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It's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do The demand for AI is currently ov

by vanuatu 5mo ago

It's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues. The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.

48terry 5mo ago
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming [...] companies growing 3x in a month while "Yes, but have you considered number go up?"
spinel 5mo ago
[dead]
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience: - The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable. - The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere - Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
  - ambicapter 5mo ago
    What's your definition of "successful people"?
    - vanuatu 5mo ago
      Self actualized, high optionality
      - samothrace 5mo ago
        Rich, rich
- robrain 5mo ago
  I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences. Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
  - noir_lord 5mo ago
    I'm English, my Danish friends have less of an English accent and are considerably more literate than the average of the people I interact with at work over most days. It isn't a moat, My partners written English surpasses mine and it is her third language.
  - aworks 5mo ago
    I, an American, was on a business trip in Sweden then a holiday in Scotland. It was easier to understand the Swedes than the Scots...
    - Biologist123 5mo ago
      Err…becuase we speak Scottish not English.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
  > but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it. Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    The ability of English to easily incorporate loanwords is because it has lost almost all word flexion from Old English, with very few exceptions, like the plural marker "-s". Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositions, there are no problems caused by phonetic mismatches with the words to which they are associated, like it happens in the languages where a borrowed noun must fit into a declension pattern, which can produce phonetically awkward words. While among the European languages, for English it is indeed the easiest to borrow new words, one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, and which would remedy various problems of English, like the necessity of knowing separately a written form and a spoken form for every word, or the existence of a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, or various difficulties to express various nuances using the existing modal verbs, or the too verbose methods for expressing certain verbal tenses, moods and voices. Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. Its moat is the inertia caused by its so widespread use in the present, which will prevent any other language to replace it, regardless of how much simpler and better that language would be.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
      > a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, This is actually another strength of English, not a weakness. > one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, The history of artificial languages (Esperanto in particular) is not encouraging in this regard. > Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. I wasn't really trying to suggest a technical advantage, but rather a cultural one. English users, as a worldwide bloc, are really incredibly open to loan words, modified grammar, and even whole new vocabulary. All of this happens in other languages too, but the culture of english makes or allows it to happen much faster and much more broadly.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time: 1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English. 2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.
  - gegtik 5mo ago
    are you including pinyin in your writing system analysis?
  - materiallie 5mo ago
    I know it's a common pop science factoid, but there's actually no evidence that language difficulty has much to do with becoming a lingua franca. Russian is commonly viewed as a difficult language, but it become a regional lingua franca in their sphere of influence. The only reason we aren't speaking Russian is because they lost the cold war. I do agree that Mandarin speakers might become more open to Pinyin if more foreigners started learning the language. I'd also point out that English and Romance speakers find Mandarin difficult. For Mandarin speakers, is their own spoken language actually difficult for them? They might find English to be a difficult language.
    - jjmarr 5mo ago
      English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, because there's so many irregular sentence/word constructions + irregular pronunciations due to vowel shift + foreign loan words like French/Latin that must be pronounced differently. Mandarin eliminates all of these problems. The tones and characters are difficult, sure, but questions and answers being grammatically identical along with consistent pinyin is a lifesaver.
- throwaway201606 5mo ago
  The language of global commerce and technology has not and has never been English It is money. Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency
  - gegtik 5mo ago
    right, it was english, but then it became english
- stymaar 5mo ago
  This. But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years. I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.
andor 5mo ago
He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening: When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent. They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes. ... One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe. (from an earlier post, https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-progr...)
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty) The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value So the solution is to reduce the cost to zero, instead of competing to provide the best outcome and highest value?
    - vanuatu 5mo ago
      If you've ever tried to start your own company in the US it's a grueling, insane warzone of competition That results in the winners providing insane value to both customers and equity holders
yogthos 5mo ago
What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward. The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.
- mrwh 5mo ago
  Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  ai generated video script "Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now" - just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace
  - yogthos 5mo ago
    Who cares how the script was generated. What he says is entirely factual. He cites plenty of concrete examples too. The idea that the talent in the US surpasses the global research community is laughable. China already tops the world in artificial intelligence publications. https://www.science.org/content/article/china-tops-world-artificial-intelligence-publications-database-analysis-reveals https://www.science.org/content/article/china-tops-world-art... China also has a population of 1.4 billion people, and an excellent education system. Pretty much all top universities are Chinese. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene... And let's not forget that top AI researchers from US are now fleeing to China. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3353398/lead-microsoft-ai-scientist-li-hongzhi-joins-chinas-tongji-university https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3353398/lead...
TimorousBestie 5mo ago
> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. Prior restraint is going to put a damper on American state of the art for the foreseeable future. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-era https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-... In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke. > as long as American companies control the talent flywheel The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem. Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint. I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    I see two possible outcomes: 1. People really voted for getting violent criminals out, in which case there is going to be a massive backlash against the current policies. 2. People are really convinced that immigrants are making their lives worse, in which case as things actually get worse with the lack of immigration, they will probably double down. Politicians can keep using immigrants as a scapegoat, and fascism here we come!
  - watwut 5mo ago
    > But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now Flip-flop means unsafe. Flip flop means you are one election away from being mistreated in a lawless way by goverment and bad luck away from being mistreated by their sympatizants. Unless there are actual prosecutions and those made to stick, there is no flip flop safety. And given one of parties is increasingly anti-democratic, unless there is flip and actual change of constitution next flip in next 3 years, flip flop will stop at the fascist side.
lorecore 5mo ago
There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model. > Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies This is simply not true?
- CharlieDigital 5mo ago
  Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage. Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
  - donkyrf 5mo ago
    China would probably be very confused that you're asserting they're not on par with Taiwan.
    - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
      In semiconductors. Otherwise, no one would need to buy from Nvidia or contract with TSMC.
      - donkyrf 5mo ago
        This article might catch you up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan
        CharlieDigital 5mo ago
        I'm aware; I'm Taiwanese :)
  - 5mo ago
an0malous 5mo ago
The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
toasty228 5mo ago
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand. I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  I hear this analogy (selling a dollar for 10ct) but it's unclear to me how we can cleanly map intelligence to cents. If the LLM was GPT-1, most people wouldn't even use it for free. So clearly there's another axis here?
  - Micrococonut 5mo ago
    The analogy is implying that the revenue generated by providers is dwarfed by the total expenditure on inference & continuously training the next best model. These providers have large operational costs and the presumption is that they are providing a dollar ~worth~ of product for 10 cents. Worth being calculable based on the actual capital & operational costs of providing the service.
    - vanuatu 5mo ago
      anthropic models are profitable fully loaded (rev - inference cost - training cost)
      - Micrococonut 5mo ago
        Yea I don't know if that's true or not. I'm just saying that is what they are getting at.
      - toasty228 5mo ago
        According to who? Remember that they told us gpt 3 was "too dangerous to release" Until their finances are open you can't trust anything they say
_verandaguy 5mo ago
I'll push back against most of the points in your comment. > The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues. This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the aggressive marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold. > The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy. > The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to some productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to mass burnout. > The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one. > I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before. What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but this clearly won't hold. In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in correctness) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  Thank you for your perspective! I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball. I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join). I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise. As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.
dosisking 5mo ago
It's hard for me to reconcile your post as being authentic. From what I see, current "AI" is simply a geo-political tool, and a tool for governments to maintain power and authority. It is not real AI, since it cannot learn. Real AI is being suppressed and it seems that it will not be allowed to exist in the mainstream, especially in the US.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
  This is the ultimate "no true Scotsman" post.
DaveChurchill 5mo ago
The gains are so obvious that nobody can cite a source proving them
- vanuatu 5mo ago
  source: revenue, people opening their wallets
  - tapoxi 5mo ago
    Tokenmaxing?
  - DaveChurchill 5mo ago
    Source: trust me bro
    - vanuatu 5mo ago
      Okay.
      - DaveChurchill 5mo ago
        Just cite me any sort of study or financial data showing that AI provides long-term financial gains for any company besides small startups
        vanuatu 5mo ago
        Do you need a study for when a trading firm reports PnL? Likewise when labs report 80x growth? There are applied AI cos making 100-400M+ in just a few years of incorporation, does that count as financial gain? Academia is currently 6-12mo behind the frontier of the industry due to secrecy and publication times, so any "long term" study, even for a year, would be out of date on arrival
        tovej 5mo ago
GeoAtreides 5mo ago
>companies growing 3x which companies are growing, the ones mining for gold or the ones selling the shovels?
maxglute 5mo ago
>American companies control the talent flywheel But we already know US doesn't, the AI competition is largely Chinese talent vs Chinese talent that the Chinese gov allows to work in west, which they control plurality of global AI talent pipeline, and can cut off at any time, like the reverse has already happened for western semi talent in PRC. Leverage applies to many other sectors. Simple law of large numbers, i.e. generating comparable STEM than RoW combined = the best talent going forward is some Chinese... with little English fluency. English fluency deprioritized from mandatory a few years ago in PRC, the smartest kids with access to most modern corpus of research in most productive academic system is going to be locked behind mandarin in future. Western models are not getting better vs massive compute difference predicted during period where compute gap vs PRC is expanding. And better in what which ways? There's entire industrial sectors US models can't get better in va PRC for the simple reasons the industrial chains do not exist in US (or at scale in west as whole). Throwing $$$ at half the problem... is severe misallocation, but the group think in the $$$ group probably feels like everything is peak because muh valuations and fomo investments while digital companies figure out how to integrate AI to write better newsletters, meanwhile some PRC dark factory goes brrrrt. A little hyperbolic, but you get the point. I think something to be said that PRC can cut off talent pipeline to US AI at anytime, but hasn't... nor losing shit over AGI threat complex. They see absurd amount of $$$ being dumped into western AI and ask themselves, why stop this hyper financialized capital bonfire.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

by vanuatu 5mo ago

48terry 5mo ago

> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming [...] companies growing 3x in a month while "Yes, but have you considered number go up?"

spinel 5mo ago

[dead]

vanuatu 5mo ago
I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience: - The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable. - The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere - Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
- ambicapter 5mo ago
  What's your definition of "successful people"?
  - vanuatu 5mo ago
    Self actualized, high optionality
    - samothrace 5mo ago
      Rich, rich
robrain 5mo ago
I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences. Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
- noir_lord 5mo ago
  I'm English, my Danish friends have less of an English accent and are considerably more literate than the average of the people I interact with at work over most days. It isn't a moat, My partners written English surpasses mine and it is her third language.
- aworks 5mo ago
  I, an American, was on a business trip in Sweden then a holiday in Scotland. It was easier to understand the Swedes than the Scots...
  - Biologist123 5mo ago
    Err…becuase we speak Scottish not English.
PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it. Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  The ability of English to easily incorporate loanwords is because it has lost almost all word flexion from Old English, with very few exceptions, like the plural marker "-s". Because most grammatical markers are isolated prepositions, there are no problems caused by phonetic mismatches with the words to which they are associated, like it happens in the languages where a borrowed noun must fit into a declension pattern, which can produce phonetically awkward words. While among the European languages, for English it is indeed the easiest to borrow new words, one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, and which would remedy various problems of English, like the necessity of knowing separately a written form and a spoken form for every word, or the existence of a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, or various difficulties to express various nuances using the existing modal verbs, or the too verbose methods for expressing certain verbal tenses, moods and voices. Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. Its moat is the inertia caused by its so widespread use in the present, which will prevent any other language to replace it, regardless of how much simpler and better that language would be.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5mo ago
    > a lot of semantic ambiguities that do not exist in other languages, This is actually another strength of English, not a weakness. > one can easily construct an artificial language that would be even better than English from this point of view, The history of artificial languages (Esperanto in particular) is not encouraging in this regard. > Thus English does not really have any technical advantages. I wasn't really trying to suggest a technical advantage, but rather a cultural one. English users, as a worldwide bloc, are really incredibly open to loan words, modified grammar, and even whole new vocabulary. All of this happens in other languages too, but the culture of english makes or allows it to happen much faster and much more broadly.
hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time: 1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English. 2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.
- gegtik 5mo ago
  are you including pinyin in your writing system analysis?
- materiallie 5mo ago
  I know it's a common pop science factoid, but there's actually no evidence that language difficulty has much to do with becoming a lingua franca. Russian is commonly viewed as a difficult language, but it become a regional lingua franca in their sphere of influence. The only reason we aren't speaking Russian is because they lost the cold war. I do agree that Mandarin speakers might become more open to Pinyin if more foreigners started learning the language. I'd also point out that English and Romance speakers find Mandarin difficult. For Mandarin speakers, is their own spoken language actually difficult for them? They might find English to be a difficult language.
  - jjmarr 5mo ago
    English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, because there's so many irregular sentence/word constructions + irregular pronunciations due to vowel shift + foreign loan words like French/Latin that must be pronounced differently. Mandarin eliminates all of these problems. The tones and characters are difficult, sure, but questions and answers being grammatically identical along with consistent pinyin is a lifesaver.
throwaway201606 5mo ago
The language of global commerce and technology has not and has never been English It is money. Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency
- gegtik 5mo ago
  right, it was english, but then it became english
stymaar 5mo ago
This. But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years. I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.

andor 5mo ago

He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening: When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent. They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes. ... One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe. (from an earlier post, https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-progr...)

vanuatu 5mo ago
Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty) The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value So the solution is to reduce the cost to zero, instead of competing to provide the best outcome and highest value?
  - vanuatu 5mo ago
    If you've ever tried to start your own company in the US it's a grueling, insane warzone of competition That results in the winners providing insane value to both customers and equity holders

yogthos 5mo ago

What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward. The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.

mrwh 5mo ago
Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...
vanuatu 5mo ago
ai generated video script "Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now" - just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace
- yogthos 5mo ago
  Who cares how the script was generated. What he says is entirely factual. He cites plenty of concrete examples too. The idea that the talent in the US surpasses the global research community is laughable. China already tops the world in artificial intelligence publications. https://www.science.org/content/article/china-tops-world-artificial-intelligence-publications-database-analysis-reveals https://www.science.org/content/article/china-tops-world-art... China also has a population of 1.4 billion people, and an excellent education system. Pretty much all top universities are Chinese. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/all https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene... And let's not forget that top AI researchers from US are now fleeing to China. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3353398/lead-microsoft-ai-scientist-li-hongzhi-joins-chinas-tongji-university https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3353398/lead...

TimorousBestie 5mo ago

> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. Prior restraint is going to put a damper on American state of the art for the foreseeable future. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-era https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-... In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke. > as long as American companies control the talent flywheel The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem. Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.

vanuatu 5mo ago
Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint. I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  I see two possible outcomes: 1. People really voted for getting violent criminals out, in which case there is going to be a massive backlash against the current policies. 2. People are really convinced that immigrants are making their lives worse, in which case as things actually get worse with the lack of immigration, they will probably double down. Politicians can keep using immigrants as a scapegoat, and fascism here we come!
- watwut 5mo ago
  > But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now Flip-flop means unsafe. Flip flop means you are one election away from being mistreated in a lawless way by goverment and bad luck away from being mistreated by their sympatizants. Unless there are actual prosecutions and those made to stick, there is no flip flop safety. And given one of parties is increasingly anti-democratic, unless there is flip and actual change of constitution next flip in next 3 years, flip flop will stop at the fascist side.

lorecore 5mo ago

There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model. > Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies This is simply not true?

CharlieDigital 5mo ago
Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage. Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
- donkyrf 5mo ago
  China would probably be very confused that you're asserting they're not on par with Taiwan.
  - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
    In semiconductors. Otherwise, no one would need to buy from Nvidia or contract with TSMC.
    - donkyrf 5mo ago
      This article might catch you up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan
      - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
        I'm aware; I'm Taiwanese :)
- 5mo ago

an0malous 5mo ago

The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.

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toasty228 5mo ago

> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand. I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore

vanuatu 5mo ago
I hear this analogy (selling a dollar for 10ct) but it's unclear to me how we can cleanly map intelligence to cents. If the LLM was GPT-1, most people wouldn't even use it for free. So clearly there's another axis here?
- Micrococonut 5mo ago
  The analogy is implying that the revenue generated by providers is dwarfed by the total expenditure on inference & continuously training the next best model. These providers have large operational costs and the presumption is that they are providing a dollar ~worth~ of product for 10 cents. Worth being calculable based on the actual capital & operational costs of providing the service.
  - vanuatu 5mo ago
    anthropic models are profitable fully loaded (rev - inference cost - training cost)
    - Micrococonut 5mo ago
      Yea I don't know if that's true or not. I'm just saying that is what they are getting at.
    - toasty228 5mo ago
      According to who? Remember that they told us gpt 3 was "too dangerous to release" Until their finances are open you can't trust anything they say

_verandaguy 5mo ago

I'll push back against most of the points in your comment. > The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues. This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the aggressive marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold. > The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy. > The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to some productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to mass burnout. > The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one. > I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before. What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but this clearly won't hold. In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in correctness) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.

vanuatu 5mo ago
Thank you for your perspective! I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball. I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join). I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise. As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.

dosisking 5mo ago

It's hard for me to reconcile your post as being authentic. From what I see, current "AI" is simply a geo-political tool, and a tool for governments to maintain power and authority. It is not real AI, since it cannot learn. Real AI is being suppressed and it seems that it will not be allowed to exist in the mainstream, especially in the US.

hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
This is the ultimate "no true Scotsman" post.

DaveChurchill 5mo ago

The gains are so obvious that nobody can cite a source proving them

vanuatu 5mo ago
source: revenue, people opening their wallets
- tapoxi 5mo ago
  Tokenmaxing?
- DaveChurchill 5mo ago
  Source: trust me bro
  - vanuatu 5mo ago
    Okay.
    - DaveChurchill 5mo ago
      Just cite me any sort of study or financial data showing that AI provides long-term financial gains for any company besides small startups
      - vanuatu 5mo ago
        Do you need a study for when a trading firm reports PnL? Likewise when labs report 80x growth? There are applied AI cos making 100-400M+ in just a few years of incorporation, does that count as financial gain? Academia is currently 6-12mo behind the frontier of the industry due to secrecy and publication times, so any "long term" study, even for a year, would be out of date on arrival
        tovej 5mo ago

GeoAtreides 5mo ago

>companies growing 3x which companies are growing, the ones mining for gold or the ones selling the shovels?

maxglute 5mo ago

>American companies control the talent flywheel But we already know US doesn't, the AI competition is largely Chinese talent vs Chinese talent that the Chinese gov allows to work in west, which they control plurality of global AI talent pipeline, and can cut off at any time, like the reverse has already happened for western semi talent in PRC. Leverage applies to many other sectors. Simple law of large numbers, i.e. generating comparable STEM than RoW combined = the best talent going forward is some Chinese... with little English fluency. English fluency deprioritized from mandatory a few years ago in PRC, the smartest kids with access to most modern corpus of research in most productive academic system is going to be locked behind mandarin in future. Western models are not getting better vs massive compute difference predicted during period where compute gap vs PRC is expanding. And better in what which ways? There's entire industrial sectors US models can't get better in va PRC for the simple reasons the industrial chains do not exist in US (or at scale in west as whole). Throwing $$$ at half the problem... is severe misallocation, but the group think in the $$$ group probably feels like everything is peak because muh valuations and fomo investments while digital companies figure out how to integrate AI to write better newsletters, meanwhile some PRC dark factory goes brrrrt. A little hyperbolic, but you get the point. I think something to be said that PRC can cut off talent pipeline to US AI at anytime, but hasn't... nor losing shit over AGI threat complex. They see absurd amount of $$$ being dumped into western AI and ask themselves, why stop this hyper financialized capital bonfire.

deleted 5mo ago

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