as the investments being pumped into it.
I think there are two layers of uncertainty here. One is, as you say, if the value is worth the investment. The other and possibly bigger issue is who is going to capture the value and how.
Assuming AI turns out to be wildly valuable, I'm not at all convinced that at the end of this money spending race that the companies pouring many billions of dollars into commercial LLMs are going to end up notably ahead of open models that are running the race on the cheap by drafting behind the "frontier" models.
For now the frontier models can stay ahead by burning heaps of money but if/when progress slows toward a limit whatever lead they have is going to quickly evaporate.
At some point I suspect some ugly legal battles as some attempt to construct some sort of moat that doesn't automatically drain after a few months of slowed progress. Google's recent complaining about people distilling gemini could be an early signal of this.
I have no idea how any of that would shake out legally, but I have a hard time sympathizing with commercial LLM providers (who slurped up most existing human knowledge without permission) if/when they start to get upset about people ripping them off.
Columbus was not a genius. He was an idiot who believed the earth was smaller than the scientists of his day, and the scientists were right. Columbus became successful through pure luck, genocide and cruelty.
Most idiots like Columbus died in obscurity.
Yeah the inclusion of Columbus is admittedly not great, but it's part of the original quote and the overall point is still a good one.
Columbus, the man that didn't know where he was going to, and when he came back he couldn't tell where he was.
Even that you mentioned NFTs in comparison hurts my mind
I mean, it's an apt comparison, given that the Venn diagram between the pro-NFT hucksters and the pro-AI crowd is a circle. When you listen to people who were so publicly and embarrassingly wrong about the future try to sell you on their next hustle, skepticism is the correct posture.
Also no particular reason to group it in with those two. There are plenty of things that never showed up at all. It's just not a signal It's kind of like "My kid is failing math, but he's just bored. Einstein failed a lot too you know". Regardless of whether Einstein actually failed anything, there are a lot more non-Einsteins that have failed.
It didn't take mobile apps with the launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?
The iPhone was not the first mobile device or even the first smartphone. Not to mention it did not support mobile applications as we know them today.
That seems a tad reductionist. Why not just say the iPhone was completely inconsequential because afterall it's simply another "computer". Why not go even back further and start the timer at the first physical implementation of a Turing machine?
The iPhone killer UX + App store release can be directly traced to the growth in tech in the subsequent years its release.
Why do I have a feeling that this will be ignored as biased by the people who need to read it the most.
It’s a grift being perpetuated by the folks at the top, who then sweep along in their slipstream folks under them, and so on. The folks who “need to hear this” are helpless to go against and so can’t back down, and the folks who don’t need to hear this because they’re driving it have their paychecks aligned to it, so they’re not backing down.
Why do I get the feeling that AI skeptics will treat it as definitive and irrefutable proof that they were right all along even though it’s one data point in an industry that’s hasn’t even been around for 5 years.
You're right, it is tempting to dunk on AI boosters every time an article like this comes out and puts a damper on their sci fi fan fiction fantasies. There's just something about a grown person getting all excited like a child that makes it really satisfying.
You must have a really bleak view on life to think an adult should never get excited like a child.
Adult life doesn’t have to be boring drudgery, you know. I mean, it mostly is, but the rare moments of childlike joy and excitement are some of the best parts.
As far as the putting a damper on anything, nope it doesn’t. And it never will.
The people excited about AI are excited because of the impacts they see on their own jobs and daily lives. We don’t care what Goldman Sachs has to say about productivity.
It's not bleak, just more mature.
Andrej Karpathy said that major revolutions like the Internet, smartphones, and AI often don’t show up clearly in GDP statistics, even when they radically change how people work. GDP measures total spending, not productivity or usefulness. These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life, but GDP mostly continued along its long-term trend.
See his interview in Dwarkesh's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0-0gGdDJyE&t=4983s
"These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life"
I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.
True. The point remains the same. GDP isn’t measuring “meaningfulness,” and it also doesn’t measure “stress” very well either. Tech can change daily life massively in either direction without moving GDP much.
Besides, AI has barely started to be productive to Developers. The rest of the workforce are still untouched for the most part. The tools that assist the bulk of knowledge work out there is still in the works.
I have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.
Its partly this, but hardly any developers I know were writing code for 8 hours a day. 4 on a good day and the rest was meetings or other auxiliary activities. From what I have gathered, companies have no idea how to measure the productivity gains yet.
I've heard another version of this is that AI can speed up some tasks, but then employees still need to wait for meetings, approvals, other users to chime in, etc. that the net effect isn't as pronounced
Incentives matter
The cover image is just too good. It's just way too good.
Article refutes itself by saying it's difficult to measure impact on GDP (thus would by this logic have to take a neutral stance on impact of AI)
the measurement problem here is real. GDP captures output, not latent capacity or quality. an ops team that responds to 200 requests/week with AI at 2x speed doesn't show up in GDP if headcount stays flat. the value is captured in retention, fewer escalations, faster revenue ops cycles -- none of which hit a GDP line directly. the reason AI added zero isn't that it didn't work. it's that we're measuring the wrong thing.
Trickle down effect reversal: > “A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP”
There really need to be better metrics about the state of an economy than GDP.
This is an abbreviated version of a far more nuanced WaPo article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-econ...
I think this is key:
"On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth."
No doubt people are using it work ( https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-c... ) the question is how much productivity results and to whom does it accrue.
Partially this is AI capability (both today and in the past), partially this is people taking time to change their tools.
The AI bros are saying everyone will be out of work in 5 years.
Economists and businesses are calling BS and saying AI is cool, but basically adding zero measurable value with 95% of AI projects failing.
The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, but it seems unlikely this bubble can continue much longer.
Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy.
With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough.
I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance.
And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment.
It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
The same underlying magic that enables LLMs to be faster than a brute force SQL query on all the worlds data while producing "good enough" results appears to be the very thing that is creating hallucinations and finite context windows. ie there is no free lunch. It seems to be the theory in many in the field (ilya included?) that the obstacle might not be overcome without an LLM-level breakthrough in AI research, or maybe more likely, a breakthrough in hardware. Big tech until at least recently seems to have thought they can brute force it with energy (nuclear). But who's paying?
No need to stress out over us rank and file answering that question. An entire economy is boiling based on it.
I think it’s still a bit too early to draw the conclusion.
We need to get past the hype first and let the cash grabbers crash.
After that, with a clear mind we can finally think about engineering this technology in a sane and useful way.
What about social media, did that evolve into something sane and useful or has it remained owned by the cash grabbers? Have we not yet internalized that they've permanently captured control of technological advances?
Yet the job situation for software developers in the United States is borderline terminal. Interesting.
COVID and "AI" lowered the threshold of acceptable service to the extent that software vendors are making offshoring attempts again.
The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.
I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
The US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.
The top don’t run the show. Tells you how much a value they provide.
I'm sure we can find stories from the 1980s and 1990s about how the "world wide web" hasn't increased the GDP at all.
Given that the first communication between a web server and client was in December 1990 (and that was private to Tim B-L's environment), and it was released to the public in 1991, I bet we actually couldn't find such stories in the 1980s :)
I assume you mean technology, not the www (didn't exist). And, until around the second half of the 90s those papers were right. Most papers you'll find arguing that it wasn't contributing much to productivity were saying just that, that it wasn't, not that it won't. At the time, they were right. Productivity had stagnated despite heavy spending in technology.
But now we have something else happening. It's hard to find an application for something that makes a lot of mistakes. That's not the same issue. The issue then was that no one had written the software yet. Everyone knew what software needed writing. The future was obvious. Here, not so much. We can't see how to make it not make mistakes.
We have to hope someone will come up with a solution to that. Otherwise their big bets on something non-productive won't pan out the same way that the computer did, and we're all going to suffer for it.
Note last year. The vibes coming from the Claude dungeons tell a different story. Just in the last six weeks. We are on the precipice.
I've been using claude code to code my own gpt model from absolute scratch in type script with c code it generates for the gpu. Anytime it wants to use cuda or some lib to do things faster I can keep telling it to write it in typescript or c etc lots of fun and it actually works lol
^This. Claude is very rapidly approaching AGI.
Opus 4.6 is SPECIAL. nothing like other models. This is a new breed of intelligence.
I give it 18-24 months until we see a full-scale societal transformation.
Just so we're on the same page, you don't think that an llm is going to achieve AGI right? Like you're thinking some sort of combination between world models, llms, visual models and others. Right?
I give it until the next model that you'll be proclaiming how NOW IT'S THE REAL THING FOR SURE THIS TIME GUYS.
I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job.
And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
Remove the job.. but have one super skilled coordinator managing and teaching agents the last 10% (or doing the 10% of the job)
If AI does 90% of the work, you can either do more work with your current staff, or fire a portion and have them do the same amount of work.
A lot of jobs that can be automated haven't been because it's not worth it is because the people with domain knowledge can't imagine automating it is other related problems.
I'm not sure if LLMs will change that or not
You can replace it with a much lower paid employee though.
A lower paid and less qualified employee won’t be able to spot when the AI screws up.
Having a higher-paid, qualified employee supervising multiple AIs as the human only needs to spot for mistakes - maybe.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. For most things, checking if a solution is correct is much easier than implementing it (page looks wrong, can't login etc...)
That's not growth. Growth is having the existing employee do more.
I'm not arguing about growth. I was addressing this statement which seems to presume that AI has no effect if the job can't be removed.
> If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job.
You definitely cannot. Code org, architecture, and system design are senior level roles and responsibilities.
AI is already aware of the best practices. It does not just blindly do what you ask of it in the simplest way.
Best practices are always situation dependent.
Claude code will prompt you and explain to you what practice fits a situation. It might not do it perfectly, but the foundations are there.