17 ms·

This time is different

199 points by speckx 9mo ago

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I would suggest editing the title to "This Time is Different". I think that captures the essence much better. Love the Sir Terry reference.
- javawizard 9mo ago
  I wonder if that was an automated HN edit? Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.
  - some_furry 9mo ago
    Usually HN only auto-edits on first submission. If you go in and undo it manually as the submitter, you can force it to read how you intend.
    - pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
      oh interesting, TIL I can go edit my submission titles! That's useful, I've definitely submitted stuff and gotten a less-good title due to the automated fixes, so I'll have to pay attention to this next time
    - meatmanek 9mo ago
      Maybe I'm only noticing the times when it messes things up, but it kinda seems like these auto-edits cause a lot of confusion that could be avoided if they were shown up-front to submitters, who would then have the option to undo them. Or maybe judicious use of an LLM here could be helpful. Replace the auto-edits with a prompt? Ask an LLM to judge whether the auto-edited title still retains its original meaning? Run the old and new titles through an embedding model and make sure they still point in roughly the same direction?
- wlesieutre 9mo ago
  And the HTTP headers x-clacks-overhead GNU Terry Pratchett
- GMoromisato 9mo ago
  Agreed--I clicked to read an article about the physics of time or something. Was sorely disappointed.
pavel_lishin 9mo ago
Title got mangled somehow, the original title is "This time is different".
Windchaser 9mo ago
For me, this captures it: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use. > No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. - Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"
NickNaraghi 9mo ago
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
- MarkusQ 9mo ago
  Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
- Joker_vD 9mo ago
  A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application. What is meta-technology?
TeamDman 9mo ago
I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way. New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- edent 9mo ago
  OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated. I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
  - troosevelt 9mo ago
    You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers. I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
    - Joker_vD 9mo ago
      > For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. Well, no, the ratio is most definitely not 1-to-1.
    - edent 9mo ago
      The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype. MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train. Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything. I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype. Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
BoppreH 9mo ago
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group? Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
p-o 9mo ago
By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
  > and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
  - p-o 9mo ago
    Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
    - wiseowise 9mo ago
      > but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
      - anthonypasq 9mo ago
        the end goal is productivity growth, aka the point of nearly every technology ever invented. The human story is about how we learn to do more with less.
dist-epoch 9mo ago
Nuclear weapons - this time is different Internet - this time is different iPhone - this time is different
redwood 9mo ago
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
- edent 9mo ago
  That sounds like an interesting article. You should write it.
  - goatlover 9mo ago
    Or have an LLM write it and then we can judge whether the OP is wrong about whether "this time is different".
riddley 9mo ago
Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?
- jjkaczor 9mo ago
  Heh - that went right off the cliff, when... well, I will let the reader research that themselves...
  - Insanity 9mo ago
    That’s dark. But.. accurate.
  - hnuser123456 9mo ago
    The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".
- hnuser123456 9mo ago
  Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands. I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too. I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too. And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far without. I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it. Maybe if they could let go of some of the cynicism, they could find something to be optimistic about. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, but that doesn't mean nothing is good.
  - jna_sh 9mo ago
    > I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it. From the post, which is not a very long one: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists"
lxgr 9mo ago
This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
- arduanika 9mo ago
  That's not a refutation. It's a list of silly cartoons designed to make the reader feel smart, thrown together by one of the leaders of the AI cult. Do you people know any other writers?
GMoromisato 9mo ago
I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows. We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right. The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong. If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible. Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do. [p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
chasd00 9mo ago
Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
stego-tech 9mo ago
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors. "This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time. "NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance. "Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce. And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before. I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  Is this “nothing ever happens”
  - inigyou 9mo ago
    Short of insider trading, betting on things not happening is apparently the best way to make money on those shady betting sites.
hoten 9mo ago
this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?
tengbretson 9mo ago
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still. It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
- ibejoeb 9mo ago
  There's another point, too. Detractors say LLMs will never advance to whatever threshold they consider meaningful. Fine. We're working on other paradigms, too, though. Just because a lot of o people are productizing LLMs doesn't mean the state of the art isn't advancing in parallel and AGI isn't in the cards.
- ericmcer 9mo ago
  Agree, LLMs are just another tool. Treating them as chatbots is a very basic way of using them. The future is intelligent engineers embedding them in traditional systems and having them perform specific roles.
- asdff 9mo ago
  Hiring seems to be way down in my world as a result of LLM. It isn't so much people staring blankly that I worry about, but companies thinking hey maybe we can get away with not replacing headcount for a while longer, or maybe this tool will help bootstrap the offshore team to be at parity with the expensive onshore team.
CompoundEyes 9mo ago
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
- shimman 9mo ago
  Can you give an example of such features?
  - CompoundEyes 9mo ago
    Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_plans/ https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...
    - skeeter2020 9mo ago
      What's the feature that was built though? This sounds like low-value refactoring. They are fundamentally different development workflows.
      - CompoundEyes 9mo ago
        Yes porting and also implementation of new features. Typical client requests for new functionality in business to business software.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
- keriati1 9mo ago
wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
When non-programmers make sweeping statements about LLMs. Deep disconnect from reality.
Dwedit 9mo ago
Use the reader view button.
voiper1 9mo ago
>Blockchain... NFTs >The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence. I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
- dvt 9mo ago
  Yeah that comparison doesn't pass the smell test. Blockchain/crypto were purely financial instruments and for better or worse, a new financial instrument is very different than a new tech innovation; tbh there was a thin veneer of tech when it comes to crypto/blockchain, but the magic was because of the money, not because of the tech. AI is different because the magic clearly is because of the tech. The fact that we get this emergent behavior out of (what essentially amounts to) polynomial fitting is pretty surprising even for the most skeptical of critics.
- zos_kia 9mo ago
  I think the author is saying that a specific crowd, which happened to be very vocal and excited about web3 and NFTs, is also very vocal and excited about AI. In my personal experience they are right, a lot of the hustler types around me who were trying to get everyone to "invest" in digital land are now doomposting about AI. It's not a very legible situation for people outside of the profession, and a lot of them believe it's just another grift that will blow up in a few years.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- magicalist 9mo ago
  > I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument? Squares are rectangles. The existence of rectangles that aren't squares doesn't negate that.
- skeeter2020 9mo ago
thomassmith65 9mo ago
The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate. It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was. It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time. AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
- mortenjorck 9mo ago
  "AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.
  - almosthere 9mo ago
    it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.
- naravara 9mo ago
  I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get. The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.
whynotminot 9mo ago
This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong. Lazy.
almosthere 9mo ago
For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it? for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
ozgung 9mo ago
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
- goatlover 9mo ago
  I'd say AR & VR were hyped to be as big as AI is now, but just haven't fully delivered on the promise yet. 3D printing was similarly hyped for a time. Same with blockchain. Nuclear power in the 50s was hyped to be the future of energy. The point is to take the hype with a grain of salt and knowledge that not all hyped technologies transformed the world as promised. Maybe AI is like the internet or electricity. But maybe the claims about AGI/ASI and full automation are just hype.
seertaak 9mo ago
To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time. My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw. These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure. But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.
- tomlue 9mo ago
  "This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different. Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves. The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.
  - spidersouris 9mo ago
    > Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years Source?
    - tomlue 9mo ago
freetonik 9mo ago
>3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. For what it’s worth, not a single other technology in the list made any sort of impact on my work. For better or worse, LLMs did. Well, okay, quantum computing actually affected me a lot because I worked at a quantum hardware manufacturer, but that’s different.
atleastoptimal 9mo ago
If you can't distinguish the actual utility and progress of AI from it's annoying hype-men then it's hard to take your dismissal of AI seriously. Failure to appreciate changes in AI will have left you calling every shot wrong over the past 5 years. While AI models continue to improve at an exponential rate, you'll cling to your facile maxims like "dude it's just predicting the next token it isn't real intelligence".
cladopa 9mo ago
A very cynical article. Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine. Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble. AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  > Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. Except for the minor bit that AI doesn't work today, and it is not yet clear if it ever will.
  - Gud 9mo ago
    It does work
smitty1e 9mo ago
This Andrew Klavan interview on AI is worth your time, if not an independent submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw "Today, I'm speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and and George D. Montañez, Director of the AMISTAD Lab at Harvey Mudd College–both of whom are extremely knowledgable on the topic of artificial intelligence. During the course of our conversation, they discuss the asymmetry between human intelligence & AI, the inability of AI to ascribe meaning to raw data, and the limitations of large language models. The real question though is: are we screwed? Let's find out."
CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago
Said elsewhere on this post... "AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Is just propaganda... Iran is 2 weeks from a nuclear weapon We obliterated Iran's nuclear dreams Russia is fighting with shovels Russia is on the verge of swarming Europe What would Joost Meerloo say about it, I wonder.
raintrees 9mo ago
to me, ai seems likely to become a new user interface, just like gui did from cli. abstract away a lot of the mechanics of working with data/information. helpful, when literacy seems to be trending in a downward direction.
senko 9mo ago
The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech: > 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. ...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed: > microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cloud, EVs, 5G ...and presents this as evidence that the current hyped tech (AI) will fail: > Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming. When the article needs to construct disingenious arguments, I'm not interested in its conclusion. But wait! If you actually read to the end, there's a plot twist! > The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality. Who said anything about winner takes all? You just burned a "this time is different" straw man and then conclude that "winner takes all" is not realistic? At this moment I'm wondering if the article was in fact written by a quantized 8B LLM. Surely people don't do such non-sequiturs and then expect to be taken seriously. But of course not. This is not an argument. This is preaching to the choir. Preach, brother, preach.
- pedalpete 9mo ago
  Exactly! If this post had been written 20 years ago it would have started with Internet, handheld computers, electric cars...The problem is the same dudes. Putting beanie babies in with Quantum Computing and Nuclear Power completely ignores the potential life changing elements of some technologies, even if they don't work. Oh, and smart glasses he put in there, so he'll be eating his words in 2 years.
  - graemep 9mo ago
    No-one thought the internet was a failed technology in 2006. It was a vital tool by then. Handheld computers were an expanding market, dominated by Blackberry. EVs were an immature technology but hybrids like the Prius were selling.
    - senko 9mo ago
      You may remember this video featuring Facebook with a ridiculously high $15B valuation, Skype, YouTube and other failures: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
parliament32 9mo ago
When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation being far faster than typing, it's not used all that often because.. the error rate is still too high for it to be useful, because errors in speech-to-text are fundamentally an unsolvable problem (you can only get so far with background noise filtering and accounting for accents etc). I see the parallel in how LLM hallucinations are fundamentally an unsolvable component of transformers-based models, and I suspect LLM usage in 20 years will be around the level of speech-to-text today: ubiquitously in the background, you use it here and there to set a timer or talk to a device, but ultimately not useful for any serious work.
- johnfn 9mo ago
  I'm curious about the statement that hallucinations are "fundamentally unsolvable". I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code - by which I mean a reference to something which doesn't exist at all - in many months. I have had great luck driving hallucinations to effectively 0% by using a language with static typechecking, telling LLMs to iterate on type errors until there are none left, and of course having a robust unit and e2e test suite. I mean, sure, I run into other problems -- it does make logic errors at some rate, but those I would hardly categorize the same as hallucinations.
  - bogzz 9mo ago
    ChatGPT 5.2 kept gaslighting me yesterday telling me that LLMs were explainable with Shapley values, and it kept referencing papers which talk about LLMs, and about SHAP, but talk about LLMs being used to explain the SHAP values of other ML models. I encounter stuff like this every week, I don't know how you don't. I suppose a well-structured codebase in a statically typed language might not provide as much of a surface for hallucinations to present themselves? But like you say, logical problems of course still occur.
bogzz 9mo ago
LLMs are really a marvel, GPT 2 actually inspired me to go back to college (not directly, rather I needed to understand how it worked). I have unlimited derision for morally spineless worms who disingenuously make it out to be more than it is-- looking at Dario, Sam, and the silly CEO of Control AI. Also, I hate to say it but Andrej Karpathy on twitter-- he's a worthless follow now. I can't blame, but am daily exasperated by media figures who can't help but go with what they hear prominent individuals in the field say. If I were a junior now, and less confident, I would be abandoning my career in this climate. LLMs are not going away. They will get a little better than they are now, and new model paradigms will come around at some point. But this tale of massive redundancy and skyrocketing unemployment is not going to come from LLMs. This is the only reason why I cannot wait for a pop, and pray to God that it comes sooner than later. I just want to feel good about technology again. I want to tinker, to feel positivity, to know how sustainable the tools I'm using actually are. I don't want to be reminded daily of the disgusting reality of unbridled capitalism.
tim333 9mo ago
I always figured AI would be a big deal from childhood onwards and wrote about it for my college entrance exam in 1980 or so. That doesn't apply to any of >3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX It's quite a different thing, more on the level of the evolution of life on earth and quite unlike all that junk.
kypro 9mo ago
I invested in Tesla extremely early (2011) because electric cars, if built correctly, would obviously make great cars, and Elon was one of the few people I actually thought had a shot at doing it. I was right that blockchain was BS and all the "not sure about Bitcoin, but blockchain will be big" people were idiots. I've been right for the last couple of years on AI and that people were vastly underestimating it when it came to it's coding potential. And I put my money where my mouth was here. In 2021 when GPT-3 came out I decided almost immediately I needed to invest a significant amount of my net worth in Google simply as hedge against AI destroying knowledge work jobs. Which at the time I thought was probably going to happen around 2030 not realising how far LLMs could go with reasoning. I'm not particularly intelligent ("only" top 1-2% IQ), but my ability to predict the future is very good. If you have a skill you're unusually good you might relate to how it's strange other people find it so hard to do that thing you find kinda easy. For me that's predicting things and computers. Since I was a young teen I have been worrying about AI. Most of my IRL best friends I have made from talking about AI risk in 2010s when I was studying AI. Admittedly I got some of the details wrong back then. In 2010 I thought a lot of manual labour jobs would be easier to automate first – warehouse work, mail, taxis, buses, trains, etc. I worried primarily about the economic and political ramifications, and much less about ASI scenario (at least in this half of the century). But I think still I got the general timeframes and direction right. This was the decade I was concerned about. I'm so scared right now... My whole life I've had nightmares about AI. I know there are some people who talk about how AI is an existential risk, but it feels like they don't internalise it like I do. They're not prepping like me for one, not that you really can prep for what's coming. If they're concerned why don't they have the nightmares of the omnipresent AI which you can't out think or punch to protect those you love? AI is so powerful in the scariest ways. Super viruses, mass surveillance and control, mind reading, unimaginable sci-fi weapons. It's like a horror story, but suddenly real. I am an OG AI doomer, but until the last few months I've at least always had some doubt in my mind about whether I'm right, perhaps not about the risk of AI broadly, but about whether we'd actually be able to develop highly capable AIs while I still have a lot of my life ahead of me. In my opinion this time is different, and what I've been worrying about for the last couple of decades is now here. We are collectively the indigenous peoples of America and the Europeans have just arrived in the new world. The risk vectors are now endless and how this all plays out is hard to know exactly. What we do know is that the majority of ways this will play out are bad, and some are incomprehensibly bad. Some may achieve status and wealth in the near-term, but longer-term we're all dead, or worse. I always worry these comments make me sound like a lunatic, I think I am, but I hope I am. I hope you will all forgive me, but I just need to shout about this tonight while I still can. We need to stop this insanity. Data centers need to be nuked. You may doubt me now, but in time you will understand. Hopefully I won't be around to say I told you so. Please make the best of the time we have left.
madrox 9mo ago
I got my first tech job in 2001. I've been doing this a while and ridden all the waves. There are two kinds of waves. The ones that don't require collective belief in them to succeed, and those that do. The latter are kinds like crypto and social media. The former is mobile...and AI. If no one else in the world had access to AI except me, I would appear superhuman to everyone in the world. People would see my level of output and be utterly shocked at how I can do so much so quickly. It doesn't matter if others don't use AI for me to appreciate AI. In fact, the more other people don't use AI, the better it works out for me. I'm sympathetic to people who feel like they are against it on principle because scummy influencers are talking about it, but I don't think they're doing themselves any favors.
- bigstrat2003 9mo ago
  > If no one else in the world had access to AI except me, I would appear superhuman to everyone in the world. You really wouldn't. AI simply isn't that useful because it is so unreliable.
  - madrox 9mo ago
    I have found that to be utterly untrue
esperent 9mo ago
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles... So you can't really start an article by picking inventions that fit your narrative and ignoring everything else.
- enraged_camel 9mo ago
  The article is trash. The only reason it got voted to the front page is because the author is salty about AI.
  - lern_too_spel 9mo ago
    It's worse than AI slop. Unlike this article, AI slop usually includes reasonable supporting evidence. The only problem with AI slop is that this supporting evidence is presented in an annoying Buzzfeed-like way by default prompts.
- dwoldrich 9mo ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Selective whinging indeed. Also meta-platitude whinging like > The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality. Sometimes the winner deserves to win, AND that's a good thing even at scale. It kindof depends.
  - nicbou 9mo ago
    The winner that deserved to win might turn into the complacent monopoly pf tomorrow. It might vow to Not Be Evil for a while, but the investors will demand that it does whatever it takes to grow.
    - dwoldrich 9mo ago
xeckr 9mo ago
Blatant strawman.
jasonlotito 9mo ago
I feel like someone is in a bubble of Crypto-bros. That does not instill confidence.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Nevermark 9mo ago
What do these lasting success stories have in common? • Self-reinforcing chemical metabolisms • DNA as a template for reproduction • Multi-cell cooperation • Multi-cell specialization • Nerve cells • Neural ganglia • Nervous systems • Brains • Self-awareness • Language • Written language • Books • Printing press • Wireless communication • Transistors • Digital memory • Computer processors • Networking • Internet • AI Answer: They all introduced dramatic qualitative and quantitative improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, interaction, speed, reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and application of information. AI is on its way to being self-designed. It is already assisting in its own design, speeding up work, by doing "mundane" things that would otherwise take people more time to do. Intelligence has not been an S-curve technology. AI, the systematic automation, manufacturing and increasingly recursive improvement of intelligence, is not an S-curve technology.
busko 9mo ago
If you believe marketing hype, then that's exactly what it is... Hype. If you speak to industry professionals and retain a healthy scepticism, you don't have to look far to find people that absolutely do not believe the marketing. Quite frankly I like that advances in say quantum computing are publically announced. The hype around what that means for society and our view of the universe is probably where you want to put on that reserved scepticism hat. Similarly smart glasses were and are a thing, but society is rightly apprehensive about the impact, so the hype has dropped off.
space_invaders 9mo ago
I love how people run to shout "this time is different, eh?" in an ironic tone while ignoring that a lot of times, yes, it was different. Covid was different -- people dismissed it initially saying it was going to be like the 2009 Swine flu or the seasonal chicken flu we see on media. The iPhone was different -- many columnists said it was just a fancier PDA and that Palm already had the market. The 2008 crisis was different -- the signs of a housing bubble were present but were dismissed. The derivatives made it different and it imploded. There are times when things are actually different and you should be able to identify them. AI is one of them. I don't even need to elaborate much, as a programmer it's clear how this a game-changer. We are moving past the era when programs were just predictable if/else chains with regex to a world where you can accept non-deterministic, never-before seen inputs and have them to be interpreted accurately. Just like the Internet added another "dimension" to computer applications, AI is now adding another "dimension" previously unreachable.* * Just as you could make a big local LAN before the Internet, it's obvious that we had past incarnations of the current technology that gave some taste of that dimension, but did not fully "unlock" it. This time, it's truly different.
thih9 9mo ago
No; the shift to AI seems to me like the shift to smartphones. Sure, not the only tool, but very significant and affecting everyday life. Unlike Stadia, 3d tv, or other examples listed in the article.
hinkley 9mo ago
This time is different. That’s why we are even discussing it. The problem is that this time is 20% different, not the 80% people are implying it is. So the same things that killed it last time will kill it again, unless that 20% has gotten us up some stairstep we got stuck on last time. But then the next thing will get us and we will go back to a new and improved version of the old thing.
pgt 9mo ago
No, this time is different.
hdgvhicv 9mo ago
I laughed at all those except Quantum Computing and Small Nuclear reactors which I did t have a timeframe for. I suspect that small nuclear will have been overtaken by renewables. AI concerns me, it feels like it will come faster and at least as impactful on workers as the Industrial Revolution. The latter at least occurred over centuries and didn’t apply globally at the same time. Is this round hype? Probably. Are we heading for a y2k crash? Probably. However those who laughed at the dotcom boom and doubled their holdings in department stores and blockbuster video didn’t do well in the long run.
sunaookami 9mo ago
>and it was nearly always dudes Yeah I know what you are, don't try to pretend.
- keybored 9mo ago
  Dude complaining about dudes. It’s nearly always like that.
- Gud 9mo ago
  And wtf does it even matter? Such a weird comment to even make.
halis 9mo ago
You forgot about crypto, 3D printing and games with virtual real estate.
waffletower 9mo ago
The author, and even posters here in the comments, have neglected to speak of a related and highly successful technology -- search engines -- instead focusing on the broader internet as a technological development. Google's search engine product has earned billions. At a minimum, AI has disrupted, transformed and radically improved this ubiquitous technology already. That alone, and AI has many other transformative applications already productized (Claude Code anyone?), earns its place well ahead of the hyped technologies list the author has provided.
prpl 9mo ago
It is different this time. In certain professions it wasn't uncommon to spend $3k/year or more (in 2026 dollars) on software licenses - Adobe CS4/CS6 etc... with a handful of products easily pushed over that. In other professions. All sorts of other jobs require people to pay for their own tools as well. What I get for $150/month I'd easily pay twice or more for that if I had to, even out of pocket if I had to for current functionality - even if was frozen in time. I'd imagine many, if not most, readers on hacker news would do the same. Multiplied across the entire population of software developers (and broader population using AI) - I think it's clear to see what AI is worth in a grounded way.
irenetusuq 8mo ago
[dead]

199 points by speckx 9mo ago

I would suggest editing the title to "This Time is Different". I think that captures the essence much better. Love the Sir Terry reference.

javawizard 9mo ago
I wonder if that was an automated HN edit? Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.
- some_furry 9mo ago
  Usually HN only auto-edits on first submission. If you go in and undo it manually as the submitter, you can force it to read how you intend.
  - pinkmuffinere 9mo ago
    oh interesting, TIL I can go edit my submission titles! That's useful, I've definitely submitted stuff and gotten a less-good title due to the automated fixes, so I'll have to pay attention to this next time
  - meatmanek 9mo ago
    Maybe I'm only noticing the times when it messes things up, but it kinda seems like these auto-edits cause a lot of confusion that could be avoided if they were shown up-front to submitters, who would then have the option to undo them. Or maybe judicious use of an LLM here could be helpful. Replace the auto-edits with a prompt? Ask an LLM to judge whether the auto-edited title still retains its original meaning? Run the old and new titles through an embedding model and make sure they still point in roughly the same direction?
wlesieutre 9mo ago
And the HTTP headers x-clacks-overhead GNU Terry Pratchett
GMoromisato 9mo ago
Agreed--I clicked to read an article about the physics of time or something. Was sorely disappointed.

pavel_lishin 9mo ago

Title got mangled somehow, the original title is "This time is different".

Windchaser 9mo ago

For me, this captures it: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use. > No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops. - Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"

NickNaraghi 9mo ago

Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.

MarkusQ 9mo ago
Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
Joker_vD 9mo ago
A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application. What is meta-technology?

TeamDman 9mo ago

I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way. New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
edent 9mo ago
OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated. I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
- troosevelt 9mo ago
  You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers. I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
  - Joker_vD 9mo ago
    > For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. Well, no, the ratio is most definitely not 1-to-1.
  - edent 9mo ago
    The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype. MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train. Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything. I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype. Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.

BoppreH 9mo ago

What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group? Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.

p-o 9mo ago

By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.

NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted. Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
- p-o 9mo ago
  Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
  - wiseowise 9mo ago
    > but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board. Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
    - anthonypasq 9mo ago
      the end goal is productivity growth, aka the point of nearly every technology ever invented. The human story is about how we learn to do more with less.

dist-epoch 9mo ago

Nuclear weapons - this time is different Internet - this time is different iPhone - this time is different

redwood 9mo ago

I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.

edent 9mo ago
That sounds like an interesting article. You should write it.
- goatlover 9mo ago
  Or have an LLM write it and then we can judge whether the OP is wrong about whether "this time is different".

riddley 9mo ago

Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?

jjkaczor 9mo ago
Heh - that went right off the cliff, when... well, I will let the reader research that themselves...
- Insanity 9mo ago
  That’s dark. But.. accurate.
- hnuser123456 9mo ago
  The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".
hnuser123456 9mo ago
Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands. I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too. I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too. And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far without. I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it. Maybe if they could let go of some of the cynicism, they could find something to be optimistic about. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, but that doesn't mean nothing is good.
- jna_sh 9mo ago
  > I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it. From the post, which is not a very long one: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists"

lxgr 9mo ago

This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

arduanika 9mo ago
That's not a refutation. It's a list of silly cartoons designed to make the reader feel smart, thrown together by one of the leaders of the AI cult. Do you people know any other writers?

GMoromisato 9mo ago

I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows. We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right. The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong. If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible. Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do. [p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]

chasd00 9mo ago

Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.

stego-tech 9mo ago

Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors. "This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time. "NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance. "Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce. And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before. I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.

paulddraper 9mo ago
Is this “nothing ever happens”
- inigyou 9mo ago
  Short of insider trading, betting on things not happening is apparently the best way to make money on those shady betting sites.

hoten 9mo ago

this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?

tengbretson 9mo ago

LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still. It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.

ibejoeb 9mo ago
There's another point, too. Detractors say LLMs will never advance to whatever threshold they consider meaningful. Fine. We're working on other paradigms, too, though. Just because a lot of o people are productizing LLMs doesn't mean the state of the art isn't advancing in parallel and AGI isn't in the cards.
ericmcer 9mo ago
Agree, LLMs are just another tool. Treating them as chatbots is a very basic way of using them. The future is intelligent engineers embedding them in traditional systems and having them perform specific roles.
asdff 9mo ago
Hiring seems to be way down in my world as a result of LLM. It isn't so much people staring blankly that I worry about, but companies thinking hey maybe we can get away with not replacing headcount for a while longer, or maybe this tool will help bootstrap the offshore team to be at parity with the expensive onshore team.

CompoundEyes 9mo ago

I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.

shimman 9mo ago
Can you give an example of such features?
- CompoundEyes 9mo ago
  Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_plans/ https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...
  - skeeter2020 9mo ago
    What's the feature that was built though? This sounds like low-value refactoring. They are fundamentally different development workflows.
    - CompoundEyes 9mo ago
      Yes porting and also implementation of new features. Typical client requests for new functionality in business to business software.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
keriati1 9mo ago

wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago

When non-programmers make sweeping statements about LLMs. Deep disconnect from reality.

Dwedit 9mo ago

Use the reader view button.

voiper1 9mo ago

>Blockchain... NFTs >The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence. I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?

dvt 9mo ago
Yeah that comparison doesn't pass the smell test. Blockchain/crypto were purely financial instruments and for better or worse, a new financial instrument is very different than a new tech innovation; tbh there was a thin veneer of tech when it comes to crypto/blockchain, but the magic was because of the money, not because of the tech. AI is different because the magic clearly is because of the tech. The fact that we get this emergent behavior out of (what essentially amounts to) polynomial fitting is pretty surprising even for the most skeptical of critics.
zos_kia 9mo ago
I think the author is saying that a specific crowd, which happened to be very vocal and excited about web3 and NFTs, is also very vocal and excited about AI. In my personal experience they are right, a lot of the hustler types around me who were trying to get everyone to "invest" in digital land are now doomposting about AI. It's not a very legible situation for people outside of the profession, and a lot of them believe it's just another grift that will blow up in a few years.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
magicalist 9mo ago
> I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument? Squares are rectangles. The existence of rectangles that aren't squares doesn't negate that.
skeeter2020 9mo ago

thomassmith65 9mo ago

The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate. It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was. It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time. AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.

mortenjorck 9mo ago
"AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.
- almosthere 9mo ago
  it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.
naravara 9mo ago
I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get. The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.

whynotminot 9mo ago

This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong. Lazy.

almosthere 9mo ago

For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it? for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.

ozgung 9mo ago

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.

goatlover 9mo ago
I'd say AR & VR were hyped to be as big as AI is now, but just haven't fully delivered on the promise yet. 3D printing was similarly hyped for a time. Same with blockchain. Nuclear power in the 50s was hyped to be the future of energy. The point is to take the hype with a grain of salt and knowledge that not all hyped technologies transformed the world as promised. Maybe AI is like the internet or electricity. But maybe the claims about AGI/ASI and full automation are just hype.

seertaak 9mo ago

To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker. This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me. I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time. My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw. These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure. But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.

tomlue 9mo ago
"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different. Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves. The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.
- spidersouris 9mo ago
  > Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years Source?
  - tomlue 9mo ago

freetonik 9mo ago

>3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. For what it’s worth, not a single other technology in the list made any sort of impact on my work. For better or worse, LLMs did. Well, okay, quantum computing actually affected me a lot because I worked at a quantum hardware manufacturer, but that’s different.

atleastoptimal 9mo ago

If you can't distinguish the actual utility and progress of AI from it's annoying hype-men then it's hard to take your dismissal of AI seriously. Failure to appreciate changes in AI will have left you calling every shot wrong over the past 5 years. While AI models continue to improve at an exponential rate, you'll cling to your facile maxims like "dude it's just predicting the next token it isn't real intelligence".

cladopa 9mo ago

A very cynical article. Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine. Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble. AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.

bigstrat2003 9mo ago
> Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today. Except for the minor bit that AI doesn't work today, and it is not yet clear if it ever will.
- Gud 9mo ago
  It does work

smitty1e 9mo ago

This Andrew Klavan interview on AI is worth your time, if not an independent submission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw "Today, I'm speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and and George D. Montañez, Director of the AMISTAD Lab at Harvey Mudd College–both of whom are extremely knowledgable on the topic of artificial intelligence. During the course of our conversation, they discuss the asymmetry between human intelligence & AI, the inability of AI to ascribe meaning to raw data, and the limitations of large language models. The real question though is: are we screwed? Let's find out."

CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago

Said elsewhere on this post... "AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!" Is just propaganda... Iran is 2 weeks from a nuclear weapon We obliterated Iran's nuclear dreams Russia is fighting with shovels Russia is on the verge of swarming Europe What would Joost Meerloo say about it, I wonder.

raintrees 9mo ago

to me, ai seems likely to become a new user interface, just like gui did from cli. abstract away a lot of the mechanics of working with data/information. helpful, when literacy seems to be trending in a downward direction.

senko 9mo ago

The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech: > 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. ...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed: > microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cloud, EVs, 5G ...and presents this as evidence that the current hyped tech (AI) will fail: > Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming. When the article needs to construct disingenious arguments, I'm not interested in its conclusion. But wait! If you actually read to the end, there's a plot twist! > The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality. Who said anything about winner takes all? You just burned a "this time is different" straw man and then conclude that "winner takes all" is not realistic? At this moment I'm wondering if the article was in fact written by a quantized 8B LLM. Surely people don't do such non-sequiturs and then expect to be taken seriously. But of course not. This is not an argument. This is preaching to the choir. Preach, brother, preach.

pedalpete 9mo ago
Exactly! If this post had been written 20 years ago it would have started with Internet, handheld computers, electric cars...The problem is the same dudes. Putting beanie babies in with Quantum Computing and Nuclear Power completely ignores the potential life changing elements of some technologies, even if they don't work. Oh, and smart glasses he put in there, so he'll be eating his words in 2 years.
- graemep 9mo ago
  No-one thought the internet was a failed technology in 2006. It was a vital tool by then. Handheld computers were an expanding market, dominated by Blackberry. EVs were an immature technology but hybrids like the Prius were selling.
  - senko 9mo ago
    You may remember this video featuring Facebook with a ridiculously high $15B valuation, Skype, YouTube and other failures: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

parliament32 9mo ago

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation being far faster than typing, it's not used all that often because.. the error rate is still too high for it to be useful, because errors in speech-to-text are fundamentally an unsolvable problem (you can only get so far with background noise filtering and accounting for accents etc). I see the parallel in how LLM hallucinations are fundamentally an unsolvable component of transformers-based models, and I suspect LLM usage in 20 years will be around the level of speech-to-text today: ubiquitously in the background, you use it here and there to set a timer or talk to a device, but ultimately not useful for any serious work.

johnfn 9mo ago
I'm curious about the statement that hallucinations are "fundamentally unsolvable". I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code - by which I mean a reference to something which doesn't exist at all - in many months. I have had great luck driving hallucinations to effectively 0% by using a language with static typechecking, telling LLMs to iterate on type errors until there are none left, and of course having a robust unit and e2e test suite. I mean, sure, I run into other problems -- it does make logic errors at some rate, but those I would hardly categorize the same as hallucinations.
- bogzz 9mo ago
  ChatGPT 5.2 kept gaslighting me yesterday telling me that LLMs were explainable with Shapley values, and it kept referencing papers which talk about LLMs, and about SHAP, but talk about LLMs being used to explain the SHAP values of other ML models. I encounter stuff like this every week, I don't know how you don't. I suppose a well-structured codebase in a statically typed language might not provide as much of a surface for hallucinations to present themselves? But like you say, logical problems of course still occur.

bogzz 9mo ago

LLMs are really a marvel, GPT 2 actually inspired me to go back to college (not directly, rather I needed to understand how it worked). I have unlimited derision for morally spineless worms who disingenuously make it out to be more than it is-- looking at Dario, Sam, and the silly CEO of Control AI. Also, I hate to say it but Andrej Karpathy on twitter-- he's a worthless follow now. I can't blame, but am daily exasperated by media figures who can't help but go with what they hear prominent individuals in the field say. If I were a junior now, and less confident, I would be abandoning my career in this climate. LLMs are not going away. They will get a little better than they are now, and new model paradigms will come around at some point. But this tale of massive redundancy and skyrocketing unemployment is not going to come from LLMs. This is the only reason why I cannot wait for a pop, and pray to God that it comes sooner than later. I just want to feel good about technology again. I want to tinker, to feel positivity, to know how sustainable the tools I'm using actually are. I don't want to be reminded daily of the disgusting reality of unbridled capitalism.

tim333 9mo ago

I always figured AI would be a big deal from childhood onwards and wrote about it for my college entrance exam in 1980 or so. That doesn't apply to any of >3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX It's quite a different thing, more on the level of the evolution of life on earth and quite unlike all that junk.

kypro 9mo ago

I invested in Tesla extremely early (2011) because electric cars, if built correctly, would obviously make great cars, and Elon was one of the few people I actually thought had a shot at doing it. I was right that blockchain was BS and all the "not sure about Bitcoin, but blockchain will be big" people were idiots. I've been right for the last couple of years on AI and that people were vastly underestimating it when it came to it's coding potential. And I put my money where my mouth was here. In 2021 when GPT-3 came out I decided almost immediately I needed to invest a significant amount of my net worth in Google simply as hedge against AI destroying knowledge work jobs. Which at the time I thought was probably going to happen around 2030 not realising how far LLMs could go with reasoning. I'm not particularly intelligent ("only" top 1-2% IQ), but my ability to predict the future is very good. If you have a skill you're unusually good you might relate to how it's strange other people find it so hard to do that thing you find kinda easy. For me that's predicting things and computers. Since I was a young teen I have been worrying about AI. Most of my IRL best friends I have made from talking about AI risk in 2010s when I was studying AI. Admittedly I got some of the details wrong back then. In 2010 I thought a lot of manual labour jobs would be easier to automate first – warehouse work, mail, taxis, buses, trains, etc. I worried primarily about the economic and political ramifications, and much less about ASI scenario (at least in this half of the century). But I think still I got the general timeframes and direction right. This was the decade I was concerned about. I'm so scared right now... My whole life I've had nightmares about AI. I know there are some people who talk about how AI is an existential risk, but it feels like they don't internalise it like I do. They're not prepping like me for one, not that you really can prep for what's coming. If they're concerned why don't they have the nightmares of the omnipresent AI which you can't out think or punch to protect those you love? AI is so powerful in the scariest ways. Super viruses, mass surveillance and control, mind reading, unimaginable sci-fi weapons. It's like a horror story, but suddenly real. I am an OG AI doomer, but until the last few months I've at least always had some doubt in my mind about whether I'm right, perhaps not about the risk of AI broadly, but about whether we'd actually be able to develop highly capable AIs while I still have a lot of my life ahead of me. In my opinion this time is different, and what I've been worrying about for the last couple of decades is now here. We are collectively the indigenous peoples of America and the Europeans have just arrived in the new world. The risk vectors are now endless and how this all plays out is hard to know exactly. What we do know is that the majority of ways this will play out are bad, and some are incomprehensibly bad. Some may achieve status and wealth in the near-term, but longer-term we're all dead, or worse. I always worry these comments make me sound like a lunatic, I think I am, but I hope I am. I hope you will all forgive me, but I just need to shout about this tonight while I still can. We need to stop this insanity. Data centers need to be nuked. You may doubt me now, but in time you will understand. Hopefully I won't be around to say I told you so. Please make the best of the time we have left.

madrox 9mo ago

I got my first tech job in 2001. I've been doing this a while and ridden all the waves. There are two kinds of waves. The ones that don't require collective belief in them to succeed, and those that do. The latter are kinds like crypto and social media. The former is mobile...and AI. If no one else in the world had access to AI except me, I would appear superhuman to everyone in the world. People would see my level of output and be utterly shocked at how I can do so much so quickly. It doesn't matter if others don't use AI for me to appreciate AI. In fact, the more other people don't use AI, the better it works out for me. I'm sympathetic to people who feel like they are against it on principle because scummy influencers are talking about it, but I don't think they're doing themselves any favors.

bigstrat2003 9mo ago
> If no one else in the world had access to AI except me, I would appear superhuman to everyone in the world. You really wouldn't. AI simply isn't that useful because it is so unreliable.
- madrox 9mo ago
  I have found that to be utterly untrue

esperent 9mo ago

> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX. Agreed, these things all failed to live up to the hype. But these didn't: Electricity, cheap computing, calculators, photography, the internet, the steam engine, the printing press, tv, cars, gps, bicycles... So you can't really start an article by picking inventions that fit your narrative and ignoring everything else.

enraged_camel 9mo ago
The article is trash. The only reason it got voted to the front page is because the author is salty about AI.
- lern_too_spel 9mo ago
  It's worse than AI slop. Unlike this article, AI slop usually includes reasonable supporting evidence. The only problem with AI slop is that this supporting evidence is presented in an annoying Buzzfeed-like way by default prompts.
dwoldrich 9mo ago
Exactly my thoughts. Selective whinging indeed. Also meta-platitude whinging like > The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality. Sometimes the winner deserves to win, AND that's a good thing even at scale. It kindof depends.
- nicbou 9mo ago
  The winner that deserved to win might turn into the complacent monopoly pf tomorrow. It might vow to Not Be Evil for a while, but the investors will demand that it does whatever it takes to grow.
  - dwoldrich 9mo ago

xeckr 9mo ago

Blatant strawman.

jasonlotito 9mo ago

I feel like someone is in a bubble of Crypto-bros. That does not instill confidence.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Nevermark 9mo ago

What do these lasting success stories have in common? • Self-reinforcing chemical metabolisms • DNA as a template for reproduction • Multi-cell cooperation • Multi-cell specialization • Nerve cells • Neural ganglia • Nervous systems • Brains • Self-awareness • Language • Written language • Books • Printing press • Wireless communication • Transistors • Digital memory • Computer processors • Networking • Internet • AI Answer: They all introduced dramatic qualitative and quantitative improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, interaction, speed, reliability, flexibility, adaptability, and application of information. AI is on its way to being self-designed. It is already assisting in its own design, speeding up work, by doing "mundane" things that would otherwise take people more time to do. Intelligence has not been an S-curve technology. AI, the systematic automation, manufacturing and increasingly recursive improvement of intelligence, is not an S-curve technology.

busko 9mo ago

If you believe marketing hype, then that's exactly what it is... Hype. If you speak to industry professionals and retain a healthy scepticism, you don't have to look far to find people that absolutely do not believe the marketing. Quite frankly I like that advances in say quantum computing are publically announced. The hype around what that means for society and our view of the universe is probably where you want to put on that reserved scepticism hat. Similarly smart glasses were and are a thing, but society is rightly apprehensive about the impact, so the hype has dropped off.

space_invaders 9mo ago

I love how people run to shout "this time is different, eh?" in an ironic tone while ignoring that a lot of times, yes, it was different. Covid was different -- people dismissed it initially saying it was going to be like the 2009 Swine flu or the seasonal chicken flu we see on media. The iPhone was different -- many columnists said it was just a fancier PDA and that Palm already had the market. The 2008 crisis was different -- the signs of a housing bubble were present but were dismissed. The derivatives made it different and it imploded. There are times when things are actually different and you should be able to identify them. AI is one of them. I don't even need to elaborate much, as a programmer it's clear how this a game-changer. We are moving past the era when programs were just predictable if/else chains with regex to a world where you can accept non-deterministic, never-before seen inputs and have them to be interpreted accurately. Just like the Internet added another "dimension" to computer applications, AI is now adding another "dimension" previously unreachable.* * Just as you could make a big local LAN before the Internet, it's obvious that we had past incarnations of the current technology that gave some taste of that dimension, but did not fully "unlock" it. This time, it's truly different.

thih9 9mo ago

No; the shift to AI seems to me like the shift to smartphones. Sure, not the only tool, but very significant and affecting everyday life. Unlike Stadia, 3d tv, or other examples listed in the article.

hinkley 9mo ago

This time is different. That’s why we are even discussing it. The problem is that this time is 20% different, not the 80% people are implying it is. So the same things that killed it last time will kill it again, unless that 20% has gotten us up some stairstep we got stuck on last time. But then the next thing will get us and we will go back to a new and improved version of the old thing.

pgt 9mo ago

No, this time is different.

hdgvhicv 9mo ago

I laughed at all those except Quantum Computing and Small Nuclear reactors which I did t have a timeframe for. I suspect that small nuclear will have been overtaken by renewables. AI concerns me, it feels like it will come faster and at least as impactful on workers as the Industrial Revolution. The latter at least occurred over centuries and didn’t apply globally at the same time. Is this round hype? Probably. Are we heading for a y2k crash? Probably. However those who laughed at the dotcom boom and doubled their holdings in department stores and blockbuster video didn’t do well in the long run.

sunaookami 9mo ago

>and it was nearly always dudes Yeah I know what you are, don't try to pretend.

keybored 9mo ago
Dude complaining about dudes. It’s nearly always like that.
Gud 9mo ago
And wtf does it even matter? Such a weird comment to even make.

halis 9mo ago

You forgot about crypto, 3D printing and games with virtual real estate.

waffletower 9mo ago

The author, and even posters here in the comments, have neglected to speak of a related and highly successful technology -- search engines -- instead focusing on the broader internet as a technological development. Google's search engine product has earned billions. At a minimum, AI has disrupted, transformed and radically improved this ubiquitous technology already. That alone, and AI has many other transformative applications already productized (Claude Code anyone?), earns its place well ahead of the hyped technologies list the author has provided.

prpl 9mo ago

It is different this time. In certain professions it wasn't uncommon to spend $3k/year or more (in 2026 dollars) on software licenses - Adobe CS4/CS6 etc... with a handful of products easily pushed over that. In other professions. All sorts of other jobs require people to pay for their own tools as well. What I get for $150/month I'd easily pay twice or more for that if I had to, even out of pocket if I had to for current functionality - even if was frozen in time. I'd imagine many, if not most, readers on hacker news would do the same. Multiplied across the entire population of software developers (and broader population using AI) - I think it's clear to see what AI is worth in a grounded way.

irenetusuq 8mo ago

[dead]