7 ms·

The AI vibe shift is upon us

73 points by lelele 1y ago

Etheryte 1y ago
> Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for I think everyone had a gut feel for something along those lines, but those numbers are even starker than I would've imagined. Granted, many (most?) people trying to vibe code full apps don't know much about building software, so they're bound to struggle to get it to do what they want. But this quote is about companies and code they've actually put into production. Don't get me wrong, I've vibe coded a bunch of utilities that I now use daily, but 95% is way higher than I would've expected.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  I’ve heard the story that SQL was originally sold as a language that non tech people could use to query databases. It’s mostly an utter failure at that, yet still immensely popular. I’m expecting a similar future for AI, it will not deliver the “deprecating devs” part but it will still be a useful and ubiquitous tool.
  - badgersnake 1y ago
    The hype cycle has priced in a paradigm shift, not gradual efficiency improvements. From that perspective a large correction is on the way.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Yeah, it was a 4GL. Roughly since the 1950s, every ten years or so someone has come along with “this will allow unskilled people to write programs, and destroy those awful programmers forever” (_COBOL_ was originally basically marketed as this!) SQL is by _far_ the most successful thing to actually come out of this recurrent trend, in that it is actually useful, and unskilled people can actually use it to an extent. Most of the rest of it, 4GLs and 5GLs and drag and drop programming and no-code and… was just kinda useless; at most it made for a good demo, but attempts to make actual workable maintainable software with it broke down fast.
    - antonvs 1y ago
      It's interesting that there's been that constant drumbeat - for at least about half a century at this point - about eliminating software developers, yet somehow we don't get the same messaging about eliminating, say, civil engineers.
      - Disposal8433 1y ago
        > eliminating software developers I must write a "me too" here because I have seen this a lot recently on various sites. Whether it comes from managers or non-coders (I guess astrosurfing managers), it's always about those awful developers gate-keeping software development with their complicated compiled languages. I know it's all fake but it's exhausting, and it's nice to see it acknowledged here on HN.
        antonvs 1y ago
        Illegitimi non carborundum
      - rsynnott 1y ago
        Don’t give them ideas. Whatever about vibe-coding, we really, really do not want vibe-railways.
  - lomase 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_... It was all the hype at the time, like LLMs are now. Most of them died because it was a bad idea. And the reason we still use some, like SQL, is not because of the sintaxt.
- redbluered 1y ago
  I think one issue is time. We're a few years in. It takes time to figure things out and see returns. The web and dot com boom and bust still led to several trillion dollar companies, eventually. AI will transform my industry, but not overnight. My employer is within that 95%... but won't be forever.
  - lomase 1y ago
    Mobile phones was what changed society, not the web or the dot com era.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      Almost everyone had a computer in their home before we had smartphones, those computers did shape society in a massive way. You didn't see them on the streets like you do phones but the effects were still just as massive.
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        'Almost everyone' was a very select group even in the 2000s. Look at reddit discourse post cheap postpaid internet phones versus before. The internet connected computer in the home was a productivity tool. Even just gaming required gamers to become pretty PC/OS/tech savvy. Cheap postpaid internet phones are bread and circuses. They two have different effects on society.
      - lomase 1y ago
        At the time I had to read slashdot on my work computer because I had no intenet or a new computer able to connect to it. Not even all geeks had it.
        Jensson 1y ago
        Almost everyone, not everyone, majority of households in USA had a computer already by year 2000, and that is counting old people without kids who didn't keep up with trends. So by the time smart phones hit almost everyone had a computer at home. If you are talking about the 90s that isn't relevant, the relevant part is how smart phones changed things, and at that time internet was already available to a large majority at home, smart phones just made it portable.
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  5% saying it's helping their company is roughly in line with the lizard man constant. [1] There will always be people who will never admit a thing didn't work out as planned and those who just like to answer sarcastically. It's not unreasonable to assume that, if this report is even remotely accurate, it's pretty much 100% of people finding AI fairly disappointing. [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    I mean, I assume the blogspam industry is thrilled with it… For the time being, and the foreseeable future, LLM’s sweet spot seems to be low-grade translation, and ultra-low-grade bottom barrel ‘content generation’. Which is… not nothing, but also not what you’d call world-changing. As a number of people said, there probably is an industry here; it’s just that it’s worth on the order of tens of billions, not trillions as the markets currently appear to believe. (Some people will claim it’s a great programming tool. Personally sceptical, but even if it’s the greatest, most amazingest programming tool ever, well, “we might be even more important than Borland and Jetbrains were” is not going to thrill the markets too much. Current valuations are built on mass-market applicability, and if that doesn’t show up soon there will be trouble.)
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      Also image generation. If you just need to fill space on web pages. Generating a few images for free/very cheap is cheaper than paying for stock images. And at that price do you really care if you do not have copy right? Especially if everything else is LLM generated slop as well.
      - rsynnott 1y ago
        Okay, so, “we’re as important as Borland, Jetbrains, AND Getty Images! That’ll be a trillion dollars investment money, pls”. Like, that’s still just silly. On the developer tools thing in particular, I’d note that it is historically extremely difficult to make a sustainable business, nevermind a wildly profitable business, in that space. Borland and Jetbrains probably are the closest that anyone has come.
- luckylion 1y ago
  > Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. [1] "We wanted to make money with it, but we didn't immediately make a lot of money" feels very different from "the project failed to deliver what it set out to". [1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
- Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  You make „utilities“, those initiatives are about replacing complex processes, business-people-engineer communication and the engineers themselves with AI. e.g. I waste a lot of time with converting business requirements into a proprietary rule language. It should be simple tasks, but the requirements are freaky, the language is limited and I often need to look up internals of systems that produce data the rules act upon. My bosses boss currently wants me to replace my work with AI. It can not work. It‘s setup for failure.
- antonvs 1y ago
  It's roughly in line with Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Except in this case, where AI can enable people with absolutely no experience in some area to produce something that at least superficially can seem plausibly viable, it's no surprise that the percentage of crap is even higher.
  - uncircle 1y ago
    This is an interesting point. As LLMs are not intelligent and trained on what already exists, their output is necessarily mediocre if not bad. We simply have found a way to increase the amount of crap in the digital world, to the point that Sturgeon’s 90% will become a very low estimate.
- lomase 1y ago
  What I don't really underdstan is how having 10 juniors in a team, all the agentic code stuff, makes a programmer more productive.
  - ricardobeat 1y ago
    You don’t understand how having an extra ten programmers in your team can be productive? Junior developers require guidance but are still producing value. And with good guidance, they will do amazing work.
    - linker3000 1y ago
      Here's one possibility. With AI we need fewer programmers, and the juniors will possibly be the first to go, but they might me retrained for other careers (which might eventually get cancelled too because of AI), or out of work. The software they produced did something - it might have been a CRM or a game, but out of work people might have to cut back on their gaming spend. As for the CRM app business, the customers and potential software customers are also cutting back in staff, and the CRM apps will be able to conduct direct B2B negotiations with client CRMs, so there's no job opportunities there, and so more people are out of work. Perhaps the businesses that used the AI-based B2B and B2C CRM and ERP systems won't be needed any more, or not have a viable customer base, too. Other industries are replacing folks with 'AI', so the unemployment pool is getting larger. This means the luxury and non-vital goods manufacturers will have less revenue and they are laying off staff so there's some compensation there, but eventually not enough for survival - which is 'fine' because AI is replacing all this stuff. This snowballs into other industries, leaving just those jobs that can be done more easily by a human, but those jobs will also reduce as AI and surrounding robotics etc improve, so what do all these unemployed people do all day. Some will embrace leisure activities that don't break the bank. Some may volunteer for community work or projects to improve the World, but they still need to eat and pay bills - who's going to help with that? One solution might be a 'Star Trek' economy not based on work for reward, but that's a big cultural shift that people and governments will struggle massively to get their heads around conceptually. There will also be powerful resistance to such a radical rebasing of the planet-wide financial model, especially by those people and organisations that have amassed wealth and don't want to give it up. They'll even fight back with lobbying and arguments against change while they're getting replaced with AI. Or...?
- chriskanan 1y ago
  Read the paper. The media is not providing a lot of missing context. The paper points out problems like leadership failures for those efforts, lack of employee buy-in (potentially because they use their personal LLM), etc. A huge fraction of people at my work use LLMs, but only a small fraction use the LLM they provided. Almost everyone is using a personal license
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
What will we do with all the datacenters once the subsidies for AI usage will disappear?
- bcardarella 1y ago
  Epic paintball venues
- mrkramer 1y ago
  Maybe they will go back to mining crypto coins.
- pram 1y ago
  They will be used to create new kinds of advertising. Commercials and banner ads that are indistinguishable from magic.
  - shit_game 1y ago
    It makes me feel so uneasy to think that the most probably answer is the one that will result in the most human misery.
- moi2388 1y ago
  Ship gigabytes worth of SPA JavaScript for your shitty company homepage, probably
  - politelemon 1y ago
    We already have react.
- theandrewbailey 1y ago
  I work at an ewaste recycling company. I expect we'll see some high end Nvidia Tesla GPUs coming through, just like the Ant Miners (Bitcoin ASICs) a few weeks ago.
  - 1y ago
sails 1y ago
> Some large companies’ pilots and younger startups are really excelling with generative AI,” … “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” Everyone victory lapping this as a grand failure should pay attention to the above snippet.
- samrus 1y ago
  i think thats a bit too defensive. the reasonable take has been that AI is definitely a game changer, like the internet was, but it was still in a bubble because people extrapolated the S-curve as though it was an exponential explosion. just like they did with the internet. so yeah, targeted well thought out usecases that are handled well by LLMs will deliver value, but it wont replace developers or anything like that, which is what these people with barely an understanding of the tech's limitations have been claiming. OpenAI hasnt "internally achieved" AGI. thats what people are calling bullshit on
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    There is also the cost of inference that has been made artificially cheap. Alot of "gamechanging workflows" may end up being economically too expensive to maintain if the true cost of that compute snaps back.
- risyachka 1y ago
  Why? Doesn’t sound different from any framework e.g. React. Fixes one pain point good. Can’t really be applied to everything. So just another tool, not a magic bullet like it is being marketed.
  - fcdradio 1y ago
    Definitely agree that it’s not a magic bullet, the hype is huge and a bubble burst is quite possible. On the other hand, its ability to eliminate toilsome work in a variety of areas (it can generate a basic legal contract as well as a basic rails app) is pretty astounding. There are many other industries besides software dev where having tools that can understand and communicate in human language and context could be totally transformative, and they have barely begun to look into it. I think this is where startups should be focused.
tra3 1y ago
I can’t help but feel like the hype generators don’t use the tech themselves. I can contrast this with crypto as a recent example. Sure there were some interesting tidbits there, but I just didn’t see the appeal. With llms the changes are transformative. I’m trying to learn 3d modeling and chatgpt just gave me a passable sketch for what I had in my mind. So much better than googling for 2 hours. Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?
- sauercrowd 1y ago
  It's "the rest". More complex projects, existing context (like infrastructure, code, business context, ...). Building a small script is easy for chatgpt, but actually leveraging the workforce consistently turns out to be a lot harder than the hype promised.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  “A new way to learn Blender” is not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. “Oh, this is kinda neat, and occasionally useful” just won’t cut it at current levels of investment.
  - torginus 1y ago
    I remember reading about a company which looked to solve the issue of open-source financing - paying volunteers of projects which were used by billion dollar companies. The company at some point crossed the billion-dollar valuation, yet only handed out a single-digit million as pay for the maintainers.
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    Education market is certainly multi trillion.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      Only if you can replace it completely, the total value of education material aggregators do not sum up to multi trillion and that is essentially what these replaces. You can say it does a bit more than education material aggregators, but it doesn't do that much more, it doesn't replace paid education in any way so far.
GaggiX 1y ago
>technology that has never proven its worth outside of specious hype Reading stuff like this makes me question the entirety of the article.
- omnicognate 1y ago
  That's a quote from Ed Zitron, whose entire schtick is that AI is a scam. It's independent of the article itself, and in particular the list of bearish observations near the top, all of which are independently verifiable.
mrkramer 1y ago
>Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for — ginning up more revenue. AI startups were meant to solve problems in novel ways not to amass revenue.
- jgilias 1y ago
  lol
- sulandor 1y ago
  the 'novelty of the ways' is usually not nearly as much a factor in adoption than if said change would contribute to the amassing of revenue.
- fhd2 1y ago
  If you're alluding to the fact that a lot of startups run at a loss to capture as much of the market as they can, that is true. But I don't think that's the point here. Revenue is probably the wrong measure, it should be profit. And a startup that doesn't somehow turn into profit for its _customers_ usually doesn't see much traction. They can either increase revenue (there's a lot of AI sales tools that promise just that), or, more commonly, reduce costs, which also increases profits. If it saves time or money, it reduces costs. If it doesn't do either of these things, you'd have to really enjoy the product to still pay for it.
- torginus 1y ago
  I smile with glee when these people fail. The fundamental issue of modern capitalism is that its a coerce and exploitative system, true believers (who are in charge unfortunately) ignore this, and think money and value are the same thing. Let me show you what I mean: Let's someone runs a grocery, and they want to make it more profitable. After looking at the value chain, they conclude the person growing the lettuces makes 10% of the profit, logistics makes 40%, and retail 50%. So they conclude that the best way to improve the business, is to optimize the retail side. Then you walk into the store and see the tiny withered lettuce on the gleaming fancy shelves. If they decided to focus on where the value is created, and helped the farmer grow better groceries, everybody would've been happy.
kh_hk 1y ago
This just feels again like the powers that be trying to bring down wages to "correct" after the recent astroturfing.
meindnoch 1y ago
Shorting NVDA with 50x leverage.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Nvidia has seen it coming. They did not over-leverage the boom themselves and will arise from a crash with a market lead, technical superiority, and a massive pile of R&D cashe. That is even if you can time it correctly. Better wait for a crash, see people panic sell thinking nvidia has any skin in the, game and buy the dip.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > Nvidia has seen it coming That doesn't matter, the question is if Nvidia investors has seen it coming or if they still overpay for the "sell shovels in a goldrush" meme. When people think you can't go wrong investing in a company then you know the company is almost surely overvalued because many have invested in it without thinking about the price.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Market can remain irrational, and all that.
- tim333 1y ago
  It had over 2% rises on Wed and Fri. I'm not sure your 50x short would last long before being wiped out.
ml-anon 1y ago
And yet Google is absolutely killing it and Meta is posting record numbers both attributing a massive amount of current and projected revenue to AI. Meta just spent billions to get a B team of AI researchers. The cream of the crop couldn’t be persuaded with 8-10 figure comp packages. This article is absolute garbage.
- ekidd 1y ago
  Vibe shifts are real. The internet was always valuable, but oh my, did the vibes shift quickly in 2001. We went from "infinite money for painfully stupid ideas" to a near-total freeze on even the best ideas for a few years. The thing about "vibe shifts" is that a big part of the shift occurs among people who have no idea what's going on. They've played with ChatGPT twice, talked about it at parties, and then invested $50,000 in NVIDIA stock. Or they're a corporate VP who doesn't understand this stuff but knows it's trendy and that it impresses the C-suite. When those people bail, the market retrenches hard, trading irrational enthusiasm for equally irrational panic and gloom. My guess is that the highly-visible switch from the sycophantic GPT 4o to the underwhelming GPT 5 is what made this concrete in the minds of the least informed investors and customers.
  - fcdradio 1y ago
    Yep, and the thing is that after the dot-com crash we’ve seen another shift where the web has totally transformed society and brought huge value to both everyday people and companies. The value of it wasn’t ColdFusion or Flash, it was the novel ways that people used the foundational tech. So yeah, the AI bubble may burst and one model or another (or a company like OpenAI) may fail, but I don’t think we have even scratched the surface on the novel things this tech can do.
  - ml-anon 1y ago
    "Vibe shifts are real" presents no evidence Meanwhile some of the most profitable companies to have ever existed post record profits and gangbusters projections based on AI capabilities.
    - 1y ago
zarzavat 1y ago
I'm going to be contrarian-contrarian. I don't buy the crash talk. This is just journalists needing to justify their own existence. HN is full of articles about coding agents in a way it wasn't a few months ago. What is overhyped is OpenAI. They don't have any moat. Why use an OpenAI model when you could use Claude or Qwen?
laincide 1y ago
I find it increasingly annoying to watch how the AI bubble hasn't burst and is currently shifting the entire economic paradigm while we get a constant stream of articles about how "actually AI flopped and it's all over guys, the show is finished pack up". Jesus, it's like worse than if just one or the other was happening.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] Some earlier discussions: Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715
dang 1y ago
When was the last time that a single study produced this much media? Edit: I mean the one discussed here, and in countless other recently submitted articles: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (413 comments) 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments) 95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI according to MIT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956648 - Aug 2025 (14 comments)
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Here's the MIT report [PDF] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus... A few HN members did submit the MIT report [PDF]^1 but HN discussion has instead centered around articles written about the report and the market's apparent reaction to it 1. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978557

73 points by lelele 1y ago

> Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for I think everyone had a gut feel for something along those lines, but those numbers are even starker than I would've imagined. Granted, many (most?) people trying to vibe code full apps don't know much about building software, so they're bound to struggle to get it to do what they want. But this quote is about companies and code they've actually put into production. Don't get me wrong, I've vibe coded a bunch of utilities that I now use daily, but 95% is way higher than I would've expected.

torben-friis 1y ago
I’ve heard the story that SQL was originally sold as a language that non tech people could use to query databases. It’s mostly an utter failure at that, yet still immensely popular. I’m expecting a similar future for AI, it will not deliver the “deprecating devs” part but it will still be a useful and ubiquitous tool.
- badgersnake 1y ago
  The hype cycle has priced in a paradigm shift, not gradual efficiency improvements. From that perspective a large correction is on the way.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Yeah, it was a 4GL. Roughly since the 1950s, every ten years or so someone has come along with “this will allow unskilled people to write programs, and destroy those awful programmers forever” (_COBOL_ was originally basically marketed as this!) SQL is by _far_ the most successful thing to actually come out of this recurrent trend, in that it is actually useful, and unskilled people can actually use it to an extent. Most of the rest of it, 4GLs and 5GLs and drag and drop programming and no-code and… was just kinda useless; at most it made for a good demo, but attempts to make actual workable maintainable software with it broke down fast.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    It's interesting that there's been that constant drumbeat - for at least about half a century at this point - about eliminating software developers, yet somehow we don't get the same messaging about eliminating, say, civil engineers.
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      > eliminating software developers I must write a "me too" here because I have seen this a lot recently on various sites. Whether it comes from managers or non-coders (I guess astrosurfing managers), it's always about those awful developers gate-keeping software development with their complicated compiled languages. I know it's all fake but it's exhausting, and it's nice to see it acknowledged here on HN.
      - antonvs 1y ago
        Illegitimi non carborundum
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      Don’t give them ideas. Whatever about vibe-coding, we really, really do not want vibe-railways.
- lomase 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_... It was all the hype at the time, like LLMs are now. Most of them died because it was a bad idea. And the reason we still use some, like SQL, is not because of the sintaxt.
redbluered 1y ago
I think one issue is time. We're a few years in. It takes time to figure things out and see returns. The web and dot com boom and bust still led to several trillion dollar companies, eventually. AI will transform my industry, but not overnight. My employer is within that 95%... but won't be forever.
- lomase 1y ago
  Mobile phones was what changed society, not the web or the dot com era.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Almost everyone had a computer in their home before we had smartphones, those computers did shape society in a massive way. You didn't see them on the streets like you do phones but the effects were still just as massive.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      'Almost everyone' was a very select group even in the 2000s. Look at reddit discourse post cheap postpaid internet phones versus before. The internet connected computer in the home was a productivity tool. Even just gaming required gamers to become pretty PC/OS/tech savvy. Cheap postpaid internet phones are bread and circuses. They two have different effects on society.
    - lomase 1y ago
      At the time I had to read slashdot on my work computer because I had no intenet or a new computer able to connect to it. Not even all geeks had it.
      - Jensson 1y ago
        Almost everyone, not everyone, majority of households in USA had a computer already by year 2000, and that is counting old people without kids who didn't keep up with trends. So by the time smart phones hit almost everyone had a computer at home. If you are talking about the 90s that isn't relevant, the relevant part is how smart phones changed things, and at that time internet was already available to a large majority at home, smart phones just made it portable.
forgotoldacc 1y ago
5% saying it's helping their company is roughly in line with the lizard man constant. [1] There will always be people who will never admit a thing didn't work out as planned and those who just like to answer sarcastically. It's not unreasonable to assume that, if this report is even remotely accurate, it's pretty much 100% of people finding AI fairly disappointing. [1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant
- rsynnott 1y ago
  I mean, I assume the blogspam industry is thrilled with it… For the time being, and the foreseeable future, LLM’s sweet spot seems to be low-grade translation, and ultra-low-grade bottom barrel ‘content generation’. Which is… not nothing, but also not what you’d call world-changing. As a number of people said, there probably is an industry here; it’s just that it’s worth on the order of tens of billions, not trillions as the markets currently appear to believe. (Some people will claim it’s a great programming tool. Personally sceptical, but even if it’s the greatest, most amazingest programming tool ever, well, “we might be even more important than Borland and Jetbrains were” is not going to thrill the markets too much. Current valuations are built on mass-market applicability, and if that doesn’t show up soon there will be trouble.)
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    Also image generation. If you just need to fill space on web pages. Generating a few images for free/very cheap is cheaper than paying for stock images. And at that price do you really care if you do not have copy right? Especially if everything else is LLM generated slop as well.
    - rsynnott 1y ago
      Okay, so, “we’re as important as Borland, Jetbrains, AND Getty Images! That’ll be a trillion dollars investment money, pls”. Like, that’s still just silly. On the developer tools thing in particular, I’d note that it is historically extremely difficult to make a sustainable business, nevermind a wildly profitable business, in that space. Borland and Jetbrains probably are the closest that anyone has come.
luckylion 1y ago
> Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. [1] "We wanted to make money with it, but we didn't immediately make a lot of money" feels very different from "the project failed to deliver what it set out to". [1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/ https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generat...
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
You make „utilities“, those initiatives are about replacing complex processes, business-people-engineer communication and the engineers themselves with AI. e.g. I waste a lot of time with converting business requirements into a proprietary rule language. It should be simple tasks, but the requirements are freaky, the language is limited and I often need to look up internals of systems that produce data the rules act upon. My bosses boss currently wants me to replace my work with AI. It can not work. It‘s setup for failure.
antonvs 1y ago
It's roughly in line with Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. Except in this case, where AI can enable people with absolutely no experience in some area to produce something that at least superficially can seem plausibly viable, it's no surprise that the percentage of crap is even higher.
- uncircle 1y ago
  This is an interesting point. As LLMs are not intelligent and trained on what already exists, their output is necessarily mediocre if not bad. We simply have found a way to increase the amount of crap in the digital world, to the point that Sturgeon’s 90% will become a very low estimate.
lomase 1y ago
What I don't really underdstan is how having 10 juniors in a team, all the agentic code stuff, makes a programmer more productive.
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  You don’t understand how having an extra ten programmers in your team can be productive? Junior developers require guidance but are still producing value. And with good guidance, they will do amazing work.
  - linker3000 1y ago
    Here's one possibility. With AI we need fewer programmers, and the juniors will possibly be the first to go, but they might me retrained for other careers (which might eventually get cancelled too because of AI), or out of work. The software they produced did something - it might have been a CRM or a game, but out of work people might have to cut back on their gaming spend. As for the CRM app business, the customers and potential software customers are also cutting back in staff, and the CRM apps will be able to conduct direct B2B negotiations with client CRMs, so there's no job opportunities there, and so more people are out of work. Perhaps the businesses that used the AI-based B2B and B2C CRM and ERP systems won't be needed any more, or not have a viable customer base, too. Other industries are replacing folks with 'AI', so the unemployment pool is getting larger. This means the luxury and non-vital goods manufacturers will have less revenue and they are laying off staff so there's some compensation there, but eventually not enough for survival - which is 'fine' because AI is replacing all this stuff. This snowballs into other industries, leaving just those jobs that can be done more easily by a human, but those jobs will also reduce as AI and surrounding robotics etc improve, so what do all these unemployed people do all day. Some will embrace leisure activities that don't break the bank. Some may volunteer for community work or projects to improve the World, but they still need to eat and pay bills - who's going to help with that? One solution might be a 'Star Trek' economy not based on work for reward, but that's a big cultural shift that people and governments will struggle massively to get their heads around conceptually. There will also be powerful resistance to such a radical rebasing of the planet-wide financial model, especially by those people and organisations that have amassed wealth and don't want to give it up. They'll even fight back with lobbying and arguments against change while they're getting replaced with AI. Or...?
chriskanan 1y ago
Read the paper. The media is not providing a lot of missing context. The paper points out problems like leadership failures for those efforts, lack of employee buy-in (potentially because they use their personal LLM), etc. A huge fraction of people at my work use LLMs, but only a small fraction use the LLM they provided. Almost everyone is using a personal license

Traubenfuchs 1y ago

What will we do with all the datacenters once the subsidies for AI usage will disappear?

bcardarella 1y ago
Epic paintball venues
mrkramer 1y ago
Maybe they will go back to mining crypto coins.
pram 1y ago
They will be used to create new kinds of advertising. Commercials and banner ads that are indistinguishable from magic.
- shit_game 1y ago
  It makes me feel so uneasy to think that the most probably answer is the one that will result in the most human misery.
moi2388 1y ago
Ship gigabytes worth of SPA JavaScript for your shitty company homepage, probably
- politelemon 1y ago
  We already have react.
theandrewbailey 1y ago
I work at an ewaste recycling company. I expect we'll see some high end Nvidia Tesla GPUs coming through, just like the Ant Miners (Bitcoin ASICs) a few weeks ago.
- 1y ago

sails 1y ago

> Some large companies’ pilots and younger startups are really excelling with generative AI,” … “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” Everyone victory lapping this as a grand failure should pay attention to the above snippet.

samrus 1y ago
i think thats a bit too defensive. the reasonable take has been that AI is definitely a game changer, like the internet was, but it was still in a bubble because people extrapolated the S-curve as though it was an exponential explosion. just like they did with the internet. so yeah, targeted well thought out usecases that are handled well by LLMs will deliver value, but it wont replace developers or anything like that, which is what these people with barely an understanding of the tech's limitations have been claiming. OpenAI hasnt "internally achieved" AGI. thats what people are calling bullshit on
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  There is also the cost of inference that has been made artificially cheap. Alot of "gamechanging workflows" may end up being economically too expensive to maintain if the true cost of that compute snaps back.
risyachka 1y ago
Why? Doesn’t sound different from any framework e.g. React. Fixes one pain point good. Can’t really be applied to everything. So just another tool, not a magic bullet like it is being marketed.
- fcdradio 1y ago
  Definitely agree that it’s not a magic bullet, the hype is huge and a bubble burst is quite possible. On the other hand, its ability to eliminate toilsome work in a variety of areas (it can generate a basic legal contract as well as a basic rails app) is pretty astounding. There are many other industries besides software dev where having tools that can understand and communicate in human language and context could be totally transformative, and they have barely begun to look into it. I think this is where startups should be focused.

tra3 1y ago

I can’t help but feel like the hype generators don’t use the tech themselves. I can contrast this with crypto as a recent example. Sure there were some interesting tidbits there, but I just didn’t see the appeal. With llms the changes are transformative. I’m trying to learn 3d modeling and chatgpt just gave me a passable sketch for what I had in my mind. So much better than googling for 2 hours. Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?

sauercrowd 1y ago
It's "the rest". More complex projects, existing context (like infrastructure, code, business context, ...). Building a small script is easy for chatgpt, but actually leveraging the workforce consistently turns out to be a lot harder than the hype promised.
rsynnott 1y ago
“A new way to learn Blender” is not a multi-trillion dollar industry, is the thing. “Oh, this is kinda neat, and occasionally useful” just won’t cut it at current levels of investment.
- torginus 1y ago
  I remember reading about a company which looked to solve the issue of open-source financing - paying volunteers of projects which were used by billion dollar companies. The company at some point crossed the billion-dollar valuation, yet only handed out a single-digit million as pay for the maintainers.
- lostmsu 1y ago
  Education market is certainly multi trillion.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Only if you can replace it completely, the total value of education material aggregators do not sum up to multi trillion and that is essentially what these replaces. You can say it does a bit more than education material aggregators, but it doesn't do that much more, it doesn't replace paid education in any way so far.

GaggiX 1y ago

>technology that has never proven its worth outside of specious hype Reading stuff like this makes me question the entirety of the article.

omnicognate 1y ago
That's a quote from Ed Zitron, whose entire schtick is that AI is a scam. It's independent of the article itself, and in particular the list of bearish observations near the top, all of which are independently verifiable.

mrkramer 1y ago

>Researchers at MIT published a report showing that 95% of the generative AI programs launched by companies failed to do the main thing they were intended for — ginning up more revenue. AI startups were meant to solve problems in novel ways not to amass revenue.

jgilias 1y ago
lol
sulandor 1y ago
the 'novelty of the ways' is usually not nearly as much a factor in adoption than if said change would contribute to the amassing of revenue.
fhd2 1y ago
If you're alluding to the fact that a lot of startups run at a loss to capture as much of the market as they can, that is true. But I don't think that's the point here. Revenue is probably the wrong measure, it should be profit. And a startup that doesn't somehow turn into profit for its _customers_ usually doesn't see much traction. They can either increase revenue (there's a lot of AI sales tools that promise just that), or, more commonly, reduce costs, which also increases profits. If it saves time or money, it reduces costs. If it doesn't do either of these things, you'd have to really enjoy the product to still pay for it.
torginus 1y ago
I smile with glee when these people fail. The fundamental issue of modern capitalism is that its a coerce and exploitative system, true believers (who are in charge unfortunately) ignore this, and think money and value are the same thing. Let me show you what I mean: Let's someone runs a grocery, and they want to make it more profitable. After looking at the value chain, they conclude the person growing the lettuces makes 10% of the profit, logistics makes 40%, and retail 50%. So they conclude that the best way to improve the business, is to optimize the retail side. Then you walk into the store and see the tiny withered lettuce on the gleaming fancy shelves. If they decided to focus on where the value is created, and helped the farmer grow better groceries, everybody would've been happy.

kh_hk 1y ago

This just feels again like the powers that be trying to bring down wages to "correct" after the recent astroturfing.

meindnoch 1y ago

Shorting NVDA with 50x leverage.

aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
Nvidia has seen it coming. They did not over-leverage the boom themselves and will arise from a crash with a market lead, technical superiority, and a massive pile of R&D cashe. That is even if you can time it correctly. Better wait for a crash, see people panic sell thinking nvidia has any skin in the, game and buy the dip.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > Nvidia has seen it coming That doesn't matter, the question is if Nvidia investors has seen it coming or if they still overpay for the "sell shovels in a goldrush" meme. When people think you can't go wrong investing in a company then you know the company is almost surely overvalued because many have invested in it without thinking about the price.
rsynnott 1y ago
Market can remain irrational, and all that.
tim333 1y ago
It had over 2% rises on Wed and Fri. I'm not sure your 50x short would last long before being wiped out.

ml-anon 1y ago

And yet Google is absolutely killing it and Meta is posting record numbers both attributing a massive amount of current and projected revenue to AI. Meta just spent billions to get a B team of AI researchers. The cream of the crop couldn’t be persuaded with 8-10 figure comp packages. This article is absolute garbage.

ekidd 1y ago
Vibe shifts are real. The internet was always valuable, but oh my, did the vibes shift quickly in 2001. We went from "infinite money for painfully stupid ideas" to a near-total freeze on even the best ideas for a few years. The thing about "vibe shifts" is that a big part of the shift occurs among people who have no idea what's going on. They've played with ChatGPT twice, talked about it at parties, and then invested $50,000 in NVIDIA stock. Or they're a corporate VP who doesn't understand this stuff but knows it's trendy and that it impresses the C-suite. When those people bail, the market retrenches hard, trading irrational enthusiasm for equally irrational panic and gloom. My guess is that the highly-visible switch from the sycophantic GPT 4o to the underwhelming GPT 5 is what made this concrete in the minds of the least informed investors and customers.
- fcdradio 1y ago
  Yep, and the thing is that after the dot-com crash we’ve seen another shift where the web has totally transformed society and brought huge value to both everyday people and companies. The value of it wasn’t ColdFusion or Flash, it was the novel ways that people used the foundational tech. So yeah, the AI bubble may burst and one model or another (or a company like OpenAI) may fail, but I don’t think we have even scratched the surface on the novel things this tech can do.
- ml-anon 1y ago
  "Vibe shifts are real" presents no evidence Meanwhile some of the most profitable companies to have ever existed post record profits and gangbusters projections based on AI capabilities.
  - 1y ago

zarzavat 1y ago

I'm going to be contrarian-contrarian. I don't buy the crash talk. This is just journalists needing to justify their own existence. HN is full of articles about coding agents in a way it wasn't a few months ago. What is overhyped is OpenAI. They don't have any moat. Why use an OpenAI model when you could use Claude or Qwen?

laincide 1y ago

I find it increasingly annoying to watch how the AI bubble hasn't burst and is currently shifting the entire economic paradigm while we get a constant stream of articles about how "actually AI flopped and it's all over guys, the show is finished pack up". Jesus, it's like worse than if just one or the other was happening.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

[dupe] Some earlier discussions: Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548 Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187 Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715

dang 1y ago

When was the last time that a single study produced this much media? Edit: I mean the one discussed here, and in countless other recently submitted articles: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (413 comments) 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments) 95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI according to MIT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956648 - Aug 2025 (14 comments)

aaron695 1y ago
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1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Here's the MIT report [PDF] https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus... A few HN members did submit the MIT report [PDF]^1 but HN discussion has instead centered around articles written about the report and the market's apparent reaction to it 1. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978557