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The AI Great Leap Forward
- arisAlexis 6mo agoThe outputs were wrong 2 years ago maybe.
- cafebabbe 6mo agoTry multithreaded code, it's wild (how wrong it is). I wonder how/where next models will learn thread safety.
- supliminal 6mo agoWhat’s the story with Klarna? Any details around it?
- madrox 6mo agoIt’s the punchline at the very end of the article. They ended up with a different SaaS vendor.
- supliminal 6mo agoYeah I read through it but all of that is surface level. Any real insider info? Not sure why I was downvoted. I read the post and the linked articles.
- ilovebnpl 6mo agoThey got rid of many employees replacing it with A.I thinking it would benefit the company. Now they’ve had multiple security issues, are under investor scrutiny and can’t rely on a robot to get them out of real world predicaments. don’t be fooled, they lie and deceive too. Klarna who? Investor fraud its what they do. #shutdown
- upsetpotato 6mo agoYeah, people being able to access accounts via recycled phone numbers is not good (this wasn’t their first time either lol and they’ve been fined for similar stuff before by Swedish regulators) Then the KYC bypass allowing fraud rings to buy 20k worth of products with stolen identities is outrages. Then the IPO stuff… That entire thing is a mess and there’s so many issues with their F-1A and being dishonest. Though this is just my subjective opinion and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
- ShacosTacos 6mo agoThe AI isn't a breakthrough; it's a distraction from the fact that the company's security and finances are a mess. It’s quite funny to now see Klarna offloading their security issues onto other companies (Google) while simultaneously suing them for $8 billion (PriceRunner v.s Google).
- badbadforyou 6mo agoYeah true, mid 2025 they announced it as “A.I innovation” and “collaboration” to fix AP2 without announcing the company then came back late 2025 to say it’s a collaboration with “Google” for security payment protocols etc — While also simultaneously suing Google for 8 billion with their company Price Runner lol. I guess they were having security issues for a while now and a few have been publicized recently which are the ones you’re talking about, but they kinda fit into the same issues they’ve had in the past and have been fined for like said by @upsetpotato
- westthebest 6mo ago[dead]
- younan 6mo ago[dead]
- mholm 6mo agoDecent sentiment and analogy, but writing this with AI with hackneyed examples undercuts the point
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- turtletontine 6mo agoI’m noticing one hallmark of blog posts made by people who talk to LLMs all day: they have 1-3 interesting points hidden in paragraphs upon paragraphs beating the horse dead. Your favorite LLM might tell you every thought is brilliant and all your words are beautiful, but please… edit it down. At the very least, out of respect for other people’s time.
- sph 6mo agoHaven’t you heard? Putting in effort is not cool any more. The best they can do is ask an LLM to edit it down.
- justherefornews 6mo agoIt's called body text or even "bread text" in some languages. It was historically meant to pad the pay for bread (writers got paid per word). Americans still do to this day and writing and blogs reflect it as well.
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- selfhoster11 6mo agoI didn't even realize that this is (allegedly) written with AI. If it's AI, then it's the kind of AI writing that's closer to the real deal and that I want to see more widely applied if AI is to be used.
- mwexler 6mo agoI actually found the examples to be both on theme and reflective of "If history doesn't repeat, it certainly echoes".
- IanCal 6mo ago> Today’s backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI. Getting real tired of people new to AI thinking only recent LLMs are AI somehow. BoW was a pretty solid technique and that only requires you to learn how to count to one.
- mrbungie 6mo agoWe can thank our AI overlords like sama and damodei for that.
- 348asGaq7 6mo agoThis is a great comparison. The US dominated software industry is centrally planned and in many ways run like a communist country, taking into account the whims of the current chairman in Washington. If the chairman dictates DEI, DEI it is. Most software developers put up the proper flags in their Twitter "bios" and purged opponents. The same developers now queue to work for Zuckerberg's "male energy" company. If the chairman and the industry dictate AI, AI it is. The same people who said girls and coal miners have to code now talk about efficiency, products and rationalize layoffs. This is the product of an industry that has been dominated by bullshitters for at least two decades.
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- skybrian 6mo agoIf you want to show that that there's a risk of disaster you need to do better than making a silly analogy. Companies will often start expensive projects that fail and then they pick themselves up and move on. Big, profitable companies can afford bigger failures. Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to experiment. So which companies are betting so big that it might actually threaten them? Oracle maybe?
- outside1234 6mo agoSeems clear to me that OpenAI at this point is a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse. This is why they are trying to IPO and dump their shares on the public market before they go bankrupt.
- skybrian 6mo agoSuppose they do somehow collapse. How does that cause wider problems? Their competitors will pick up customers.
- layer8 6mo agoIf they collapse, then because their value proposition doesn’t add up. It’s unclear why that should be different with their competitors then.
- skybrian 6mo agoIt looks like nobody is collapsing, but OpenAI might be behind Anthropic now: https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/ai-enterprise-revenue-anthropic-openai https://www.axios.com/2026/03/18/ai-enterprise-revenue-anthr... https://x.com/albrgr/status/2041288324464451617 https://x.com/albrgr/status/2041288324464451617
- e3df 6mo ago"Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to experiment." Only with the blessing of shareholders. Frankly Google's search box and ad-tech has been carrying all of its failed bets but at some point people will start questioning if Google is returning enough cash given the results of new investments. Google's management does not own the cash - it holds the cash on behalf of the owners.
- vingilot 6mo agoNote that the author of this blog post is also the author of a soon-to-be-published Manning book on safely implementing AI systems.
- gbnwl 6mo agoLiked the article in general, but > These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch. Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address, and will for some reason require humans to fix. Working at pace with agents I accrue tech debt every day, then go through the code nightly, again with agents, to clean and tidy everything up. The more I see this view espoused the more bizzare it seems. People's assumptions seem to be "if AI couldn't one shot this perfectly the first time, then it's useless to try to have it go back over the codebase and identify and address issues". This doesn't match my personal experience at all, second or third passes over code with CC or Codex are almost always helpful and weed out critical issues, but I'm open to hearing from the rest of the HN crowd on their experiences on this.
- apsurd 6mo agoTech debt used here is likely a catch-all term, and you're disagreeing, reasonably so, with one definition. I think human understanding of the surface area of a company is already very unwieldy. AI balloons the surface area. at some point using more AI to solve AI is reasonable! But to whatever extent a human needs to interface and manage this world, that's the accrued debt.
- hperrin 6mo agoAIs don’t produce well organized code. They duplicate effort, which is tech debt. Maybe one day they will be able to clear their own tech debt. And who knows, maybe they’ll still be heavily subsidized by VC money then.
- deltamidway 6mo agoGreat rant! Claw based propaganda posters makes me smile.
- cynicalsecurity 6mo agoOh god, don't get me started on this. The article goes full opera-level tragedy, like we're all marching into some corporate gulag where AI eats our souls and the lights go out forever. "The famine comes later" my ass. It's peak doomer porn, written to make you feel like the sky is falling instead of just another round of executive circle jerking. The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does. Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now. But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre. Been there many times. Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with delegating the project management to someone else below on the corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats. So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has been.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago>"Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does. The buzzwords you cite are the vulnerabilities of the corporations which predator consultancies rely on to make sales. I don't know that the corporate world is 'about' those things so much as it suffers from them.
- tim333 6mo agoComparing AI to steel production in the Great Leap Forward seems unfair. It's not some communist plan - it's a capitalist free for all similar to the industrial revolutions in the UK/US. It won't lead to a famine, it'll lead to the chaotic creative destruction capitalism usually produces.
- busterarm 6mo agoYou're mistaking communism/capitalism as economic systems for communism/capitalism as organizational structures. The latter is what the argument centers around. It's been argued frequently that families and tech companies are structured like socialist states. Central planning, flatter structures, division of labor...I'm not starting down that thread or opening up that debate. This only is not a capitalist structure but capitalism itself doesn't really offer any ideas about structure or governance beyond encouraging the free movement of capital.
- tim333 6mo agoFair enough.
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- operatingthetan 6mo ago>A prompt template behind a REST endpoint is not a model. Not pulling any punches over there. It does feel like 95% of the "AI industry" consists of wrappers and associated tools.
- sinuhe69 6mo agoThe organisation where my wife works ordered all mid-level leaders and above to take a mandatory AI course, mostly remote with two days on-site to present their capstone projects, costing 2x K USD (not including flights). The capstone projects sounded impressive, and the course was celebrated as a resounding success. However, one year later, as far as I know, none of the capstone projects have been implemented, including my wife's and other ones I know of. Having looked at some of the project descriptions, I realised that they would need to invest far more manpower, special expertise and time if they wanted to implement them with a moderate chance of success. I believe this is not uncommon in large organisations worldwide. BTW, it’s great that somebody has drawn a comparison with China’s Great Leap Forward. Not many people know about it and it always serves as a stark reminder of how crazy state-ordered “progress” could be.
- johnnienaked 6mo agoGood article and it's on the mark
- JackSlateur 6mo agoAt work, some team are going AI full speak ahead, for a year now Their product still sucks, their roadmap is still a joke, their product is still buggy, they are more people than ever and their cost has increased what did any of this actually produce?