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These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an

These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of your money on it, you can launch yourself into a whole other echelon of life. I've been a heavy user of AI ever since ChatGPT was released for free. I've been tracking its progress relative to the work done by humans at large. I've concluded that it's improvements over the last few years are not across-the-board changes, but benefit specific areas more than others. And unfortunately for AI hype believers, it happens to be areas such as art, which provide a big flashy "look at this!" demonstration of AI's power to people. But... try letting AI come up with a nuanced character for a novel, or design an amplifier circuit, or pick stocks, or do your taxes. I'm a bit worried about YCombinator. I like Hacker News. I'm a bit worried that YC has so much riding on AI startups. After machine learning, crypto, the post-Covid 19 healthcare bubble, fintech, NFTs, can they take another blow when the music stops?

SoftTalker 1y ago
> The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. Why is that the counter-narrative? Doesn't it seem more likely that it will contine to gradually improve, perhaps asymptotically, maybe be more specifically trained in the niches where it works well, and it will just become another tool that humans use? Maybe that's a flop compared to the hype?
- ls612 1y ago
  At the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty. So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear argument).
  - j_w 1y ago
    Re: running out of data LLM bulls will say that they are going to generate synthetic data that is better than the real data.
  - barchar 1y ago
    It's been able to sustain 90s era revenue growth rates, not 90s era income growth rates no?
    - ls612 1y ago
      I think all of the dot com boom companies other than the shovel sellers like MS and Cisco were not profitable in the 90s? Not even future behemoths like Amazon.
      - hollerith 1y ago
        Amazon would've been profitable if it weren't investing so much in growth. Also, eBay, Yahoo!, AOL, Priceline, Cisco Systems, E*TRADE and DoubleClick became profitable in the 90s according to DeepSeek.
ryandrake 1y ago
I wouldn't worry too much about YCombinator. Although individual investors can get richer or poorer, "investors" as a class effectively have unlimited money. Collectively, they will always be looking for a place to put it so it keeps growing even more, so there will always be work for firms like YCombinator to sprinkle all that investment money around.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
Not the biggest fan of crypto companies, but YC probably did well because of Coinbase.
barchar 1y ago
It's not really enough to predict the outcome, you need something concrete to actually bet on, and you need to time things right (particularly for the pessimistic bet). For any bet that involves purchasing bits of profits you you could be right and lose money because because the government generally won't allow the entire economy to implode. By the time a bubble pops literally everyone knows they're in a bubble, knowing something is a bubble doesn't make it irrational to jump on the bandwagon.
ramesh31 1y ago
>The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. The answer (as always) lies somewhere in the middle. Expert software developers who embrace the tech whole heartedly while understanding its' limitations are now in an absolute golden era of being able to do things they never could have dreamed of before. I have no doubt we will see the first unicorns made of "single pizza" size teams here shortly.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. Why is that the counter-narrative? Doesn't it seem more likely that it will contine to gradually improve, perhaps asymptotically, maybe be more specifically trained in the niches where it works well, and it will just become another tool that humans use? Maybe that's a flop compared to the hype?

ls612 1y ago
At the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty. So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear argument).
- j_w 1y ago
  Re: running out of data LLM bulls will say that they are going to generate synthetic data that is better than the real data.
- barchar 1y ago
  It's been able to sustain 90s era revenue growth rates, not 90s era income growth rates no?
  - ls612 1y ago
    I think all of the dot com boom companies other than the shovel sellers like MS and Cisco were not profitable in the 90s? Not even future behemoths like Amazon.
    - hollerith 1y ago
      Amazon would've been profitable if it weren't investing so much in growth. Also, eBay, Yahoo!, AOL, Priceline, Cisco Systems, E*TRADE and DoubleClick became profitable in the 90s according to DeepSeek.

ryandrake 1y ago

I wouldn't worry too much about YCombinator. Although individual investors can get richer or poorer, "investors" as a class effectively have unlimited money. Collectively, they will always be looking for a place to put it so it keeps growing even more, so there will always be work for firms like YCombinator to sprinkle all that investment money around.

tokioyoyo 1y ago

Not the biggest fan of crypto companies, but YC probably did well because of Coinbase.

barchar 1y ago

It's not really enough to predict the outcome, you need something concrete to actually bet on, and you need to time things right (particularly for the pessimistic bet). For any bet that involves purchasing bits of profits you you could be right and lose money because because the government generally won't allow the entire economy to implode. By the time a bubble pops literally everyone knows they're in a bubble, knowing something is a bubble doesn't make it irrational to jump on the bandwagon.

ramesh31 1y ago

>The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. The answer (as always) lies somewhere in the middle. Expert software developers who embrace the tech whole heartedly while understanding its' limitations are now in an absolute golden era of being able to do things they never could have dreamed of before. I have no doubt we will see the first unicorns made of "single pizza" size teams here shortly.