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The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is ver
by cmiles8 10mo ago
The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there.
The concern mostly comes from the business side… that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on. It’s a nice set of useful features but without products with sufficient revenue flowing in to pay for it all.
That paints a picture of the tech sticking around but a general implosion of the startups and business models betting on making all this work.
The later isn’t really “anti-AI hype” but more folks just calling out the reality that there’s not a lot of evidence and data to support the amount of money invested and committed. And if you’ve been around the tech and business scene a while you’ve seen that movie before and know what comes next.
In 5 years time I expect to be using AI more than I do now. I also expect most of the AI companies and startups won’t exist anymore.
- antirez 10mo agoThe blog post title is a joke about the AI hype.
- iLoveOncall 10mo agoWell it completely misses the mark, because your whole article IS hyping up AI, and probably more than anything I've seen before honestly. If it's all meant to be ironical, it's a huge failure and people will use it to support their AI hype.
- antirez 10mo agoI was not clear enough. I wanted to write a PRO-AI blog post. The people against AI always say negative things with using as central argument that "AI is hyped and overhyped". So I, for fun, consider the anti-AI movement a form of hype. It's a joke but not in the sense it does not mean what it means.
- iLoveOncall 10mo ago[flagged]
- menaerus 10mo agoWhat's wrong with you? Let people express their experience without calling them mentally ill. Put yourself together.
- zahlman 10mo agoThe comment was flagged and killed; the system works. Please don't respond to personal attacks with personal attacks.
- simonw 10mo ago> Anyone claiming "Writing code is no longer needed for the most part" is not a serious software engineer. You need to recalibrate. Six months ago I would have agreed with you, but Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 represent a very real change. I would phrase this as "typing the code out by hand is no longer needed for the most part", which I think is what antirez was getting at here.
- danielbln 10mo agoThere are too many people who see the absurd AI hype (especially absurd in terms of investment) and construct a counter-argument with it that AI is useless, overblown and just generally not good. And that's a fallacy. Two things can be true at the same time. Coding agents are a step change and immensely useful, and the valuations and breathless AGI evangelizing is a smoke screen and pure hype. Don't let hype deter you to get your own hands dirty and try shit.
- nielsole 10mo agoIn the late 2000s i remember that "nobody is willing to pay for things on the Internet" was a common trope. I think it'll culturally take a while before businesses and people understand what they are willing to pay for. For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion. One is the time of a human (irreplaceable) and the other is a tool for some human to use, seems proportional to me.
- thunky 10mo ago> human (irreplaceable) Everyone is replaceable. Software devs aren't special.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoYes, with another human. I meant more that you cannot replace a human with a non-human, at least not yet and if you care about quality.
- user34283 9mo agoPerhaps you can replace multiple developers with a single developer and an AI tool in the near future. In the same way that you could potentially replace multiple workers with handsaws with one guy wielding power tools. There could be a lot of financial gain for businesses in this, even if you still need humans in the loop.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoThat may be, but I still think > if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion. Is way off base. Even if you replace multiple workers with one worker but better tool, businesses still won't want to pay the "multiple worker salary" to the single worker just because they use a more effective tool.
- dist-epoch 10mo agoPeople said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off): - when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube - when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram - when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics. Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions.
- cmiles8 10mo agoThere’s no comparison to what’s going on now vs those examples. Not even remotely similar.
- dist-epoch 10mo ago> that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on you lack imagination, human workers are paid globally over $10 trillion dollars.
- qcnguy 10mo agoWe don't really know how much money Google sunk into YouTube before it became (presumably) profitable. It might have actually not been strongly coupled to economics.
- Izkata 10mo agoAlso they attempted their own competitor before buying YouTube, called Google Video. It never got very popular.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo agoYou listed only acquisitions that paid off and not the many, many more that didn't though.
- smcl 9mo agoI am not even clear how Whatsapp "paid off" for Facebook in any sense other than them being able to nip a potential competitor in the bud. I use Whatsapp but do not see a single advert there nor do I pay a single penny for it, and I suspect my situation is pretty typical. Presumably some people see ads or pay for some services but I've not, and I don't imagine there's that much money to be made in being the #1 platform for sharing "Good Morning" GIFs
- senordevnyc 10mo agoOn the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there. What? HN is absolutely packed with people complaining about LLMs are nothing more than net useless creators of slop. Granted, fewer than six months ago, which should tell people something...