8 ms·

The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

120 points by LordAtlas 10mo ago

devin 10mo ago
> Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation. This is flat out wrong.
- billy99k 10mo ago
  I've been approached by a few companies to train their models to basically replace me. Why would I want to do this?
  - bigyabai 10mo ago
    [flagged]
- throw310822 10mo ago
  I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more economic impact than society can actually bear. Who should be wiped out by the wildfire? Anthropic?
  - watwut 10mo ago
    To be fair, if you look at language learning reddit, there are about 10 ads a day for shovelware of AI powered apps that no one ever needed. They would be those pets.com
    - throw310822 10mo ago
      Maybe I just didn't notice. Fair. But are these ads from companies that are collecting large capitals, or from small shops that just use the APIs provided by the few big players?
      - linkjuice4all 10mo ago
        Not parent - but I've noticed those same 'start ups' and they just seem to be today's hustle-bro crypto/drop-ship/mobile-app/ceo-with-no-employees/self-help-book/low-effort grift (bullshit). I'm sure some of them have managed to shake some change out of the VCs but these wanna-be shovel sellers are just gonna let their domains expire and move on to the next scheme with little overall damage to the economy.
      - watwut 10mo ago
        I am pretty sure they use API and dont have millions on training. I have no idea about their financials. They just annoy me, because they mask their ads as posts/comments. And use ChatGPT to generate those, they are like 2 page long drivel.
  - mNovak 10mo ago
    Grammarly certainly comes to mind, for being essentially a free feature of most chat AIs now. Interestingly this time around I could see the 'fire' affecting mid-large corporations (or at least some divisions of them) if they don't adapt. Adobe, being heavily focused on graphic design seems like it could be under pressure. Low-end consulting / outsourcing is largely doing the same work AI is good at. Similarly with technical gig-work (like Upwork).
  - philipwhiuk 10mo ago
    OpenAI and Anthropic. They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a business model.
    - throw310822 10mo ago
      Don't know about OpenAI, but Claude wrote almost all of my code in the past few days, multiplying my productivity by a factor of at least two. My feeling is that for some use cases Anthropic could already charge enterprises a significant fraction of each developer's salary and it would still be a net gain for customers.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    From how stock valuations look like, they had an insane rally from the release of ChatGPT to around mid-2024, from which point it stayed mostly on a consistent trajectory with the rest of the economy. I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be. Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a grain of salt..
dmix 10mo ago
VC is inherently high risk capital. It's by design most companies will fail or at most break even via acquisitions/acquihires, while a small few make investors massive amounts of money. The only real difference this time around is all of the datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it much riskier and capital intensive.
- saulpw 10mo ago
  The big difference this time around is that this 'high risk capital' isn't a small amount, it's 1-10% of the entire economy.
  - dmix 10mo ago
    Fair
ForHackernews 10mo ago
> Businesses aren’t asking “do we want AI capabilities?” They’re asking “how much can we get, and how soon?” This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.
- throw310822 10mo ago
  The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.
  - Spivak 10mo ago
    I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern. We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.
    - Eisenstein 10mo ago
      Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone. Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money. I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?
dlojudice 10mo ago
The text reminded me of one of Veritasium's latest videos [1] about power law, self-organized criticality, percolation, etc... and it also has a wildfire simulation [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
gmuslera 10mo ago
Framing this as something cyclic as the rest of the world is static may be a mistake if things have deep changes outside (related or not with what is being done here), or the nature of the field radically changes. Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.
Nevermark 10mo ago
> training compute looks more like an operating expense with a short payback window than a durable capital asset Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand, that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further into their functional lifetimes. There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while older GPUs continue working. Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term functional value. I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand. Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and better ways. The wildflowers will grow fast.
mwkaufma 10mo ago
"The Bubble is Good Actually" cope cope cope.
blibble 10mo ago
I don't see how nvidia come out of this stronger their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"
- malux85 10mo ago
  Gaming, then crypto, then AI - all GPU hungry!
  - flopsamjetsam 10mo ago
    And each one requiring an order of magnitude more GPUs than the last!
    - bdangubic 10mo ago
      this trend will always continue with next big thing
- vb-8448 10mo ago
  Nvidia is the Cisco of .com ... cisco still exists, and it's doing pretty well.
  - cr125rider 10mo ago
    I forgot they bought Splunk. Enterprises love shoveling money into that fire pit
  - diamond559 10mo ago
    Just took them a few 26 years to touch their peak dot com bubble stock price again.
    - vb-8448 10mo ago
      And it will be probably the same for nvidia, unless they didn't find another business stream apart from selling "shovels". BTW, stock price is not everything, Cisco survived, grew, and it's the backbone of internet today.
kittikitti 10mo ago
I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake. I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
- cr125rider 10mo ago
  And everyone but tech company is leveraged to the moon on selling shovels
- Libidinalecon 10mo ago
  California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania. Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic.. We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different". "AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide. It is all completely rational this time.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - m4rtink 10mo ago
    Not not mention the California gold rush basically killed the existing functional local community (often literally) with very few people actually getting rich and even fewer from the gold itself. Har not to see parallels with the current AI bubble.
  - watwut 10mo ago
    > "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" I don't see those companies promising that. They are bragging about being able to replace jobs for millions people and their CEOs are also simultaneously taking pretty dismissive attitude toward lesser people. If is more of "we will replace millions of people of eff you, billionaire class will become more powerful. I am not saying it will realistically happen, I am saying that is what current messaging is.
vb-8448 10mo ago
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance. The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.
jameslk 10mo ago
In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0] The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time 0. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html https://paulgraham.com/aord.html
pizlonator 10mo ago
> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?
- com2kid 10mo ago
  Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
  - emp17344 10mo ago
    Historically, this is not how technology that improves productivity has affected the economy. I’d encourage you to learn more about economics and the history of automation.
    - com2kid 10mo ago
      Doing this stuff is literally my job. Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible. People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone. Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech support completely erased the profit from that product's sale. Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to happen. One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the expected cost of customer service factored into the product price will drop. E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product. (And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost savings are found!)
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
I think.. after reading this article twice that, if it is indeed presented accurately and if the table participants are not just trying to drive a specific agenda, is it applying the wrong metaphor. It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'. I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall. Here is what I mean by this: - the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use ) It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.
- Lapel2742 10mo ago
  > the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead Maybe it's simply less visible? I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.
bgwalter 10mo ago
It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now. "AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies. This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.
- qgin 10mo ago
  Amazon, Microsoft, Google all are profitable even despite their capex. Worst case scenario they stop spending on AI capex and go back to being ridiculously profitable instead of just comfortably profitable. There's no actual implosion for the big names.
  - bgwalter 10mo ago
    I'm not saying they will cease to exist. I'm saying that the Internet bubble of 2000 had valid tech whose growth was (deliberately) overestimated. They can write it off and move on to other things. But that is not what the new wildfire talking point says. The wildfire framing says that the underlying tech is as valuable as the tech of 2000 was.
- lkbm 10mo ago
  I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping was maybe 30% as fast. I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
thelastgallon 10mo ago
AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success' with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc. Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.
- lkbm 10mo ago
  A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped me. You: No one knows anything AI helps with. Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.
  - AstroBen 10mo ago
    How much astroturfing is happening online? These companies certainly have the funds to do so on a wide scale The only thing I trust about these right now is my own experience
    - bgwalter 10mo ago
      This is how it is done openly with clearly Grok-edited or written comments: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m One can only imagine the amount of covert promotion.
      - AstroBen 10mo ago
        From another industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_discredit_veganism_online_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_... I don't have much proof, but given the incentives and the possibility of doing it I'd be surprised if it wasn't happening everywhere. How much would be enough to pay the top 50 influencers in a market to push something? To hire 100 people to be active full time on all social media sites? To a company with billions they wouldn't even notice the expense Default to skepticism and double down on your critical thinking skills. More important than ever today
zkmon 10mo ago
These analogies are like fitting a curve to align with the data. Let the new data come in next year, the curve changes to fit that data as well. Any data can be curve-fitted and be seen as following some pattern. It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe. The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces. For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.
GMoromisato 10mo ago
If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire. The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.
- m4rtink 10mo ago
  That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.
  - LogicFailsMe 10mo ago
    Mid-Century at least optimistically. All of this will play out before then, but broadly, those who can code the machines will survive and thrive as they always do. Except for the older ones, it will be yet another excuse to jettison all that experience and talent because of the gray hair that makes them creatively dead from the neck up according to youthful disruptive beach loving Vinod Khosla.
  - GMoromisato 10mo ago
    Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations. Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1] He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever. But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not. ------------- [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229
    - m4rtink 10mo ago
      Sure, it is impressive how much solar power Starlink currently captures, but ISS actually does not get that much - as far as I can tell its about 250 kW maximum even with the new roll-out solar arrays that have been installed quite recently. So about 2.5 MW of solar potential ? That's indeed quite impressive, but for serious compute a lot of energy needs cooling will eat into that.
GMoromisato 10mo ago
Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?
- never_inline 10mo ago
  If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.
  - Tuna-Fish 10mo ago
    Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply available compute (from the firesales of failing companies) to produce models that match their quality, while having to invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to, allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the first wave and making them go under.
    - mattgreenrocks 10mo ago
      Yup. The big AI companies are scared to death of LLMs being seen as commodities. But in the long term, they are. See also: the big deepseek smear campaign.
  - pizlonator 10mo ago
    > If they are profitable on inference currently Man that is the question, isn't it
8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago
With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?
- karlgkk 10mo ago
  That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - delfinom 10mo ago
    > if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.
    - karlgkk 10mo ago
      I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.
      - ghaff 10mo ago
        Which is a pretty high salary in the US in tech generally. That said, a lot of people in US tech can probably retire relatively early if they run the numbers and don't have a lot of external expenses.
m3047 10mo ago
Ummm... Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal... Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator... doesn't look like a particularly virtuous trajectory to me.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
striking 10mo ago
I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
- debo_ 10mo ago
  It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other languages.
  - anthk 10mo ago
    In Spanish: "En resúmen.." (in conclusion...)
- jakeydus 10mo ago
  You forgot the italics on Y
- almosthere 10mo ago
  I just copy-paste an article into chatgpt and tell it to give me 3 bullet points for the article. We should have had this forever.
- nick486 10mo ago
  > "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence. I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
  - dist-epoch 10mo ago
    People are already prompting with "yeah, don't do these things": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
    - ssl-3 10mo ago
      "That's such a great observation that highlights an important social issue — let's delve into it!" I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd guess. It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output, noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."
dvfjsdhgfv 10mo ago
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.
daemontus 10mo ago
The metaphor sure seems plausible, but why does the whole thing read like a LinkedIn post that was fed to an LLM to farm attention? :(
- lbreakjai 10mo ago
  Because it most certainly is.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mNovak 10mo ago
Is there an elegant term to describe a severely overburdened metaphor? I'm getting lost in the thick bark of an intertwined canopy root system here..
- Sgt_Apone 10mo ago
  Glad I was the only one getting lost in that forest. I’ve never seen a metaphor get hammered so much in one piece (AI or otherwise).
nubg 10mo ago
Could the author please post the prompt this article was generated with?
rullera 10mo ago
Exclusive ceo dinners so that one can publish the insights? A bit odd
derelicta 10mo ago
I love how for Westerners, it's totally normal that the economy shits itself every 10 years and that people should welcome this.
philipwhiuk 10mo ago
> The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance. I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.
- tim333 10mo ago
  Crypto is more a casino thing on the side that doesn't effect the real economy much.
credit_guy 10mo ago
There is no wildfire coming. The model providers have narrowed down to 4: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The chip manufacturers are Nvidia, Google (TPUs) and AMD is trying to break in as well. Microsoft is position very well as a middleman. All these guys are giants already. Just Nvidia, Microsoft and Google together have a market cap above ten trillion. OpenAI, Anthropic, AMD and xAI probably add one trillion more. Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.
uplifter 10mo ago
> She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health. This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."
insane_dreamer 10mo ago
Hopefully the wildfire will also get rid of AI-generated think pieces like this one.
d4rkn0d3z 10mo ago
A bad thing with some positive side effects is not a good thing. Wildfire is bad, too frequent wildfires will turn forest into savannah. I didn't see where this part of the analogy was discussed.
- orian 10mo ago
  It is not, because SV people use shallow metaphors from areas they don’t understand, to gain publicity. But that was the same thought for me. The other totally missed aspect: a fire kills all life in area.

120 points by LordAtlas 10mo ago

devin 10mo ago

> Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation. This is flat out wrong.

billy99k 10mo ago
I've been approached by a few companies to train their models to basically replace me. Why would I want to do this?
- bigyabai 10mo ago
  [flagged]
throw310822 10mo ago
I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more economic impact than society can actually bear. Who should be wiped out by the wildfire? Anthropic?
- watwut 10mo ago
  To be fair, if you look at language learning reddit, there are about 10 ads a day for shovelware of AI powered apps that no one ever needed. They would be those pets.com
  - throw310822 10mo ago
    Maybe I just didn't notice. Fair. But are these ads from companies that are collecting large capitals, or from small shops that just use the APIs provided by the few big players?
    - linkjuice4all 10mo ago
      Not parent - but I've noticed those same 'start ups' and they just seem to be today's hustle-bro crypto/drop-ship/mobile-app/ceo-with-no-employees/self-help-book/low-effort grift (bullshit). I'm sure some of them have managed to shake some change out of the VCs but these wanna-be shovel sellers are just gonna let their domains expire and move on to the next scheme with little overall damage to the economy.
    - watwut 10mo ago
      I am pretty sure they use API and dont have millions on training. I have no idea about their financials. They just annoy me, because they mask their ads as posts/comments. And use ChatGPT to generate those, they are like 2 page long drivel.
- mNovak 10mo ago
  Grammarly certainly comes to mind, for being essentially a free feature of most chat AIs now. Interestingly this time around I could see the 'fire' affecting mid-large corporations (or at least some divisions of them) if they don't adapt. Adobe, being heavily focused on graphic design seems like it could be under pressure. Low-end consulting / outsourcing is largely doing the same work AI is good at. Similarly with technical gig-work (like Upwork).
- philipwhiuk 10mo ago
  OpenAI and Anthropic. They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a business model.
  - throw310822 10mo ago
    Don't know about OpenAI, but Claude wrote almost all of my code in the past few days, multiplying my productivity by a factor of at least two. My feeling is that for some use cases Anthropic could already charge enterprises a significant fraction of each developer's salary and it would still be a net gain for customers.
- torginus 10mo ago
  From how stock valuations look like, they had an insane rally from the release of ChatGPT to around mid-2024, from which point it stayed mostly on a consistent trajectory with the rest of the economy. I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be. Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a grain of salt..

dmix 10mo ago

VC is inherently high risk capital. It's by design most companies will fail or at most break even via acquisitions/acquihires, while a small few make investors massive amounts of money. The only real difference this time around is all of the datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it much riskier and capital intensive.

saulpw 10mo ago
The big difference this time around is that this 'high risk capital' isn't a small amount, it's 1-10% of the entire economy.
- dmix 10mo ago
  Fair

ForHackernews 10mo ago

> Businesses aren’t asking “do we want AI capabilities?” They’re asking “how much can we get, and how soon?” This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.

throw310822 10mo ago
The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.
- Spivak 10mo ago
  I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern. We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.
  - Eisenstein 10mo ago
    Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone. Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money. I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?

dlojudice 10mo ago

The text reminded me of one of Veritasium's latest videos [1] about power law, self-organized criticality, percolation, etc... and it also has a wildfire simulation [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k

gmuslera 10mo ago

Framing this as something cyclic as the rest of the world is static may be a mistake if things have deep changes outside (related or not with what is being done here), or the nature of the field radically changes. Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.

Nevermark 10mo ago

> training compute looks more like an operating expense with a short payback window than a durable capital asset Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand, that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further into their functional lifetimes. There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while older GPUs continue working. Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term functional value. I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand. Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and better ways. The wildflowers will grow fast.

mwkaufma 10mo ago

"The Bubble is Good Actually" cope cope cope.

blibble 10mo ago

I don't see how nvidia come out of this stronger their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"

malux85 10mo ago
Gaming, then crypto, then AI - all GPU hungry!
- flopsamjetsam 10mo ago
  And each one requiring an order of magnitude more GPUs than the last!
  - bdangubic 10mo ago
    this trend will always continue with next big thing
vb-8448 10mo ago
Nvidia is the Cisco of .com ... cisco still exists, and it's doing pretty well.
- cr125rider 10mo ago
  I forgot they bought Splunk. Enterprises love shoveling money into that fire pit
- diamond559 10mo ago
  Just took them a few 26 years to touch their peak dot com bubble stock price again.
  - vb-8448 10mo ago
    And it will be probably the same for nvidia, unless they didn't find another business stream apart from selling "shovels". BTW, stock price is not everything, Cisco survived, grew, and it's the backbone of internet today.

kittikitti 10mo ago

I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake. I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.

cr125rider 10mo ago
And everyone but tech company is leveraged to the moon on selling shovels
Libidinalecon 10mo ago
California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania. Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic.. We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different". "AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide. It is all completely rational this time.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- m4rtink 10mo ago
  Not not mention the California gold rush basically killed the existing functional local community (often literally) with very few people actually getting rich and even fewer from the gold itself. Har not to see parallels with the current AI bubble.
- watwut 10mo ago
  > "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" I don't see those companies promising that. They are bragging about being able to replace jobs for millions people and their CEOs are also simultaneously taking pretty dismissive attitude toward lesser people. If is more of "we will replace millions of people of eff you, billionaire class will become more powerful. I am not saying it will realistically happen, I am saying that is what current messaging is.

vb-8448 10mo ago

> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance. The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.

jameslk 10mo ago

In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0] The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time 0. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html https://paulgraham.com/aord.html

pizlonator 10mo ago

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?

com2kid 10mo ago
Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
- emp17344 10mo ago
  Historically, this is not how technology that improves productivity has affected the economy. I’d encourage you to learn more about economics and the history of automation.
  - com2kid 10mo ago
    Doing this stuff is literally my job. Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible. People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone. Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech support completely erased the profit from that product's sale. Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to happen. One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the expected cost of customer service factored into the product price will drop. E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product. (And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost savings are found!)

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago

I think.. after reading this article twice that, if it is indeed presented accurately and if the table participants are not just trying to drive a specific agenda, is it applying the wrong metaphor. It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'. I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall. Here is what I mean by this: - the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use ) It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.

Lapel2742 10mo ago
> the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead Maybe it's simply less visible? I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.

bgwalter 10mo ago

It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now. "AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies. This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.

qgin 10mo ago
Amazon, Microsoft, Google all are profitable even despite their capex. Worst case scenario they stop spending on AI capex and go back to being ridiculously profitable instead of just comfortably profitable. There's no actual implosion for the big names.
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  I'm not saying they will cease to exist. I'm saying that the Internet bubble of 2000 had valid tech whose growth was (deliberately) overestimated. They can write it off and move on to other things. But that is not what the new wildfire talking point says. The wildfire framing says that the underlying tech is as valuable as the tech of 2000 was.
lkbm 10mo ago
I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping was maybe 30% as fast. I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.
- deleted 10mo ago
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thelastgallon 10mo ago

AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success' with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc. Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.

lkbm 10mo ago
A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped me. You: No one knows anything AI helps with. Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.
- AstroBen 10mo ago
  How much astroturfing is happening online? These companies certainly have the funds to do so on a wide scale The only thing I trust about these right now is my own experience
  - bgwalter 10mo ago
    This is how it is done openly with clearly Grok-edited or written comments: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m One can only imagine the amount of covert promotion.
    - AstroBen 10mo ago
      From another industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_discredit_veganism_online_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_... I don't have much proof, but given the incentives and the possibility of doing it I'd be surprised if it wasn't happening everywhere. How much would be enough to pay the top 50 influencers in a market to push something? To hire 100 people to be active full time on all social media sites? To a company with billions they wouldn't even notice the expense Default to skepticism and double down on your critical thinking skills. More important than ever today

zkmon 10mo ago

These analogies are like fitting a curve to align with the data. Let the new data come in next year, the curve changes to fit that data as well. Any data can be curve-fitted and be seen as following some pattern. It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe. The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces. For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.

GMoromisato 10mo ago

If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire. The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.

m4rtink 10mo ago
That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.
- LogicFailsMe 10mo ago
  Mid-Century at least optimistically. All of this will play out before then, but broadly, those who can code the machines will survive and thrive as they always do. Except for the older ones, it will be yet another excuse to jettison all that experience and talent because of the gray hair that makes them creatively dead from the neck up according to youthful disruptive beach loving Vinod Khosla.
- GMoromisato 10mo ago
  Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations. Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1] He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever. But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not. ------------- [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229
  - m4rtink 10mo ago
    Sure, it is impressive how much solar power Starlink currently captures, but ISS actually does not get that much - as far as I can tell its about 250 kW maximum even with the new roll-out solar arrays that have been installed quite recently. So about 2.5 MW of solar potential ? That's indeed quite impressive, but for serious compute a lot of energy needs cooling will eat into that.

GMoromisato 10mo ago

Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?

never_inline 10mo ago
If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.
- Tuna-Fish 10mo ago
  Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply available compute (from the firesales of failing companies) to produce models that match their quality, while having to invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to, allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the first wave and making them go under.
  - mattgreenrocks 10mo ago
    Yup. The big AI companies are scared to death of LLMs being seen as commodities. But in the long term, they are. See also: the big deepseek smear campaign.
- pizlonator 10mo ago
  > If they are profitable on inference currently Man that is the question, isn't it

8f2ab37a-ed6c 10mo ago

With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?

karlgkk 10mo ago
That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- delfinom 10mo ago
  > if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.
  - karlgkk 10mo ago
    I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on. That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.
    - ghaff 10mo ago
      Which is a pretty high salary in the US in tech generally. That said, a lot of people in US tech can probably retire relatively early if they run the numbers and don't have a lot of external expenses.

m3047 10mo ago

Ummm... Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal... Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator... doesn't look like a particularly virtuous trajectory to me.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

striking 10mo ago

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

debo_ 10mo ago
It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other languages.
- anthk 10mo ago
  In Spanish: "En resúmen.." (in conclusion...)
jakeydus 10mo ago
You forgot the italics on Y
almosthere 10mo ago
I just copy-paste an article into chatgpt and tell it to give me 3 bullet points for the article. We should have had this forever.
nick486 10mo ago
> "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence. I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
- dist-epoch 10mo ago
  People are already prompting with "yeah, don't do these things": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
  - ssl-3 10mo ago
    "That's such a great observation that highlights an important social issue — let's delve into it!" I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd guess. It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output, noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."

dvfjsdhgfv 10mo ago

> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.

daemontus 10mo ago

The metaphor sure seems plausible, but why does the whole thing read like a LinkedIn post that was fed to an LLM to farm attention? :(

lbreakjai 10mo ago
Because it most certainly is.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

mNovak 10mo ago

Is there an elegant term to describe a severely overburdened metaphor? I'm getting lost in the thick bark of an intertwined canopy root system here..

Sgt_Apone 10mo ago
Glad I was the only one getting lost in that forest. I’ve never seen a metaphor get hammered so much in one piece (AI or otherwise).

nubg 10mo ago

Could the author please post the prompt this article was generated with?

rullera 10mo ago

Exclusive ceo dinners so that one can publish the insights? A bit odd

derelicta 10mo ago

I love how for Westerners, it's totally normal that the economy shits itself every 10 years and that people should welcome this.

philipwhiuk 10mo ago

> The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance. I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.

tim333 10mo ago
Crypto is more a casino thing on the side that doesn't effect the real economy much.

credit_guy 10mo ago

There is no wildfire coming. The model providers have narrowed down to 4: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The chip manufacturers are Nvidia, Google (TPUs) and AMD is trying to break in as well. Microsoft is position very well as a middleman. All these guys are giants already. Just Nvidia, Microsoft and Google together have a market cap above ten trillion. OpenAI, Anthropic, AMD and xAI probably add one trillion more. Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.

uplifter 10mo ago

> She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health. This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."

insane_dreamer 10mo ago

Hopefully the wildfire will also get rid of AI-generated think pieces like this one.

d4rkn0d3z 10mo ago

A bad thing with some positive side effects is not a good thing. Wildfire is bad, too frequent wildfires will turn forest into savannah. I didn't see where this part of the analogy was discussed.

orian 10mo ago
It is not, because SV people use shallow metaphors from areas they don’t understand, to gain publicity. But that was the same thought for me. The other totally missed aspect: a fire kills all life in area.