8 ms·

I love LLMs, I hate hype

501 points by therepanic 3mo ago

luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
kordlessagain 3mo ago
There's good reason to hate the merchants and their marketing. But builders are not merchants. They build with whatever tool is available.
- pphysch 3mo ago
  Geohot is one of the (attempted) merchants, but maybe that is not going so well and he is changing his tune.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Not sure why you had to add the (attempted) qualifier. He started a company and is selling a box. That makes him a merchant. How successful that venture is, is a different question, but he absolutely is a merchant in this arena.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - kordlessagain 3mo ago
      A slight defense of any qualifiers, mine or others. I am a sole developer, who formed a "box" as you put it, to house my assets. I'm the sole director of it. That doesn't mean my box is at war with users. To be clear, a merchant is a middleman and some merchants have taken the goods produced by the builder and built a middleman moat. Cloudflare, Anthropic, and the list goes on. Geohot doesn't do this. He builds and sells what he builds. That makes him more a craftsman, not a merchant. Merchants market other's work and profit. Craftsman, or builders, build and grow their customer base organically.
      - pphysch 3mo ago
        I feel like you're splitting hairs. Geohot is/was selling shovels during a gold rush, full stop. Maybe he had a recent change of heart, but his public actions (including Elon stuff) clearly put him in the "monetize hype" camp rather than the "quietly build" camp.
sigmar 3mo ago
>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim. It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago
  Does Xitter still have people complaining about class divisions? (Genuinely curious, I hadn't ever seen that there though I don't go there much any more.)
  - ToValueFunfetti 3mo ago
    "Permanent underclass" is the notion that people who get involved at the ground floor will essentially get infinite wealth relative to the ones who don't. It's a little goofy, but more of the capitalism you'd expect from today's X than the communism you're imagining in yesterday's Twitter.
- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  Those people are not just on Twitter. They’re here on HN, they’re at work, they’re at your next social gathering. I’ve found them to be unavoidable to some degree.
  - RajT88 3mo ago
    I see a lot of them on Nextdoor and at my city council meetings. Talking points like: "Data centers are just surveillance centers that are going to use AI to put us into a digital prison!" Whatever all that means. I assume some of it is about Flock cameras.
    - 3mo ago
neiman 3mo ago
Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.
- moffkalast 3mo ago
  Stocks and politics I guess.
- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  C-suites. Marketers. People with stock portfolios. Banks. Politicians. So all people that don’t understand the thing being hyped.
  - an0malous 3mo ago
    Basically all people with monetary investment in the thing being hyped
- tuvix 3mo ago
  Agreed, but I do think this is a wholly different kind of hype. With crypto currencies it was the promise of modernizing value exchange, with some zealots promising the end of traditional currency. With this, I’m hearing (from supposedly reputable publications, in addition to random people) that this is going to end knowledge work in general and take out a large percentage of the world’s labor force. I’m being told to pick up a trade, and that the career I have and the knowledge I’ve gained is now worthless. The worst part seems to be that it’s pretty much impossible to quantify any kind of impact these tools will have until after the impact is actually felt. We’ve been in limbo while the tech sector is just rotting.
- asdff 3mo ago
  It is great for video games because it gives you fresh noobs to pwn instead of having to face the sweats. I can’t really play the old fps games I like anymore not because they are dead, they are very much alive, but everyone still playing has been playing nonstop for years now and are way above me in skill.
apsurd 3mo ago
Your SF hate isn't a good look. There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN. TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties. EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco. > This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.
- markasoftware 3mo ago
  the vast majority of the target audience of this blog post would only consider moving to SF because of the tech scene. This isn't a mountain biking or asian food blog.
- NetOpWibby 3mo ago
  False equivalency
  - apsurd 3mo ago
    ooh I like your site: https://webb.page https://webb.page false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly: > This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.
    - NetOpWibby 3mo ago
      Thanks! The author didn't "go out of his way to blame shitty SF." At least, that's not what I (and seemingly most other people) got from it. He's speaking to the AGI nuts who are convinced humans are going the way of the dodo because of AI and that kind of hype only really works in SF (and SF-pilled areas).
- 3mo ago
wxw 3mo ago
> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. > And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed. Haha, OP has a way with words. In a way, both these emotional extremes (FOMO & the singularity) are just tools being used to continue driving the massive CapEx behind LLM improvement. Hate to love it? Love to hate it?
HellDunkel 3mo ago
How to you love this stuff so hard? I could newer love any ai generated music, book or artwork. Anything ai gemerated i have ever seem or heard was either disgustingly slop or indistinguishable from something else which was real. It‘s a like finding a cool track only to discover it‘s a lazy bootleg.
- m463 3mo ago
  I've made ai generated art using family photos as the starting point, and it was wonderful. :)
  - NexRebular 3mo ago
    s/I've/machine/;
- ivanjermakov 3mo ago
  I'm sure most engineering is LLM-assisted already and nothing is wrong with it. It's just the one-shot vibe-coded low quality slop that spoils sentiment of this tools. Also many people are interested in what agents can build unsupervised as a test of "superintelligence".
- nylonstrung 3mo ago
  Yeah but it was only like 2 years ago that artists were arguing this on the basis that AI-gen images would consistently mangle hands Now we're at a point where that never happens, and where lipsync is almost a completely solved problem If the issue here is simply that the quality is bad, one has to contend with the fact that it is undoubtedly exponentially improving and there's no reason we should expect that improvement to stop I also don't have any interest in consuming AI generated art, but the same criticisms were levied at computer graphics and if we're comparing to CGI we'd be at the late 1970s in terms of nascency
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    An LLM cannot make art because it isn't human. It can make "art like artifacts". Art involves one human communicating some emotional experience to another human, LLMs cannot experience human emotion, so they cannot make art. The process of making art is not a subset of hill climbing optimisation algorithms.
hamandcheese 3mo ago
> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? It's running, privately, in my homelab. I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy. This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago
  You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.
  - otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  - midasz 3mo ago
    I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/skills/upstream-sync https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...
    - cyanydeez 3mo ago
      I'm doing it right now to see what the cost is; I cloned the upstream and made a copy of the working directory and asked the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model to merge my production files with the new upstream. Since it's just a duplicate folder, I can always fall back if it fubars.
- atomicnumber3 3mo ago
jacobgold 3mo ago
As soon as we started unironically calling LLMs "AI" we went down the hype path. That has plenty of downsides, like stressing out the entire world and attracting cryptocurrency bros, but also the major upside massive of funding/acceleration. So far, all we have is more software running on computers. It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic. Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.
- cautiouscat 3mo ago
  > Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet. I’m not sure it’s net negative or not. I’ve found that it’s reductive though. We have this really broad field of artificial intelligence reduced down to at worst a “slop machine” and at best a single tool. Imagine being a CS professor that studied AI in the 90s and how you have to over explain you don’t mean LLM chatbots to a layman.
- lukan 3mo ago
  "It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic" But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good). I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engines and alike were called AI long ago. So it is not general strong AI and has no consciousness and no mind and is pretty dumb too often - but the general concept - getting from a some vague text to a working program has some connection to intelligence to me.
  - jacobgold 3mo ago
    Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1] But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
    - 3mo ago
TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago
At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases. You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.
- lacedeconstruct 3mo ago
  This doesn't make sense, I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit I dont want to spend my time perfecting the craft of making bread for my daily needs (maybe once in a while its a soothing activity), I want someone smarter than me to spend his entire life coming up and perfecting a solution and exerting more time and effort than I can afford and I am very happy to support him so I can stop worrying about it and focus on what I want to do
  - dolebirchwood 3mo ago
    > This doesn't make sense Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. What doesn't make sense is that analogy. Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread.
    - lacedeconstruct 3mo ago
      >Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. It doesn't really, because whenever I ask them what did they actually create, its always a shitty dashboard or a finance tracker or something derivative and worse than what is out there
      - wccrawford 3mo ago
        You're missing the point that it isn't worse than what's already out there for them. They've implemented only the parts they need, and removed all the crap that just complicates the system for them. They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it. It's something that you couldn't afford to do previously, sometimes even as a programmer. Now, it's often quick and easy, up to a certain complexity.
password54321 3mo ago
Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98d31/cdc_prompt.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...
- andy99 3mo ago
  The secret sauce is training data. They’re not just taking advantage of more compute (which obviously is necessary but as mentions basically a commodity). They are paying billions to data labelers and making judgements about the nature of the training data they best need to make the product they want. This seems to get pushed aside as a minor point but it’s the primary differentiator of the big labs.
  - password54321 3mo ago
    As a I said, compute and data. But LLMs can be distilled, so even their data is not much of a secret sauce.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  I'm pretty sure at this point that Anthropic is training mixture models (at least in the heavy pre-train) and deploying them dense with explicit loss on thinking trace coherence. Having a thinking trace that is legible, coherent, and immediately implies the explicit turn output and/or tool use seems difficult if not impossible to reliably get from mixture models. I predict MoE is a transitional technology, it's got too many problems and the benefits are...kinda grandfathered into the dogma at this point.
  - charcircuit 3mo ago
    >I predict MoE is a transitional technology While scaling laws hold (more weights = better), and time / financial costs are not trivial the incentives are in place to have MoE. MoE means you can have more weights without increasing the critical path of evaluating it. I am curious what you believe the problems with it that would cause people to prefer using less weights. I'm not following what you mean by MoE can't have legible thinkings trace or tool use when existing models with MoE can.
Razengan 3mo ago
I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on. In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence. Now I can just ask AI about fleeting ideas and always have a starting point for some area of some project to work on. A lot/some of the concerns about the AI Age could be alleviated if people got UBI and a 4-day workweek. like if AI's supposed to be so great why do we still have to work so much?? and if we don't have to work, how do we pay for food and bed?
- jagenabler2 3mo ago
  Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore. I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was stuck for too long, I’d discard it. Now I feel like I have an obligation to build everything. Maybe it never mattered and the quantity of solutions is truly the most valuable thing.
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    > Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? You have to be careful and "remain yourself": Like I've been trying to think of a generic save/load system for my game framework, but the ideas given by Codex so far don't suit my desired design/interface, BUT it makes me certain of how I DON'T want to do it heh If I got lazy and just blindly took the AI's first suggestion, I'd end up in deeper tech dept. You have to take advantage of and "exploit" the way LLMs work, which seems ideal for shaping vague ideas, by using the AI's fuzziness to help you decide what you do and don't want.
    - jagenabler2 3mo ago
kenforthewin 3mo ago
I felt the same way in 2024-2025. Then Sonnet 4 was released, and things started feeling different. Opus 4.5 was another step change for me. Everything feels like it's accelerating, and timelines are getting crunched. I guess in some ways I envy OP, who would "bet everything" against ASI - the truth is I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows, where this ends.
- lukeschlather 3mo ago
  He didn't say he bets everything against ASI, he said he bets everything against ASI being a flash of light in the sky which destroys our chance of getting access to the wealth it creates.
  - kenforthewin 3mo ago
    That's a much less generous interpretation of his writing. "Yes we will birth superintelligence, but everything will just sort of work out for us humans". This seems like a silly take to me.
    - int_19h 3mo ago
      Is it? To me, the notion that a superintelligence (by which I'm assuming you mean the more sensible "something smarter than us", not "literally a godlike entity") automatically means that sky is going to fall is sillier.
      - kenforthewin 3mo ago
        I have no idea what happens next if we create and horizontally scale superintelligence; one thing I do know for sure is it won't be "business as usual".
      - asdff 3mo ago
        You have to take a step back and look at the sort of world we already live in to understand the sky falling take. We built this monster known as the shareholder model. This is an immoral, cold, unscrupulous beast we unleashed to the world some time ago. This is the model where your boss knows full well you do decent enough work, that you support a family on your income, that getting another job is tough, that is aware blindsiding you may leave you unprepared, and yet, your boss knows all this and lays you off anyway. Why? Because it is more efficient for the company. This is the model that sees companies pollute our world. That sees fisheries ravaged just outside the reach of local jurisdictions and legal action. This is the model that is burning the future for the next quarter. So given this empowerement of capital beyond any control of any person, where even the boss that fired you is just as much a slave to the system as you are with no real loyalty given to them, how do you think this plays out? The AI model trained to make the most profit possible for lowest cost is going to not do that? It is going to say hey, Bob needs a good job to put food on the table? Hell no it isn’t. The system we have today ensures we will one day get the most horrifying version of ai in control of this planet before long. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just herds us up and burns us like firewood to power some data centers to save on energy spend for a quarter.
ks2048 3mo ago
> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.
- therepanic 3mo ago
  the author does not believe in the technological singularity.
  - ks2048 3mo ago
    That's what I gathered from the blog post - which made the title of the blog seem odd.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
dom96 3mo ago
I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?
- EgregiousCube 3mo ago
  Guarantee is too strong a thing to seek, but healthy competition makes it highly likely that the supply/demand curve will meet at a healthy place. You're always guaranteed that you can stash away the open models!
- talloaktrees 3mo ago
  Currently, because of the subsidies from the frontier models, demand is mostly for higher intelligence. If subsidies do end, demand for price efficiency per unit of intelligence will go way up.And because there's many players in the market, this demand should be met by at least some of them.
  - byzantinegene 3mo ago
    would i hire a phd grad if they cost the same as a degree holder? sure, why not. but if they cost twice as much?
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  > They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices? I would bet good money on prices going down significantly, not up. If we get to the point where you can run an Opus 4.8 model on your local computer, it's going to be even cheaper for a datacenter to serve it on their hardware. That means prices crash, not that they're going to rise.
simianthoughts 3mo ago
This guy is sooooo annoying with his stale takes. This is what he wrote before. > I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. Now he's writng > I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents. SMH now he writes about the hype. My brother in absolute Deity, *you* should have believed the hype.
- TN1ck 3mo ago
  Both can be true and I have both opinions also in me. Love the progress, worry about the consequences of not being careful with it. He does say in this post: > I’m getting better at using them and get some boost from the models. It is a new skill, and it’s not like I haven’t constantly been trying them. You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue, and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?).
- emp17344 3mo ago
  You act as a hype peddler in practically every LLM-adjacent thread. No wonder you’re taking this article so personally. Touch grass.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
andy99 3mo ago
He says he might have been too harsh in his “eternal sloptember” post from may: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-e... I wonder what he thinks was too harsh, still seems pretty bang on, I think it’s going to age well.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  > the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. I think he now thinks agents can maybe program a little bit.
fragmede 3mo ago
> But models are useful just like... all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will! Wait, does this mean I'm better at something than geohot? All that time spent learning regexps wasn't a waste!
fuckaiwriter 3mo ago
[flagged]
- jaaacckz 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - fuckaiwriter 3mo ago
    Fuck you
fwlr 3mo ago
I get it, I want to agree, I really do like the “this is a new tool in the toolkit of the professional software craftsperson” argument… …but consider: the Q-tip. “Don’t use it to clean your ears”, but for most people that’s all they want to do with it, and empirical observation indicates that this dynamic results in either “using Q-tips irresponsibly” or “not using Q-tips”, with “uses Q-tips properly” being a small-to-vanishing proportion of the whole.
- ghthor 3mo ago
  Qtips are made for cleaning your ears. It says not to do that so they are NOT sued every time some idiot fucks up their ear with one.
  - wizzwizz4 3mo ago
    But the part of the ear that needs cleaning can be reached without a cotton bud. This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus.
    - simoncion 3mo ago
      > This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus. In my personal experience, not using a cotton-tipped swab for the task is like cleaning a plate loaded with gunk and burned-on patches with one's bare hands rather than choosing to use a sponge and/or brush. You can do it, [0] but it's much more work, much more time consuming, or you get an inferior result. [0] In my case, I'd need to make one set of passes with paper wrapped around my smallest finger, and then another set with paper shaped into a tool that can lever the excess wax out from outer orifice of my ear canal.
      - fragmede 3mo ago
        We live in the future. You can get an ear cleaning camera endoscope device for $40 next day Amazon delivery anywhere they reach.
pu_pe 3mo ago
> A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it. > AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?
xyst 3mo ago
I think big money/private equity/vulture capitalists tend to ruin everything. They set these unrealistic goals and force companies to do shady shit in order to meet these often unattainable goals or achieve unicorn status. It’s why con artists, scammers always flood every hype cycle. Greed ruins everything.
deep_concern 3mo ago
>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim. It's bullshit in the sense that they don't know for sure, but the author doesn't either. Why might or might not it be true?
- rglover 3mo ago
  May be true because humans, especially in the West, are big on performative humanitarianism but not actually considering the well-being of others (or changing their behavior solely for the benefit of others). May not be true because it's a blind spot to assume that purely by being a player in the AI game (with no real attention paid to quality of result), you have increased odds of winning the game. That's true in the abstract, but practically, it requires a competent player to become true in reality.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  No one knows for sure. I certainly don't. Looking at history though, at what happened in 2008, and the effects it had on my own personal financial situation, it's easy to see "falling behind" as plausible.
a-dub 3mo ago
it's kinda like riding an e-bike, but in heavy and unpredictable pedestrian traffic.
SwellJoe 3mo ago
This line: "this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, though bounded, amount of tokens), frontier models are a no-brainer, most folks and companies will use them. But, at token rates, 10x or 100x the cost of open models or what I was spending on the frontier models a month ago? That is a harder question to answer "yes" to. I certainly wouldn't spend $1000 a month for the best model, much less $10,000; my employer might pay $1000/month, but definitely not $10,000. The frontier labs need everyone to answer "yes" to spending 100x what they currently spend to justify the valuations, and it's just not going to happen as long as everyone knows how to make these models. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to figure that out now. Anthropic, in particular, has their finger on the trigger...they want to push people to usage-based billing for Fable. But, OpenAI released 5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!), and there's no moat keeping someone from switching. If Anthropic really does end Fable access on the subscription plans in a few days, I predict a large market move back toward OpenAI. The market isn't going to bear the cost of making the frontiers investment make sense.
- arscan 3mo ago
  Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?
  - SwellJoe 3mo ago
    So far, it seems to be the reverse of that disruption. Hardware companies, Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, ARM, memory companies, are all having record-setting quarters, and it's actual profits, not subsidized by investors and circular investments (though the hardware companies are investing in the AI companies to keep the hype train rolling).
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
rho4 3mo ago
Thank you, I really needed to read a sane voice. The relentless hype-onslaught is not easy to cope with.
- ipdashc 3mo ago
  These comments are always interesting to me (genuinely! no shade) because it feels like we're on different sides of the Internet. Almost everything I see about LLMs is somewhere between uneasy acceptance, skepticism, and outright hate. Even those of us who admit they're impressively capable usually caveat it with "... but our jobs and society are cooked, aren't they?" The "hype onslaught" is, like... Something I know exists, on some abstract level. In news reports about CEOs, or seeing screenshots of LinkedIn, or whatever. But it feels so far removed from a sentiment any real person holds.
  - Capricorn2481 3mo ago
    I have read hundreds of comments on this site alone saying you need to become a prompt engineer now, regardless of your profession, or be left behind. There are a lot of companies with "AI mandates" right now, essentially asking their employees to... Do something with AI. Doesn't matter what
    - ipdashc 3mo ago
      > on this site alone Even here, it feels like we're on different websites. Most comments I see on HN are between the "uneasy acceptance" and "skepticism" levels. The "left behind" rhetoric I see made fun of more often than used wholeheartedly. Perhaps we just click on different comment sections? The "AI mandates", yeah, I'd count that as hype (though even that in its aimlessness feels more like an admission that they don't know what to do and are just trying to fit in to look cool, than outright hype, but still). I'm just lucky to not work at a place that has them.
ChicagoDave 3mo ago
A lot of people died from Covid and if not for mRNA technology and extraordinary caregivers a lot more deaths would have occurred. That’s hype where it truly belongs. Don’t mix AI hype with Covid conspiracy theories.
yunnpp 3mo ago
misunderestimate? So overestimate, or estimate exactly?
rafeuddaraj 3mo ago
This was a refreshing perspective. Thanks for writing it.
kotberg 3mo ago
[flagged]
LugosFergus 3mo ago
Since no one is talking about it: T2 isn’t about machines taking over the world. That has happened (or will happen). But humans eventually defeat the machines. Skynet is trying to prevent that by killing John Connor. That’s what the movie is about. I suppose it’s also about John searching for a parental figure through the T800. He doesn’t get that through is foster parents and his estranged mother. Anyway, I don’t think this dude actually watched this movie. It’s too bad because it’s a classic.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- undeveloper 3mo ago
  he's biggest larper of all time
- nulltype 3mo ago
  Maybe he meant to link to Colossus: The Forbin Project
- voidUpdate 3mo ago
  I mean all of the Terminator films are essentially "Machines took over the world. John Connor will eventually defeat the machines. The leader of the machines sent a machine back in time to prevent John Connor defeating the machines"
  - LugosFergus 3mo ago
    Not exactly. Terminator Salvation didn't have time travel.
    - voidUpdate 3mo ago
      You mean there are terminator films after T3?
      - LugosFergus 3mo ago
llm_nerd 3mo ago
This feels a bit like a reframing of the rather absurd "Eternal Sloptember" nonsense, desperately trying to pivot from Luddism to visionary (and yes, I know this is the "hacked the iPhone" guy. I'm not a cult of personality person and I positively do not care). Also incredibly weird how it repeatedly talks about people moving to San Francisco, which ... what in the world is that nonsense about? People talking about the concerns of AI and automation are in no universe considering moving to SF as the protection... "Where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?" This is a recurring gotcha in the anti-AI marketplace of denialism. It's a bit like saying "I saw a fat guy, so why do people keep telling me that GLP-1s change everything?" It takes time. Like already I would say just about every programmer has replaced a number of tools with random shit they spit out from LLMs. It percolates out from there as some things become products, etc. And to anyone actually paying attention, and not just feeding their delusions, the impact is utterly enormous. Incontestable. The "Where's the software? / Where's the change?" people are absolutely going to find themselves in the dustbin of history. It's also fascinating how often people do the stochastic parrot horseshit. The other night I had to do a large scale compression test with libjxl, which notably is software that has seen an enormous amount of optimization interest and you would assume has little extra to be eked out. I've traced through this software before and the compression path is insanely complex. It's the sort of software that is headache inducing. Anyways, curious what the state of the platform was I grabbed the latest source and asked Fable to look for low-hanging fruit in the lossy and lossless compression paths. It suggested a few, created a test harness to A:B bitwise compare with the original, and implemented its optimizations. It achieved a 14% performance increase in a single pass, using just the remaining quota I had on a subscription as my week drew to a close. And all it did was some high level logical optimizations, some more efficient memory allocations, and so on. All of its code was completely in the style of the project, was no more significant than necessary, and so on. Anyone that isn't utterly blown away by that -- who gets the hype -- is lying to themselves.
desktopentree 3mo ago
every output looks similar now across the coding models
slopinthebag 3mo ago
I think I agree completely. It’s worth pointing out that Linus’s comparison of LLMs and compilers is that they are both tools, not that they’re the same thing. Like how both compilers and hammers are tools, but a hammer is not a compiler. They’re really quite useful but the Bay Area mentality and hype is completely disgusting and turned me completely off for a while. What brought me back was a surge in useful Chinese models, with a significantly more mature approach to marketing and discourse. I think Geohot is 100% correct about SF and the people there perpetuating insanity. And I wonder, has it always been like that there, or is this a new phenomenon?
vkaku 3mo ago
I'm not an AI skeptic but I hate the hype. Especially throwing compute for the sake of it. I do alt inference prototypes and got much farther than I had hoped to. So indeed, any investor in AI should read deep and question hype and frontier lab investments. See: https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT for the sort of hype busting I do.
smcg 3mo ago
Seems ironic coming from a poster child for hyping up hacking.
lurkercodemnky 3mo ago
Without hype our companies would not pay for them :)
modgate 3mo ago
[flagged]
segmondy 3mo ago
I don't always agree with george, but his hot takes on LLM has been right on!
deterministic 3mo ago
[flagged]
entropyneur 3mo ago
> all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?) Part-time vibe coder here. As far as I can tell it's no longer "slop" in the sense that I am no longer hitting the state where AI can't maintain what it has written or can't meet the requirements. But shipping is as hard as ever. Projects get more ambitious, scope creeps, nuances keep being discovered as you work on a piece of software, etc. Right now I feel that the absence of new software explosion is best explained by the fact that the part we have automated turned out to be relatively small.
qsera 3mo ago
>AI is the continuation of the computer revolution. Yes, it is a vastly efficient search technique using fast computers.
smcg 3mo ago
Remember when George was an iconoclast hacker and not the lapdog of AI oligarchs?
aanet 3mo ago
I dont usually read rants, but sometimes I do. And sometimes I like 'em too. This one is a well deserved read. and I find myself agreeing with @geohot Even if the blog's title is "Singularity is nearer"
ghosthamlet 3mo ago
So am i.
dreamglider 3mo ago
Thank you. Love the post. Best of all it does not try to state the obvious but just share how one feels about the cr@p hype which is soooo tiresome - not just about the LLMs, it was pretty much the same for mobile apps, big data, lab on a chip, quantum computing, fusion (ma favourite), monkey in a jar & etc. However the sad truth is that - hype will continue, seems like a default feature irrespective of context and domain, more hype = more $, more visibility, more reach. Probably the only good thing is the cray talk lead by Sam Altman, weirdest though - so many zombies believe it but again - expected, will have the same faith as the EOW according to the Mayan calendar... lol

501 points by therepanic 3mo ago

[flagged]

There's good reason to hate the merchants and their marketing. But builders are not merchants. They build with whatever tool is available.

pphysch 3mo ago
Geohot is one of the (attempted) merchants, but maybe that is not going so well and he is changing his tune.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Not sure why you had to add the (attempted) qualifier. He started a company and is selling a box. That makes him a merchant. How successful that venture is, is a different question, but he absolutely is a merchant in this arena.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kordlessagain 3mo ago
    A slight defense of any qualifiers, mine or others. I am a sole developer, who formed a "box" as you put it, to house my assets. I'm the sole director of it. That doesn't mean my box is at war with users. To be clear, a merchant is a middleman and some merchants have taken the goods produced by the builder and built a middleman moat. Cloudflare, Anthropic, and the list goes on. Geohot doesn't do this. He builds and sells what he builds. That makes him more a craftsman, not a merchant. Merchants market other's work and profit. Craftsman, or builders, build and grow their customer base organically.
    - pphysch 3mo ago
      I feel like you're splitting hairs. Geohot is/was selling shovels during a gold rush, full stop. Maybe he had a recent change of heart, but his public actions (including Elon stuff) clearly put him in the "monetize hype" camp rather than the "quietly build" camp.

sigmar 3mo ago

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim. It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.

paulryanrogers 3mo ago
Does Xitter still have people complaining about class divisions? (Genuinely curious, I hadn't ever seen that there though I don't go there much any more.)
- ToValueFunfetti 3mo ago
  "Permanent underclass" is the notion that people who get involved at the ground floor will essentially get infinite wealth relative to the ones who don't. It's a little goofy, but more of the capitalism you'd expect from today's X than the communism you're imagining in yesterday's Twitter.
cautiouscat 3mo ago
Those people are not just on Twitter. They’re here on HN, they’re at work, they’re at your next social gathering. I’ve found them to be unavoidable to some degree.
- RajT88 3mo ago
  I see a lot of them on Nextdoor and at my city council meetings. Talking points like: "Data centers are just surveillance centers that are going to use AI to put us into a digital prison!" Whatever all that means. I assume some of it is about Flock cameras.
  - 3mo ago

neiman 3mo ago

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

moffkalast 3mo ago
Stocks and politics I guess.
cautiouscat 3mo ago
C-suites. Marketers. People with stock portfolios. Banks. Politicians. So all people that don’t understand the thing being hyped.
- an0malous 3mo ago
  Basically all people with monetary investment in the thing being hyped
tuvix 3mo ago
Agreed, but I do think this is a wholly different kind of hype. With crypto currencies it was the promise of modernizing value exchange, with some zealots promising the end of traditional currency. With this, I’m hearing (from supposedly reputable publications, in addition to random people) that this is going to end knowledge work in general and take out a large percentage of the world’s labor force. I’m being told to pick up a trade, and that the career I have and the knowledge I’ve gained is now worthless. The worst part seems to be that it’s pretty much impossible to quantify any kind of impact these tools will have until after the impact is actually felt. We’ve been in limbo while the tech sector is just rotting.
asdff 3mo ago
It is great for video games because it gives you fresh noobs to pwn instead of having to face the sweats. I can’t really play the old fps games I like anymore not because they are dead, they are very much alive, but everyone still playing has been playing nonstop for years now and are way above me in skill.

apsurd 3mo ago

Your SF hate isn't a good look. There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN. TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties. EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco. > This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

markasoftware 3mo ago
the vast majority of the target audience of this blog post would only consider moving to SF because of the tech scene. This isn't a mountain biking or asian food blog.
NetOpWibby 3mo ago
False equivalency
- apsurd 3mo ago
  ooh I like your site: https://webb.page https://webb.page false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly: > This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.
  - NetOpWibby 3mo ago
    Thanks! The author didn't "go out of his way to blame shitty SF." At least, that's not what I (and seemingly most other people) got from it. He's speaking to the AGI nuts who are convinced humans are going the way of the dodo because of AI and that kind of hype only really works in SF (and SF-pilled areas).
3mo ago

wxw 3mo ago

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. > And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed. Haha, OP has a way with words. In a way, both these emotional extremes (FOMO & the singularity) are just tools being used to continue driving the massive CapEx behind LLM improvement. Hate to love it? Love to hate it?

HellDunkel 3mo ago

How to you love this stuff so hard? I could newer love any ai generated music, book or artwork. Anything ai gemerated i have ever seem or heard was either disgustingly slop or indistinguishable from something else which was real. It‘s a like finding a cool track only to discover it‘s a lazy bootleg.

m463 3mo ago
I've made ai generated art using family photos as the starting point, and it was wonderful. :)
- NexRebular 3mo ago
  s/I've/machine/;
ivanjermakov 3mo ago
I'm sure most engineering is LLM-assisted already and nothing is wrong with it. It's just the one-shot vibe-coded low quality slop that spoils sentiment of this tools. Also many people are interested in what agents can build unsupervised as a test of "superintelligence".
nylonstrung 3mo ago
Yeah but it was only like 2 years ago that artists were arguing this on the basis that AI-gen images would consistently mangle hands Now we're at a point where that never happens, and where lipsync is almost a completely solved problem If the issue here is simply that the quality is bad, one has to contend with the fact that it is undoubtedly exponentially improving and there's no reason we should expect that improvement to stop I also don't have any interest in consuming AI generated art, but the same criticisms were levied at computer graphics and if we're comparing to CGI we'd be at the late 1970s in terms of nascency
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  An LLM cannot make art because it isn't human. It can make "art like artifacts". Art involves one human communicating some emotional experience to another human, LLMs cannot experience human emotion, so they cannot make art. The process of making art is not a subset of hill climbing optimisation algorithms.

hamandcheese 3mo ago

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? It's running, privately, in my homelab. I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy. This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.

paulryanrogers 3mo ago
You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.
- otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- midasz 3mo ago
  I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/skills/upstream-sync https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    I'm doing it right now to see what the cost is; I cloned the upstream and made a copy of the working directory and asked the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model to merge my production files with the new upstream. Since it's just a duplicate folder, I can always fall back if it fubars.
atomicnumber3 3mo ago

jacobgold 3mo ago

As soon as we started unironically calling LLMs "AI" we went down the hype path. That has plenty of downsides, like stressing out the entire world and attracting cryptocurrency bros, but also the major upside massive of funding/acceleration. So far, all we have is more software running on computers. It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic. Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.

cautiouscat 3mo ago
> Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet. I’m not sure it’s net negative or not. I’ve found that it’s reductive though. We have this really broad field of artificial intelligence reduced down to at worst a “slop machine” and at best a single tool. Imagine being a CS professor that studied AI in the 90s and how you have to over explain you don’t mean LLM chatbots to a layman.
lukan 3mo ago
"It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic" But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good). I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engines and alike were called AI long ago. So it is not general strong AI and has no consciousness and no mind and is pretty dumb too often - but the general concept - getting from a some vague text to a working program has some connection to intelligence to me.
- jacobgold 3mo ago
  Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1] But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
  - 3mo ago

TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases. You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.

lacedeconstruct 3mo ago
This doesn't make sense, I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit I dont want to spend my time perfecting the craft of making bread for my daily needs (maybe once in a while its a soothing activity), I want someone smarter than me to spend his entire life coming up and perfecting a solution and exerting more time and effort than I can afford and I am very happy to support him so I can stop worrying about it and focus on what I want to do
- dolebirchwood 3mo ago
  > This doesn't make sense Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. What doesn't make sense is that analogy. Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread.
  - lacedeconstruct 3mo ago
    >Makes perfect sense to anyone good at using these models. It doesn't really, because whenever I ask them what did they actually create, its always a shitty dashboard or a finance tracker or something derivative and worse than what is out there
    - wccrawford 3mo ago
      You're missing the point that it isn't worse than what's already out there for them. They've implemented only the parts they need, and removed all the crap that just complicates the system for them. They've made it do exactly what they need, exactly how they need it. It's something that you couldn't afford to do previously, sometimes even as a programmer. Now, it's often quick and easy, up to a certain complexity.

password54321 3mo ago

Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98d31/cdc_prompt.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

andy99 3mo ago
The secret sauce is training data. They’re not just taking advantage of more compute (which obviously is necessary but as mentions basically a commodity). They are paying billions to data labelers and making judgements about the nature of the training data they best need to make the product they want. This seems to get pushed aside as a minor point but it’s the primary differentiator of the big labs.
- password54321 3mo ago
  As a I said, compute and data. But LLMs can be distilled, so even their data is not much of a secret sauce.
reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
I'm pretty sure at this point that Anthropic is training mixture models (at least in the heavy pre-train) and deploying them dense with explicit loss on thinking trace coherence. Having a thinking trace that is legible, coherent, and immediately implies the explicit turn output and/or tool use seems difficult if not impossible to reliably get from mixture models. I predict MoE is a transitional technology, it's got too many problems and the benefits are...kinda grandfathered into the dogma at this point.
- charcircuit 3mo ago
  >I predict MoE is a transitional technology While scaling laws hold (more weights = better), and time / financial costs are not trivial the incentives are in place to have MoE. MoE means you can have more weights without increasing the critical path of evaluating it. I am curious what you believe the problems with it that would cause people to prefer using less weights. I'm not following what you mean by MoE can't have legible thinkings trace or tool use when existing models with MoE can.

Razengan 3mo ago

I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on. In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence. Now I can just ask AI about fleeting ideas and always have a starting point for some area of some project to work on. A lot/some of the concerns about the AI Age could be alleviated if people got UBI and a 4-day workweek. like if AI's supposed to be so great why do we still have to work so much?? and if we don't have to work, how do we pay for food and bed?

jagenabler2 3mo ago
Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore. I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was stuck for too long, I’d discard it. Now I feel like I have an obligation to build everything. Maybe it never mattered and the quantity of solutions is truly the most valuable thing.
- Razengan 3mo ago
  > Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? You have to be careful and "remain yourself": Like I've been trying to think of a generic save/load system for my game framework, but the ideas given by Codex so far don't suit my desired design/interface, BUT it makes me certain of how I DON'T want to do it heh If I got lazy and just blindly took the AI's first suggestion, I'd end up in deeper tech dept. You have to take advantage of and "exploit" the way LLMs work, which seems ideal for shaping vague ideas, by using the AI's fuzziness to help you decide what you do and don't want.
  - jagenabler2 3mo ago

kenforthewin 3mo ago

I felt the same way in 2024-2025. Then Sonnet 4 was released, and things started feeling different. Opus 4.5 was another step change for me. Everything feels like it's accelerating, and timelines are getting crunched. I guess in some ways I envy OP, who would "bet everything" against ASI - the truth is I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows, where this ends.

lukeschlather 3mo ago
He didn't say he bets everything against ASI, he said he bets everything against ASI being a flash of light in the sky which destroys our chance of getting access to the wealth it creates.
- kenforthewin 3mo ago
  That's a much less generous interpretation of his writing. "Yes we will birth superintelligence, but everything will just sort of work out for us humans". This seems like a silly take to me.
  - int_19h 3mo ago
    Is it? To me, the notion that a superintelligence (by which I'm assuming you mean the more sensible "something smarter than us", not "literally a godlike entity") automatically means that sky is going to fall is sillier.
    - kenforthewin 3mo ago
      I have no idea what happens next if we create and horizontally scale superintelligence; one thing I do know for sure is it won't be "business as usual".
    - asdff 3mo ago
      You have to take a step back and look at the sort of world we already live in to understand the sky falling take. We built this monster known as the shareholder model. This is an immoral, cold, unscrupulous beast we unleashed to the world some time ago. This is the model where your boss knows full well you do decent enough work, that you support a family on your income, that getting another job is tough, that is aware blindsiding you may leave you unprepared, and yet, your boss knows all this and lays you off anyway. Why? Because it is more efficient for the company. This is the model that sees companies pollute our world. That sees fisheries ravaged just outside the reach of local jurisdictions and legal action. This is the model that is burning the future for the next quarter. So given this empowerement of capital beyond any control of any person, where even the boss that fired you is just as much a slave to the system as you are with no real loyalty given to them, how do you think this plays out? The AI model trained to make the most profit possible for lowest cost is going to not do that? It is going to say hey, Bob needs a good job to put food on the table? Hell no it isn’t. The system we have today ensures we will one day get the most horrifying version of ai in control of this planet before long. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just herds us up and burns us like firewood to power some data centers to save on energy spend for a quarter.

ks2048 3mo ago

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

therepanic 3mo ago
the author does not believe in the technological singularity.
- ks2048 3mo ago
  That's what I gathered from the blog post - which made the title of the blog seem odd.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

dom96 3mo ago

I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

EgregiousCube 3mo ago
Guarantee is too strong a thing to seek, but healthy competition makes it highly likely that the supply/demand curve will meet at a healthy place. You're always guaranteed that you can stash away the open models!
talloaktrees 3mo ago
Currently, because of the subsidies from the frontier models, demand is mostly for higher intelligence. If subsidies do end, demand for price efficiency per unit of intelligence will go way up.And because there's many players in the market, this demand should be met by at least some of them.
- byzantinegene 3mo ago
  would i hire a phd grad if they cost the same as a degree holder? sure, why not. but if they cost twice as much?
Aurornis 3mo ago
> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices? I would bet good money on prices going down significantly, not up. If we get to the point where you can run an Opus 4.8 model on your local computer, it's going to be even cheaper for a datacenter to serve it on their hardware. That means prices crash, not that they're going to rise.

simianthoughts 3mo ago

This guy is sooooo annoying with his stale takes. This is what he wrote before. > I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. Now he's writng > I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents. SMH now he writes about the hype. My brother in absolute Deity, *you* should have believed the hype.

TN1ck 3mo ago
Both can be true and I have both opinions also in me. Love the progress, worry about the consequences of not being careful with it. He does say in this post: > I’m getting better at using them and get some boost from the models. It is a new skill, and it’s not like I haven’t constantly been trying them. You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue, and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?).
emp17344 3mo ago
You act as a hype peddler in practically every LLM-adjacent thread. No wonder you’re taking this article so personally. Touch grass.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

andy99 3mo ago

He says he might have been too harsh in his “eternal sloptember” post from may: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-e... I wonder what he thinks was too harsh, still seems pretty bang on, I think it’s going to age well.

fragmede 3mo ago
> the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. I think he now thinks agents can maybe program a little bit.

fragmede 3mo ago

> But models are useful just like... all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will! Wait, does this mean I'm better at something than geohot? All that time spent learning regexps wasn't a waste!

fuckaiwriter 3mo ago

[flagged]

jaaacckz 3mo ago
[flagged]
- fuckaiwriter 3mo ago
  Fuck you

fwlr 3mo ago

I get it, I want to agree, I really do like the “this is a new tool in the toolkit of the professional software craftsperson” argument… …but consider: the Q-tip. “Don’t use it to clean your ears”, but for most people that’s all they want to do with it, and empirical observation indicates that this dynamic results in either “using Q-tips irresponsibly” or “not using Q-tips”, with “uses Q-tips properly” being a small-to-vanishing proportion of the whole.

ghthor 3mo ago
Qtips are made for cleaning your ears. It says not to do that so they are NOT sued every time some idiot fucks up their ear with one.
- wizzwizz4 3mo ago
  But the part of the ear that needs cleaning can be reached without a cotton bud. This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus.
  - simoncion 3mo ago
    > This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus. In my personal experience, not using a cotton-tipped swab for the task is like cleaning a plate loaded with gunk and burned-on patches with one's bare hands rather than choosing to use a sponge and/or brush. You can do it, [0] but it's much more work, much more time consuming, or you get an inferior result. [0] In my case, I'd need to make one set of passes with paper wrapped around my smallest finger, and then another set with paper shaped into a tool that can lever the excess wax out from outer orifice of my ear canal.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      We live in the future. You can get an ear cleaning camera endoscope device for $40 next day Amazon delivery anywhere they reach.

pu_pe 3mo ago

> A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it. > AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing. But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?

xyst 3mo ago

I think big money/private equity/vulture capitalists tend to ruin everything. They set these unrealistic goals and force companies to do shady shit in order to meet these often unattainable goals or achieve unicorn status. It’s why con artists, scammers always flood every hype cycle. Greed ruins everything.

deep_concern 3mo ago

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim. It's bullshit in the sense that they don't know for sure, but the author doesn't either. Why might or might not it be true?

rglover 3mo ago
May be true because humans, especially in the West, are big on performative humanitarianism but not actually considering the well-being of others (or changing their behavior solely for the benefit of others). May not be true because it's a blind spot to assume that purely by being a player in the AI game (with no real attention paid to quality of result), you have increased odds of winning the game. That's true in the abstract, but practically, it requires a competent player to become true in reality.
fragmede 3mo ago
No one knows for sure. I certainly don't. Looking at history though, at what happened in 2008, and the effects it had on my own personal financial situation, it's easy to see "falling behind" as plausible.

a-dub 3mo ago

it's kinda like riding an e-bike, but in heavy and unpredictable pedestrian traffic.

SwellJoe 3mo ago

This line: "this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, though bounded, amount of tokens), frontier models are a no-brainer, most folks and companies will use them. But, at token rates, 10x or 100x the cost of open models or what I was spending on the frontier models a month ago? That is a harder question to answer "yes" to. I certainly wouldn't spend $1000 a month for the best model, much less $10,000; my employer might pay $1000/month, but definitely not $10,000. The frontier labs need everyone to answer "yes" to spending 100x what they currently spend to justify the valuations, and it's just not going to happen as long as everyone knows how to make these models. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to figure that out now. Anthropic, in particular, has their finger on the trigger...they want to push people to usage-based billing for Fable. But, OpenAI released 5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!), and there's no moat keeping someone from switching. If Anthropic really does end Fable access on the subscription plans in a few days, I predict a large market move back toward OpenAI. The market isn't going to bear the cost of making the frontiers investment make sense.

arscan 3mo ago
Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?
- SwellJoe 3mo ago
  So far, it seems to be the reverse of that disruption. Hardware companies, Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, ARM, memory companies, are all having record-setting quarters, and it's actual profits, not subsidized by investors and circular investments (though the hardware companies are investing in the AI companies to keep the hype train rolling).

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

rho4 3mo ago

Thank you, I really needed to read a sane voice. The relentless hype-onslaught is not easy to cope with.

ipdashc 3mo ago
These comments are always interesting to me (genuinely! no shade) because it feels like we're on different sides of the Internet. Almost everything I see about LLMs is somewhere between uneasy acceptance, skepticism, and outright hate. Even those of us who admit they're impressively capable usually caveat it with "... but our jobs and society are cooked, aren't they?" The "hype onslaught" is, like... Something I know exists, on some abstract level. In news reports about CEOs, or seeing screenshots of LinkedIn, or whatever. But it feels so far removed from a sentiment any real person holds.
- Capricorn2481 3mo ago
  I have read hundreds of comments on this site alone saying you need to become a prompt engineer now, regardless of your profession, or be left behind. There are a lot of companies with "AI mandates" right now, essentially asking their employees to... Do something with AI. Doesn't matter what
  - ipdashc 3mo ago
    > on this site alone Even here, it feels like we're on different websites. Most comments I see on HN are between the "uneasy acceptance" and "skepticism" levels. The "left behind" rhetoric I see made fun of more often than used wholeheartedly. Perhaps we just click on different comment sections? The "AI mandates", yeah, I'd count that as hype (though even that in its aimlessness feels more like an admission that they don't know what to do and are just trying to fit in to look cool, than outright hype, but still). I'm just lucky to not work at a place that has them.

ChicagoDave 3mo ago

A lot of people died from Covid and if not for mRNA technology and extraordinary caregivers a lot more deaths would have occurred. That’s hype where it truly belongs. Don’t mix AI hype with Covid conspiracy theories.

yunnpp 3mo ago

misunderestimate? So overestimate, or estimate exactly?

rafeuddaraj 3mo ago

This was a refreshing perspective. Thanks for writing it.

kotberg 3mo ago

[flagged]

LugosFergus 3mo ago

Since no one is talking about it: T2 isn’t about machines taking over the world. That has happened (or will happen). But humans eventually defeat the machines. Skynet is trying to prevent that by killing John Connor. That’s what the movie is about. I suppose it’s also about John searching for a parental figure through the T800. He doesn’t get that through is foster parents and his estranged mother. Anyway, I don’t think this dude actually watched this movie. It’s too bad because it’s a classic.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
undeveloper 3mo ago
he's biggest larper of all time
nulltype 3mo ago
Maybe he meant to link to Colossus: The Forbin Project
voidUpdate 3mo ago
I mean all of the Terminator films are essentially "Machines took over the world. John Connor will eventually defeat the machines. The leader of the machines sent a machine back in time to prevent John Connor defeating the machines"
- LugosFergus 3mo ago
  Not exactly. Terminator Salvation didn't have time travel.
  - voidUpdate 3mo ago
    You mean there are terminator films after T3?
    - LugosFergus 3mo ago

llm_nerd 3mo ago

This feels a bit like a reframing of the rather absurd "Eternal Sloptember" nonsense, desperately trying to pivot from Luddism to visionary (and yes, I know this is the "hacked the iPhone" guy. I'm not a cult of personality person and I positively do not care). Also incredibly weird how it repeatedly talks about people moving to San Francisco, which ... what in the world is that nonsense about? People talking about the concerns of AI and automation are in no universe considering moving to SF as the protection... "Where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?" This is a recurring gotcha in the anti-AI marketplace of denialism. It's a bit like saying "I saw a fat guy, so why do people keep telling me that GLP-1s change everything?" It takes time. Like already I would say just about every programmer has replaced a number of tools with random shit they spit out from LLMs. It percolates out from there as some things become products, etc. And to anyone actually paying attention, and not just feeding their delusions, the impact is utterly enormous. Incontestable. The "Where's the software? / Where's the change?" people are absolutely going to find themselves in the dustbin of history. It's also fascinating how often people do the stochastic parrot horseshit. The other night I had to do a large scale compression test with libjxl, which notably is software that has seen an enormous amount of optimization interest and you would assume has little extra to be eked out. I've traced through this software before and the compression path is insanely complex. It's the sort of software that is headache inducing. Anyways, curious what the state of the platform was I grabbed the latest source and asked Fable to look for low-hanging fruit in the lossy and lossless compression paths. It suggested a few, created a test harness to A:B bitwise compare with the original, and implemented its optimizations. It achieved a 14% performance increase in a single pass, using just the remaining quota I had on a subscription as my week drew to a close. And all it did was some high level logical optimizations, some more efficient memory allocations, and so on. All of its code was completely in the style of the project, was no more significant than necessary, and so on. Anyone that isn't utterly blown away by that -- who gets the hype -- is lying to themselves.

desktopentree 3mo ago

every output looks similar now across the coding models

slopinthebag 3mo ago

I think I agree completely. It’s worth pointing out that Linus’s comparison of LLMs and compilers is that they are both tools, not that they’re the same thing. Like how both compilers and hammers are tools, but a hammer is not a compiler. They’re really quite useful but the Bay Area mentality and hype is completely disgusting and turned me completely off for a while. What brought me back was a surge in useful Chinese models, with a significantly more mature approach to marketing and discourse. I think Geohot is 100% correct about SF and the people there perpetuating insanity. And I wonder, has it always been like that there, or is this a new phenomenon?

vkaku 3mo ago

I'm not an AI skeptic but I hate the hype. Especially throwing compute for the sake of it. I do alt inference prototypes and got much farther than I had hoped to. So indeed, any investor in AI should read deep and question hype and frontier lab investments. See: https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT for the sort of hype busting I do.

smcg 3mo ago

Seems ironic coming from a poster child for hyping up hacking.

lurkercodemnky 3mo ago

Without hype our companies would not pay for them :)

modgate 3mo ago

[flagged]

segmondy 3mo ago

I don't always agree with george, but his hot takes on LLM has been right on!

deterministic 3mo ago

[flagged]

entropyneur 3mo ago

> all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?) Part-time vibe coder here. As far as I can tell it's no longer "slop" in the sense that I am no longer hitting the state where AI can't maintain what it has written or can't meet the requirements. But shipping is as hard as ever. Projects get more ambitious, scope creeps, nuances keep being discovered as you work on a piece of software, etc. Right now I feel that the absence of new software explosion is best explained by the fact that the part we have automated turned out to be relatively small.

qsera 3mo ago

>AI is the continuation of the computer revolution. Yes, it is a vastly efficient search technique using fast computers.

smcg 3mo ago

Remember when George was an iconoclast hacker and not the lapdog of AI oligarchs?

aanet 3mo ago

I dont usually read rants, but sometimes I do. And sometimes I like 'em too. This one is a well deserved read. and I find myself agreeing with @geohot Even if the blog's title is "Singularity is nearer"

ghosthamlet 3mo ago

So am i.

dreamglider 3mo ago

Thank you. Love the post. Best of all it does not try to state the obvious but just share how one feels about the cr@p hype which is soooo tiresome - not just about the LLMs, it was pretty much the same for mobile apps, big data, lab on a chip, quantum computing, fusion (ma favourite), monkey in a jar & etc. However the sad truth is that - hype will continue, seems like a default feature irrespective of context and domain, more hype = more $, more visibility, more reach. Probably the only good thing is the cray talk lead by Sam Altman, weirdest though - so many zombies believe it but again - expected, will have the same faith as the EOW according to the Mayan calendar... lol