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> absent the AI boom we would probably have lower interest rates [and] electricity prices, thus some additional growth in other sectors. In other words, the AI

> absent the AI boom we would probably have lower interest rates [and] electricity prices, thus some additional growth in other sectors. In other words, the AI hype comes at the cost of lower growth rates in other sectors of the economy? It makes sense, since investor money is spent exactly once. If it goes to AI then it doesn't go elsewhere. And if it didn't go to AI then it would go elsewhere. Sad for folks outside tech. But at least they can AI generate cat pictures now, and watch their tech friend use AI tooling to write software.

pj_mukh 1y ago
I see this take a lot, but it confuses me. There is no guarantee that LP’s would take that money and instead invest it in <tech I respect that is not AI>. They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity. VC is actually a pretty effective vehicle to separate rich people from their money so society can try crazy things. You just don’t agree with this particular adventure and frankly there will never be the perfect alternative adventure.
- mordae 1y ago
  Most people wouldn't vote or participate in this investment craze. Maybe we shouldn't let unelected lucky nobodies decide how we invest our time for us.
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    I’m not saying don’t tax them or let them influence politics. I’m saying letting them go to space or turning sand into intelligence is infinitely better than buying land and charging us rent (what most rich people have done in history).
    - alanbernstein 1y ago
      They are hoping to invest in the companies that will be the (next) electronic equivalent of rent-seeking land owners, as faang are now. It's better since land is physically necessary to live, but only marginally so.
      - pj_mukh 1y ago
        Happy to wield the hammer of Lina Khan to stop the monopolizing and rent seeking.
    - teiferer 1y ago
      Buying more land, building more housing to ultimately charge rent would definitely be good for everybody. The housing crisis is a supply side shortage and every dollar going into building new rentals would alleviate that pressure. Instead, the money goes to building more AI datacenters so that the family of 5 with mom and dad working at Walmart can have higher definition cat videos. They'd be better served with more supply in the rental market, ultimately lowering rent.
- piva00 1y ago
  Isn't the core issue that this deluge of spending on the hype inflates away adjacent companies valuation (Meta, Google, Tesla, Nvidia, etc.) where people's pensions and savings get directed towards since they become the growth stocks in the index, and when it inevitably corrects there's second/third-order effects on non-rich people? > They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity. Another core issue in a hyper-financialised economy, the money doesn't get invested in what would be best for society, it keeps chasing either risky endeavours or parked in presumed safe assets (such as housing), inflating away asset classes. Where are the incentives to invest in foundational areas which do compound to make a society have resilient growth, like infrastructure: energy, transportation, etc.? It feels like without government direction to spend in big projects there's simply no appetite from the private, hyper-financialised, system to do the work, unless there's potential to get 10-100x returns. Is that good for society at large? If hyper-financialisation is not helping the overall economy, and society to become better, why the hell should we still (in the Western world) pursue that? If all it can do is increasingly chase the extremes: hyper-growth vs extremely safe assets, is it any good anymore?
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    I think if you want the public to accept that the government will be a better shepherd of this money than a decentralized smattering of individuals then the government should provide evidence for this, once it actually opens up from a dysfunctional shutdown. At least in the American context everything from California High Speed rail to bloated defense spending has shown that VC’s are much better shepherds of their own money.
    - piva00 1y ago
      Completely agree, the American government has become incompetent in delivering any real big project to its citizenry, it went through a whole ideological process of gutting its abilities to do so. It was designed to lose this ability, and to lean onto private enterprises to do anything but in the past the government was able to rollout highways, go to the moon, build dams, bridges, power plants. If both the government and VCs are now unreliable to shepherd capital to direct it to the improvement of society at large you might need to rethink the whole system, and work to nudge it into a better path.
eunos 1y ago
If the AI is indeed a bubble and burst not so long after this... We might even have a Warhammer 40k style anti AI movement
- KronisLV 1y ago
  I mean, most of my friends (especially the artists but also software devs) seem to hate AI with a passion: sometimes because of the ethical bankruptcy, other times because of the amount of slop it produces and how in your face it is due to the hype cycle, other times due to a belief that it more or less leads to brainrot and atrophy of cognitive abilities.
  - allie1 1y ago
    The slop is real. Especially when I see promoters of platforms for vibe coders. They don't understand the implications of lack of security in potentially viral apps. It's easy to consider them as WMDs. People have the same password across services. They share personal information. In a geopolitical climate as today's, where the currency of war is disruption, it can wreak havoc.
  - cafebabbe 1y ago
    I'm a big AI supporter. I'm just waiting for the slop to be so metastasized that our terminally ill "social networks" finally die, alongside with it. Of course i'll be proven terribly wrong. But hey. hope.
    - world2vec 1y ago
      Fingers crossed.
  - vladms 1y ago
    Hating a tool? And software developers with emotions ? (I get it for the artists :-p) In my opinion AI makes visible more structural issues that were always there, but we could ignore. People addicted to various stuff (being substances or social networks or watching sports), social communities disappearing (no more going to the pub, stay at home with your TV), growing inequality (because capital is not taxed as labor), strange beliefs (all the conspiracy theories, which existed before) and others. Find a use for the new tool to improve the situation if you can, but I think that hating tools can lead you on dark paths.
zerosizedweasle 1y ago
That’s the most unforgivable part of this. How this is starving and destroying the rest of the economy
- trod1234 1y ago
  Opportunity costs don't destroy the economy. Money-printing does destroy the economy on a lag, specifically when the production has such catastrophic shortfall that it shows itself to be ponzi without tangible value or benefit. Value being based entirely in human action. When that happens, its basically slave labor silently extracted from the population through inflation. Such things historically always trigger other cascading failures.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > when the production has such catastrophic shortfall that it shows itself to be ponzi without tangible value or benefit. Indeed, the scale matters a lot. With that said, a ponzi always has beneficiaries. > Such things historically always trigger other cascading failures. With the help of war or without, it's up to the beneficiaries.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    I see you've got the same treatment I often do. I tried to help, even with science on our side, it's not much that I can do, but it's from the heart:) Cheers!
    - trod1234 1y ago
      Unfortunately that is just how it is on biased platforms, but its not like that everywhere yet. It is like a page out of Atlas Shrugged though. All the parasites ended up dying in that book when all the intelligent people decided to just step back and let natural human tendency and the momentum they created do what it was always going to do. All those people were deluded into thinking they could just make a law without paying respect to the mechanics that made things work. Ayn Rand though is also quite deluded in that her ideas don't work without eliminating inheritance and money-printing. Slavery is intolerable in any form.
throw94i4485 1y ago
[dead]
- zerosizedweasle 1y ago
  You really can’t see that in the entire economy (particularly in such a large country) there isn’t anything else worth investing in and that basically everyone outside the small groups of people involved by in AI should what, just be starved out of the economy?
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    But that’s not how investing works? It’s money looking for returns not social good (that’s what taxes are for). In that way AI is 1000% better than crypto or real estate speculation.
    - zerosizedweasle 1y ago
      This isn’t an opportunity if Open AI is signing deals in a single year 2025 where it commits to pay a bigger number than the entire defense budget despite being deeply unprofitable. It’s a scam. The bubble makes it seem like it’s a good investment. And yes I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.
      - pj_mukh 1y ago
        “I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.” Then make them! I don’t have the confidence you have in this “scam”. For sure the valuations are inflated but I don’t think this infrastructure investment will be a waste.
    - hvb2 1y ago
      Investing is choosing how to put your money to work just like how you choose what vendor to give your business. Here's a though experiment. If you could invest today in a company that will result in the destruction of your town (say a mining company) but you got 1% higher return compared to others, you're saying that's a perfect investment and would do it right away? And if the answer is yes to the above, you can make that a lot darker if you want. See how far your belief goes.
csomar 1y ago
Is it good for folks in tech? Most of the money is spent on energy and silicon.
- zerosizedweasle 1y ago
  It’s good for a tiny subsection of people in tech, for most people this is very destructive
rich_sasha 1y ago
That's right. By the same argument, I don't think it's right to say without AI, GDP growth would be flat. That cash would likely go into other investments. The question is if AI will make a return on the investment or not.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  If you look at the last 10 years you have to admit that the statement wouldn't be true. No tech company spent like they do now they rather opted for stock buybacks.
  - zerosizedweasle 1y ago
    This is just a very expensive buyback. At the heart this is all Nvidia doing round about the same mechanism of pushing the share price up. This started out as a useful idea, and it’s mutated into something that is destroying the economy
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
      Except NVIDIA is turning the roundabout investments into real silicon, data centers and extraneous software investments (see: IsaacSim, autonomy stack etc). They may not have the returns all the investors are expecting but they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem. I think the comparison to stock buybacks is ludicrous.
      - teiferer 1y ago
        > they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem. Evidence? Perhaps depends on what you mean with "ecosystem". Within the AI tech/hype, sure, there it's good. But for the economy as a whole? Is it that good? There are probably some benefits, but do they match the current valuations? Most likely they don't, because hype cycles inherently overvaluate things for a while because they don't know what will stick. If things were not dramatically overvalued right now then investors would not be acting in their best interest.
fragmede 1y ago
Some of that “AI-driven growth” might just be the economy treading water against the tariff headwinds.
oytis 1y ago
Sad for folks inside tech not interested in/working on AI either
- benterix 1y ago
  I upvoted you but strictly speaking it is not true. "AI" is such a broad term. You probably meant GenAI like LLMs, and even here there are some genuinely useful applications. But in general, there is a lot of extremely fascinating stuff, both to exploit and explore, for example in the context of traditional (non-transforeme-based) ML/DL methods. The methods are getting better year by year, and the hardware needed to do anything useful is getting cheaper. So while it's true that after the initial fascination developers might not be that interested in GenAI, and some even deliberately decided not to use these tools at all in order to keep their skills fresh and avoid problems related with constant review fatigue, many tech folks are interested in AI in a wider context and are getting good results.
  - amonith 1y ago
    Not the parent commenter, but why would you assume that he meant LLMs specifically? I'm one of the "tech people not interested in AI" and I mean everything around AI/ML. I just like writing OG code man. I like architecture, algorithms, writing "feeling good" code. Like carpenters who just like to work with wood I like to work with code.
    - nosianu 1y ago
      I see my instructions for the LLM still as code. Just in human language and not a particular programming language. I still have to specify the algorithm, and I still have to be specific - the more fuzzy my instructions the more likely it is that I end up with having to correct the LLM afterwards. There is so much framework stuff, when I started coding I could mostly concentrate on the algorithm, now I have to do so much framework stuff, I feel like telling the LLM really only the actual algorithm, minus all the overhead, is much more "programming" than today's programming with the many many layers of "stuff" layered around what I actually want to do. I find it a bit ironic though that our tool out of the excessive complexity is an even more complex tool, although, looking at biology and that programming in large longer-running projects already felt like it had plenty of elements that reminded me of how evolution works in biology, already leading to hard or even impossible to comprehend systems (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637), the new direction is not that big of a surprise. We'll end up more like biology and medicine some day, with probabilistic methods and less direct knowledge and understanding of the ever more complex systems, and evolution of those systems based on "survival" (does what it is supposed to most of the time, we can work around the bugs, no way to debug in detail, survival of the fittest - what doesn't work is thrown away, what passes the tests is released). Small systems that are truly "engineered" and thought through will remain valuable, but increasingly complex systems go the route shown by these new tools. I see this development as part of a path towards being able to create and deal with ever more complex systems, not, or only partially, to replace what we have to create current ones. That AI (and what will develop out of it) can be used to create current systems too is a (for some, or many, nice) side effect, but I see the main benefit in the start of a new method to deal with ever more complexity. I only ever see single-person or -team short-term experiences of LLM use for development. Obviously, since it is so new. But one important task of the tooling will only partially be to help that one person, or even team, to produce something that can be released. Much more important will be the long-term, like that decades-long software dev process they ended up with in my link above, with a lot of developers over time passing through still being able to extend it and fix issues years later. Right now it is solved in ways that are far from fun already, with many developers staying in those teams only long enough, or H1Bs who have little choice. If this could be done in a higher level way, with whatever "AI for software dev" will turn into over the next few decades, it could help immensely.
nosianu 1y ago
> since investor money is spent exactly once So I'm nitpicking here, but this seems to me to be an important nitpick: This is not true because money circulates. The distinction is, one should not stop looking at only the first level effects, but the entire fields the money streams flow through. It remains true that money flows in specific areas, but it is on a higher level than only the immediate first level spending, so the analysis has to be different too.
- lqstuart 1y ago
  Like, for example, NVIDIA investing billions back into OpenAI so that they can buy more of NVIDIA’s hardware
  - nosianu 1y ago
    That money will still flow elsewhere.
    - llamatastic 1y ago
      Your house is in flames? Don't worry that energy will flow elsewhere
    - tylerhou 1y ago
      Money circulates but resources do not. A human hour spent constructing a data center can’t then be used to build an apartment building.
      - nosianu 1y ago
        Yes, and??? How is that relevant? We were talking about money, explicitly. Not the resources. When the economy still has room, i.e. people are available to do more, then any missing resources can be obtained by sooner or later by employing people. This is not about the body or the land, but about the blood or the water flowing through them.
        1y ago
bko 1y ago
Yes, without [popular activity] there would be more [resource activity uses] at a lower price. At some point you have to grant people agency and accept that things spend money and time on things that are valuable to them.
- mcphage 1y ago
  > you have to grant people agency and accept that things spend money and time on things that are valuable to them We're talking about companies here, not people. And yet, it is kinda true—companies spend time and money on things that are valuable to the people at high level positions in the company and board. But that isn't the same as companies spending time and money on things that are valuable to the company.
  - bko 1y ago
    ChatGPT currently has ~ 120 to 190 million daily active users and ~ 800 million weekly active users. It's the fastest growing product in history, blowing others out of the water. I think investment is warranted
    - datadrivenangel 1y ago
      Hey if you have a few trillion dollars to invest, my "Free dollar per user daily giveaway" app will be even faster growing. ChatGPT is great, but giving things away is ultimately philanthropy, and the OpenAI investors expect returns, not a tax write-off.
    - trod1234 1y ago
      Your just looking at pool walking down a concentration gradient. When everyone has access, and such access eliminated more jobs than created, do you think the investment was warranted. Value is only ever based in human action; when the basis for the reasoning is shown to be false or removed it becomes something similar to tulip mania.
re-thc 1y ago
> It makes sense, since investor money is spent exactly once. If it goes to AI then it doesn't go elsewhere. And if it didn't go to AI then it would go elsewhere. This assumes only "the US" exists in this world. The AI hype would have been a thing regardless. If the money doesn't go to the US it'd go to China or somewhere else. Just like with batteries you'd just lose the market if you don't invest.
sgnelson 1y ago
See Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
rchaud 1y ago
> Sad for folks outside tech. I'd think investment banks, law firms and management consultancies must be doing very well in this inflated market. They get a piece of every financing deal and consulting engagement that drives these bilkion dollar spending decisions.

pj_mukh 1y ago

I see this take a lot, but it confuses me. There is no guarantee that LP’s would take that money and instead invest it in <tech I respect that is not AI>. They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity. VC is actually a pretty effective vehicle to separate rich people from their money so society can try crazy things. You just don’t agree with this particular adventure and frankly there will never be the perfect alternative adventure.

mordae 1y ago
Most people wouldn't vote or participate in this investment craze. Maybe we shouldn't let unelected lucky nobodies decide how we invest our time for us.
- pj_mukh 1y ago
  I’m not saying don’t tax them or let them influence politics. I’m saying letting them go to space or turning sand into intelligence is infinitely better than buying land and charging us rent (what most rich people have done in history).
  - alanbernstein 1y ago
    They are hoping to invest in the companies that will be the (next) electronic equivalent of rent-seeking land owners, as faang are now. It's better since land is physically necessary to live, but only marginally so.
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
      Happy to wield the hammer of Lina Khan to stop the monopolizing and rent seeking.
  - teiferer 1y ago
    Buying more land, building more housing to ultimately charge rent would definitely be good for everybody. The housing crisis is a supply side shortage and every dollar going into building new rentals would alleviate that pressure. Instead, the money goes to building more AI datacenters so that the family of 5 with mom and dad working at Walmart can have higher definition cat videos. They'd be better served with more supply in the rental market, ultimately lowering rent.
piva00 1y ago
Isn't the core issue that this deluge of spending on the hype inflates away adjacent companies valuation (Meta, Google, Tesla, Nvidia, etc.) where people's pensions and savings get directed towards since they become the growth stocks in the index, and when it inevitably corrects there's second/third-order effects on non-rich people? > They would just as likely hoover up housing around the country or some such insanity to capitalize on the scarcity. Another core issue in a hyper-financialised economy, the money doesn't get invested in what would be best for society, it keeps chasing either risky endeavours or parked in presumed safe assets (such as housing), inflating away asset classes. Where are the incentives to invest in foundational areas which do compound to make a society have resilient growth, like infrastructure: energy, transportation, etc.? It feels like without government direction to spend in big projects there's simply no appetite from the private, hyper-financialised, system to do the work, unless there's potential to get 10-100x returns. Is that good for society at large? If hyper-financialisation is not helping the overall economy, and society to become better, why the hell should we still (in the Western world) pursue that? If all it can do is increasingly chase the extremes: hyper-growth vs extremely safe assets, is it any good anymore?
- pj_mukh 1y ago
  I think if you want the public to accept that the government will be a better shepherd of this money than a decentralized smattering of individuals then the government should provide evidence for this, once it actually opens up from a dysfunctional shutdown. At least in the American context everything from California High Speed rail to bloated defense spending has shown that VC’s are much better shepherds of their own money.
  - piva00 1y ago
    Completely agree, the American government has become incompetent in delivering any real big project to its citizenry, it went through a whole ideological process of gutting its abilities to do so. It was designed to lose this ability, and to lean onto private enterprises to do anything but in the past the government was able to rollout highways, go to the moon, build dams, bridges, power plants. If both the government and VCs are now unreliable to shepherd capital to direct it to the improvement of society at large you might need to rethink the whole system, and work to nudge it into a better path.

eunos 1y ago

If the AI is indeed a bubble and burst not so long after this... We might even have a Warhammer 40k style anti AI movement

KronisLV 1y ago
I mean, most of my friends (especially the artists but also software devs) seem to hate AI with a passion: sometimes because of the ethical bankruptcy, other times because of the amount of slop it produces and how in your face it is due to the hype cycle, other times due to a belief that it more or less leads to brainrot and atrophy of cognitive abilities.
- allie1 1y ago
  The slop is real. Especially when I see promoters of platforms for vibe coders. They don't understand the implications of lack of security in potentially viral apps. It's easy to consider them as WMDs. People have the same password across services. They share personal information. In a geopolitical climate as today's, where the currency of war is disruption, it can wreak havoc.
- cafebabbe 1y ago
  I'm a big AI supporter. I'm just waiting for the slop to be so metastasized that our terminally ill "social networks" finally die, alongside with it. Of course i'll be proven terribly wrong. But hey. hope.
  - world2vec 1y ago
    Fingers crossed.
- vladms 1y ago
  Hating a tool? And software developers with emotions ? (I get it for the artists :-p) In my opinion AI makes visible more structural issues that were always there, but we could ignore. People addicted to various stuff (being substances or social networks or watching sports), social communities disappearing (no more going to the pub, stay at home with your TV), growing inequality (because capital is not taxed as labor), strange beliefs (all the conspiracy theories, which existed before) and others. Find a use for the new tool to improve the situation if you can, but I think that hating tools can lead you on dark paths.

zerosizedweasle 1y ago

That’s the most unforgivable part of this. How this is starving and destroying the rest of the economy

trod1234 1y ago
Opportunity costs don't destroy the economy. Money-printing does destroy the economy on a lag, specifically when the production has such catastrophic shortfall that it shows itself to be ponzi without tangible value or benefit. Value being based entirely in human action. When that happens, its basically slave labor silently extracted from the population through inflation. Such things historically always trigger other cascading failures.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago
  > when the production has such catastrophic shortfall that it shows itself to be ponzi without tangible value or benefit. Indeed, the scale matters a lot. With that said, a ponzi always has beneficiaries. > Such things historically always trigger other cascading failures. With the help of war or without, it's up to the beneficiaries.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago
  I see you've got the same treatment I often do. I tried to help, even with science on our side, it's not much that I can do, but it's from the heart:) Cheers!
  - trod1234 1y ago
    Unfortunately that is just how it is on biased platforms, but its not like that everywhere yet. It is like a page out of Atlas Shrugged though. All the parasites ended up dying in that book when all the intelligent people decided to just step back and let natural human tendency and the momentum they created do what it was always going to do. All those people were deluded into thinking they could just make a law without paying respect to the mechanics that made things work. Ayn Rand though is also quite deluded in that her ideas don't work without eliminating inheritance and money-printing. Slavery is intolerable in any form.

throw94i4485 1y ago

[dead]

zerosizedweasle 1y ago
You really can’t see that in the entire economy (particularly in such a large country) there isn’t anything else worth investing in and that basically everyone outside the small groups of people involved by in AI should what, just be starved out of the economy?
- pj_mukh 1y ago
  But that’s not how investing works? It’s money looking for returns not social good (that’s what taxes are for). In that way AI is 1000% better than crypto or real estate speculation.
  - zerosizedweasle 1y ago
    This isn’t an opportunity if Open AI is signing deals in a single year 2025 where it commits to pay a bigger number than the entire defense budget despite being deeply unprofitable. It’s a scam. The bubble makes it seem like it’s a good investment. And yes I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.
    - pj_mukh 1y ago
      “I do believe there are better investments outside the AI bubble.” Then make them! I don’t have the confidence you have in this “scam”. For sure the valuations are inflated but I don’t think this infrastructure investment will be a waste.
  - hvb2 1y ago
    Investing is choosing how to put your money to work just like how you choose what vendor to give your business. Here's a though experiment. If you could invest today in a company that will result in the destruction of your town (say a mining company) but you got 1% higher return compared to others, you're saying that's a perfect investment and would do it right away? And if the answer is yes to the above, you can make that a lot darker if you want. See how far your belief goes.

csomar 1y ago

Is it good for folks in tech? Most of the money is spent on energy and silicon.

zerosizedweasle 1y ago
It’s good for a tiny subsection of people in tech, for most people this is very destructive

rich_sasha 1y ago

That's right. By the same argument, I don't think it's right to say without AI, GDP growth would be flat. That cash would likely go into other investments. The question is if AI will make a return on the investment or not.

BoredPositron 1y ago
If you look at the last 10 years you have to admit that the statement wouldn't be true. No tech company spent like they do now they rather opted for stock buybacks.
- zerosizedweasle 1y ago
  This is just a very expensive buyback. At the heart this is all Nvidia doing round about the same mechanism of pushing the share price up. This started out as a useful idea, and it’s mutated into something that is destroying the economy
  - pj_mukh 1y ago
    Except NVIDIA is turning the roundabout investments into real silicon, data centers and extraneous software investments (see: IsaacSim, autonomy stack etc). They may not have the returns all the investors are expecting but they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem. I think the comparison to stock buybacks is ludicrous.
    - teiferer 1y ago
      > they are an extreme net good for the ecosystem. Evidence? Perhaps depends on what you mean with "ecosystem". Within the AI tech/hype, sure, there it's good. But for the economy as a whole? Is it that good? There are probably some benefits, but do they match the current valuations? Most likely they don't, because hype cycles inherently overvaluate things for a while because they don't know what will stick. If things were not dramatically overvalued right now then investors would not be acting in their best interest.

fragmede 1y ago

Some of that “AI-driven growth” might just be the economy treading water against the tariff headwinds.

oytis 1y ago

Sad for folks inside tech not interested in/working on AI either

benterix 1y ago
I upvoted you but strictly speaking it is not true. "AI" is such a broad term. You probably meant GenAI like LLMs, and even here there are some genuinely useful applications. But in general, there is a lot of extremely fascinating stuff, both to exploit and explore, for example in the context of traditional (non-transforeme-based) ML/DL methods. The methods are getting better year by year, and the hardware needed to do anything useful is getting cheaper. So while it's true that after the initial fascination developers might not be that interested in GenAI, and some even deliberately decided not to use these tools at all in order to keep their skills fresh and avoid problems related with constant review fatigue, many tech folks are interested in AI in a wider context and are getting good results.
- amonith 1y ago
  Not the parent commenter, but why would you assume that he meant LLMs specifically? I'm one of the "tech people not interested in AI" and I mean everything around AI/ML. I just like writing OG code man. I like architecture, algorithms, writing "feeling good" code. Like carpenters who just like to work with wood I like to work with code.
  - nosianu 1y ago
    I see my instructions for the LLM still as code. Just in human language and not a particular programming language. I still have to specify the algorithm, and I still have to be specific - the more fuzzy my instructions the more likely it is that I end up with having to correct the LLM afterwards. There is so much framework stuff, when I started coding I could mostly concentrate on the algorithm, now I have to do so much framework stuff, I feel like telling the LLM really only the actual algorithm, minus all the overhead, is much more "programming" than today's programming with the many many layers of "stuff" layered around what I actually want to do. I find it a bit ironic though that our tool out of the excessive complexity is an even more complex tool, although, looking at biology and that programming in large longer-running projects already felt like it had plenty of elements that reminded me of how evolution works in biology, already leading to hard or even impossible to comprehend systems (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637), the new direction is not that big of a surprise. We'll end up more like biology and medicine some day, with probabilistic methods and less direct knowledge and understanding of the ever more complex systems, and evolution of those systems based on "survival" (does what it is supposed to most of the time, we can work around the bugs, no way to debug in detail, survival of the fittest - what doesn't work is thrown away, what passes the tests is released). Small systems that are truly "engineered" and thought through will remain valuable, but increasingly complex systems go the route shown by these new tools. I see this development as part of a path towards being able to create and deal with ever more complex systems, not, or only partially, to replace what we have to create current ones. That AI (and what will develop out of it) can be used to create current systems too is a (for some, or many, nice) side effect, but I see the main benefit in the start of a new method to deal with ever more complexity. I only ever see single-person or -team short-term experiences of LLM use for development. Obviously, since it is so new. But one important task of the tooling will only partially be to help that one person, or even team, to produce something that can be released. Much more important will be the long-term, like that decades-long software dev process they ended up with in my link above, with a lot of developers over time passing through still being able to extend it and fix issues years later. Right now it is solved in ways that are far from fun already, with many developers staying in those teams only long enough, or H1Bs who have little choice. If this could be done in a higher level way, with whatever "AI for software dev" will turn into over the next few decades, it could help immensely.

nosianu 1y ago

> since investor money is spent exactly once So I'm nitpicking here, but this seems to me to be an important nitpick: This is not true because money circulates. The distinction is, one should not stop looking at only the first level effects, but the entire fields the money streams flow through. It remains true that money flows in specific areas, but it is on a higher level than only the immediate first level spending, so the analysis has to be different too.

lqstuart 1y ago
Like, for example, NVIDIA investing billions back into OpenAI so that they can buy more of NVIDIA’s hardware
- nosianu 1y ago
  That money will still flow elsewhere.
  - llamatastic 1y ago
    Your house is in flames? Don't worry that energy will flow elsewhere
  - tylerhou 1y ago
    Money circulates but resources do not. A human hour spent constructing a data center can’t then be used to build an apartment building.
    - nosianu 1y ago
      Yes, and??? How is that relevant? We were talking about money, explicitly. Not the resources. When the economy still has room, i.e. people are available to do more, then any missing resources can be obtained by sooner or later by employing people. This is not about the body or the land, but about the blood or the water flowing through them.
      - 1y ago

bko 1y ago

Yes, without [popular activity] there would be more [resource activity uses] at a lower price. At some point you have to grant people agency and accept that things spend money and time on things that are valuable to them.

mcphage 1y ago
> you have to grant people agency and accept that things spend money and time on things that are valuable to them We're talking about companies here, not people. And yet, it is kinda true—companies spend time and money on things that are valuable to the people at high level positions in the company and board. But that isn't the same as companies spending time and money on things that are valuable to the company.
- bko 1y ago
  ChatGPT currently has ~ 120 to 190 million daily active users and ~ 800 million weekly active users. It's the fastest growing product in history, blowing others out of the water. I think investment is warranted
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Hey if you have a few trillion dollars to invest, my "Free dollar per user daily giveaway" app will be even faster growing. ChatGPT is great, but giving things away is ultimately philanthropy, and the OpenAI investors expect returns, not a tax write-off.
  - trod1234 1y ago
    Your just looking at pool walking down a concentration gradient. When everyone has access, and such access eliminated more jobs than created, do you think the investment was warranted. Value is only ever based in human action; when the basis for the reasoning is shown to be false or removed it becomes something similar to tulip mania.

re-thc 1y ago

> It makes sense, since investor money is spent exactly once. If it goes to AI then it doesn't go elsewhere. And if it didn't go to AI then it would go elsewhere. This assumes only "the US" exists in this world. The AI hype would have been a thing regardless. If the money doesn't go to the US it'd go to China or somewhere else. Just like with batteries you'd just lose the market if you don't invest.

sgnelson 1y ago

See Dutch Disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

rchaud 1y ago

> Sad for folks outside tech. I'd think investment banks, law firms and management consultancies must be doing very well in this inflated market. They get a piece of every financing deal and consulting engagement that drives these bilkion dollar spending decisions.