[HN Gopher] The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful ...
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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy
Author : LordAtlas
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-12-07 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ceodinner.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ceodinner.substack.com)
| devin wrote:
| > Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being
| courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing
| the same vertical, whether it's coding copilots, novel datasets,
| customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation.
|
| This is flat out wrong.
| billy99k wrote:
| I've been approached by a few companies to train their models
| to basically replace me. Why would I want to do this?
| throw310822 wrote:
| I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My
| perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI
| today? Where are all the small companies with improbable
| business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments
| because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge
| players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real
| progress on something that will have more economic impact than
| society can actually bear. Who should be wiped out by the
| wildfire? Anthropic?
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, if you look at language learning reddit, there
| are about 10 ads a day for shovelware of AI powered apps that
| no one ever needed. They would be those pets.com
| throw310822 wrote:
| Maybe I just didn't notice. Fair. But are these ads from
| companies that are collecting large capitals, or from small
| shops that just use the APIs provided by the few big
| players?
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| Not parent - but I've noticed those same 'start ups' and
| they just seem to be today's hustle-bro crypto/drop-
| ship/mobile-app/ceo-with-no-employees/self-help-book/low-
| effort grift (bullshit).
|
| I'm sure some of them have managed to shake some change
| out of the VCs but these wanna-be shovel sellers are just
| gonna let their domains expire and move on to the next
| scheme with little overall damage to the economy.
| watwut wrote:
| I am pretty sure they use API and dont have millions on
| training.
|
| I have no idea about their financials. They just annoy
| me, because they mask their ads as posts/comments. And
| use ChatGPT to generate those, they are like 2 page long
| drivel.
| mNovak wrote:
| Grammarly certainly comes to mind, for being essentially a
| free feature of most chat AIs now.
|
| Interestingly this time around I could see the 'fire'
| affecting mid-large corporations (or at least some divisions
| of them) if they don't adapt. Adobe, being heavily focused on
| graphic design seems like it could be under pressure. Low-end
| consulting / outsourcing is largely doing the same work AI is
| good at. Similarly with technical gig-work (like Upwork).
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| OpenAI and Anthropic.
|
| They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI
| allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a
| business model.
| torginus wrote:
| From how stock valuations look like, they had an insane rally
| from the release of ChatGPT to around mid-2024, from which
| point it stayed mostly on a consistent trajectory with the
| rest of the economy.
|
| I think a huge breakthrough for AI was priced in, and we are
| still waiting to find out if it will come and what it'll be.
|
| Personally, as this article seems investment focused, I see
| no downside to diversifying away into more varied kind of
| investments, but then again, I'm not a pro, so take it with a
| grain of salt..
| dmix wrote:
| VC is inherently high risk capital. It's by design most companies
| will fail or at most break even via acquisitions/acquihires,
| while a small few make investors massive amounts of money.
|
| The only real difference this time around is all of the
| datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it
| much riskier and capital intensive.
| saulpw wrote:
| The big difference this time around is that this 'high risk
| capital' isn't a small amount, it's 1-10% of the entire
| economy.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > Businesses aren't asking "do we want AI capabilities?" They're
| asking "how much can we get, and how soon?"
|
| This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-
| sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any
| product they can. AI is the new digital clock.
| throw310822 wrote:
| The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get
| half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of
| office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic;
| but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed
| agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in
| the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users
| really quickly.
| Spivak wrote:
| I really don't know what this means about the state of the
| corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad.
| Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at
| all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This
| isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care
| where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern.
|
| We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers
| and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI--
| even if it's theoretical--that we do pointless work for
| nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because
| all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards
| and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the
| business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying
| for is worthwhile.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what
| it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the
| internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken
| days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a
| calculator and a telephone.
|
| Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more
| vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the
| money.
|
| I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly
| pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value
| without getting a share of that value?
| throw310822 wrote:
| > we haven't gotten more share of the money.
|
| But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have
| been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A
| pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine,
| instant access to information anywhere in the world.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Material gains (produced by more productive workers)
| don't offset the increases in the
| number of expenses required to minimally live
| (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and the
| ever escalating costs of those added requirements
|
| Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in
| complexity for basic living factors - complexity that
| consumes internal resources and time.
|
| More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an
| irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are
| far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't
| care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it
|
| Frankly I've added some of the features of my own
| initiative. They were low hanging fruits and really helpful
| in some cases, and in others they are placeholders waiting
| to be better integrated or expanded depending on the users
| requests. Nobody forces anyone to use them or even notice
| them, so why not?
|
| As I said: these features look like magic in demos, it's
| not because of the hype that managers want them integrated
| but because of genuine enthusiasm. But they require more
| development and maintenance effort than was apparent from
| the demo. Also, there's a clear discoverability problem due
| to the fact that an agent has basically no UI.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Candidly, the accusation of short-sightedness doesn't really
| make sense when it comes to enthusiasm in a technology which
| often in practice falls short today but which _in certain
| cases_ and _in more cases tomorrow than today_ is worth
| tremendous business value.
|
| If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness.
| They are not the sticks in the mud.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous
| business value
|
| That's a nice crystal ball you have there. From where I'm
| standing, model performance improvements have been slowing
| down for a while now, and without some sort of fundamental
| breakthrough, I don't see where the business value is going
| to come from
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| The prerequisite for me to be wrong is that the technology
| needs to stop getting better _entirely_ *right now* AND we
| need to discover _ZERO_ new uses for what exists today.
|
| That's a fairly tall order.
| jpkw wrote:
| So if the plateau is unanimously declared to have been
| reached tomorrow OR just one more tiny use case exists
| tomorrow and all others dwindle away to nothing, than you
| consider yourself to be correct? What a wild assertion!
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| If the plateau is reached at some higher level of
| capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are
| discovered that do not exist today, I will also be
| correct. You said it in a silly way but you're
| directionally correct.
| jpkw wrote:
| No. You state that this is all that it would take to be
| considered as tremendous business value. You are moving
| your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are
| taking an absolute position that there is tremendous
| business value in its current form(as a miniscule
| improvement and one insignificant new use case does does
| not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so
| that remains to be seen.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| We don't even have good uses today. That doesn't mean
| there won't be good uses tomorrow, but neither does it
| inspire confidence.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Rushing to get on board something that looks like it might be
| the next big thing is often short-sighted. Some recent
| examples include Windows XP: Tablet Edition and Google Glass.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| That's like saying that gambling is shortsighted. It
| depends entirely on the odds as to whether or not it's
| _wise_ , but "shortsighted" implies that making the bet
| precludes some future course of action.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Can a company like openAI be worth an estimated 1/5th of
| Alphabet, which offers a similar product but also has an
| operative system, a browser, the biggest video platform, the
| most used mail client, its own silicon to running that
| product, the 3rd most popular Cloud platform, ... ?
|
| I think that is the recklessness in question. Throw in that
| there is no profit for OpenAI & co and that everything is
| fueled by debt and the picture is grim (IMHO)
| dlojudice wrote:
| The text reminded me of one of Veritasium's latest videos [1]
| about power law, self-organized criticality, percolation, etc...
| and it also has a wildfire simulation
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
| gmuslera wrote:
| Framing this as something cyclic as the rest of the world is
| static may be a mistake if things have deep changes outside
| (related or not with what is being done here), or the nature of
| the field radically changes.
|
| Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the
| regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no
| difference for most of the survivors.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > training compute looks more like an operating expense with a
| short payback window than a durable capital asset
|
| Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are
| economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand,
| that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further
| into their functional lifetimes.
|
| There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But
| turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while
| older GPUs continue working.
|
| Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated
| increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term
| functional value.
|
| I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying
| trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand.
| Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a
| greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along
| with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and
| better ways.
|
| The wildflowers will grow fast.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| "The Bubble is Good Actually" cope cope cope.
| blibble wrote:
| I don't see how nvidia come out of this stronger
|
| their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be
| faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
|
| jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now
| "AI"
| vb-8448 wrote:
| Nvidia is the Cisco of .com ... cisco still exists, and it's
| doing pretty well.
| cr125rider wrote:
| I forgot they bought Splunk. Enterprises love shoveling money
| into that fire pit
| diamond559 wrote:
| Just took them a few 26 years to touch their peak dot com
| bubble stock price again.
| vb-8448 wrote:
| And it will be probably the same for nvidia, unless they
| didn't find another business stream apart from selling
| "shovels".
|
| BTW, stock price is not everything, Cisco survived, grew,
| and it's the backbone of internet today.
| eastbound wrote:
| I wonder what's going to be the "I can cloud-configure
| all my Cisco routers over the internet" for Nvidia.
| patapong wrote:
| > their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will
| be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
|
| Are we sure this will be the case? Perhaps the sweet spot for
| hardware that can train/run language models is the GPU already,
| especially with the years of head start Nvidia has?
| malux85 wrote:
| Gaming, then crypto, then AI - all GPU hungry!
| flopsamjetsam wrote:
| And each one requiring an order of magnitude more GPUs than
| the last!
| bdangubic wrote:
| this trend will always continue with _next big thing_
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will
| be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs_
|
| Why? NVIDIA is better positioned to produce faster and more
| efficient ML ASICs any of their huge customers (except possibly
| Google). And on top of that, the fact that there is a huge
| library of CUDA code that will run out of the box on NVIDIA
| hardware is a big advantage.
|
| Arguably, this shift has already happened. Modern NVIDIA
| datacenter GPUs, like the H100, only bear a passing resemblance
| to a GPU -- most of the silicon is dedicated to accelerating ML
| workloads.
| throw234234234 wrote:
| I think this is what the "circular financing" is all about
| actually. While you are in the 'picks and shovels' phase you
| want to use your high margins to buy up the value chain and
| become more vertically integrated. Effectively investing when
| the sun shines to diversify the company.
|
| As a possibility for example I can see them transforming from a
| GPU based corp into a parent company for many full or partially
| owned "subsidiaries". They still manufacture chips to be
| "vertically integrated" but that becomes bread and butter as an
| enablement rather than the main story (e.g. Google TPU's). As
| their margins go down the value accrues to what they are owning
| (the business units/product areas).
| kittikitti wrote:
| I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I
| think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign,
| but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that
| inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience
| because inference is a much easier problem than training. The
| training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when
| we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake.
|
| I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There
| is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined.
| The people who are entering at this point are woefully
| unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune,
| when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
| cr125rider wrote:
| And everyone but tech company is leveraged to the moon on
| selling shovels
| Libidinalecon wrote:
| California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a
| mania.
|
| Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic..
|
| We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different".
|
| "AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this
| time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all
| going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is
| going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause
| mass human genocide.
|
| It is all completely rational this time.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Not not mention the California gold rush basically killed the
| existing functional local community (often literally) with
| very few people actually getting rich and even fewer from the
| gold itself.
|
| Har not to see parallels with the current AI bubble.
| watwut wrote:
| > "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going
| to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI"
|
| I don't see those companies promising that. They are bragging
| about being able to replace jobs for millions people and
| their CEOs are also simultaneously taking pretty dismissive
| attitude toward lesser people. If is more of "we will replace
| millions of people of eff you, billionaire class will become
| more powerful.
|
| I am not saying it will realistically happen, I am saying
| that is what current messaging is.
| oasisbob wrote:
| Gold rush comparison is an interesting one. Much of Seattle's
| early economy was based on "mining the miners", especially gold
| rushes in the Yukon. In addition to profits to local merchants,
| it would distort the labor pool as people abandoned logging and
| left the woods to work mining claims instead.
| vb-8448 wrote:
| > The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in
| 2008-2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber,
| and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same
| pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.
|
| The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble,
| maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if
| there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those
| 2 things nearby.
| jameslk wrote:
| In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0]
|
| The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue,
| covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if
| there's not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous
| commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model
| materializes, are living on borrowed time
|
| 0. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html
| pizlonator wrote:
| > AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings.
| Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer
| acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase
| worker productivity. The return is measurable and often
| immediate, not hypothetical.
|
| Is the return measurable and immediate?
|
| Is it really?
| com2kid wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2.
|
| A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support
| reps.
|
| Translation teams laid off.
|
| Documentation teams dramatically reduced.
|
| Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Historically, this is not how technology that improves
| productivity has affected the economy. I'd encourage you to
| learn more about economics and the history of automation.
| com2kid wrote:
| Doing this stuff is literally my job.
|
| Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees
| and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable
| with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call
| center staff as quickly as possible.
|
| People don't realize how much a call to customers service
| costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for
| our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone.
| Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech
| support completely erased the profit from that product's
| sale.
|
| Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to
| happen.
|
| One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can
| push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to
| fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net
| positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the
| expected cost of customer service factored into the product
| price will drop.
|
| E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support
| during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way
| costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up
| as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product.
|
| (And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost
| savings are found!)
| pizlonator wrote:
| That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening?
|
| Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem
| plausible are translation team and data entry team, though
| even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.
| jakeydus wrote:
| I think that is it happening is an important question, but
| "does the consumer actually want it to happen" should be
| equally important. It won't be, because the c suite will
| just make the decision for us all, but it ought to be.
| com2kid wrote:
| If done properly you shouldn't be able to tell. A really
| good voice AI assistant is indistinguishable from front
| line support reading through a script, and potentially a
| few steps better.
| com2kid wrote:
| I'm telling you of what I've either worked on or seen
| myself.
|
| Just a couple days ago a scheduled a furnace repair through
| an AI receptionist on the phone.
|
| Layoffs in tech support and customer service already
| happened last year.
|
| Entry level sales jobs doing cold calling have been
| replaced all over the place.
| willis936 wrote:
| AI didn't replace those jobs, it was just the excuse to
| stop offering the service.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are not capable of telling the difference between human
| translated and AI translated communication.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| And yet, whenever I pick up the phone I do so because I need
| to do something I cannot do on the website.
|
| The chatbot, acting as my agent, whether on the website on on
| a call doesn't have more permissions than I have.
| never_inline wrote:
| It's AI writing. Big words and rule of 3.
| khannn wrote:
| I forgot about the rule of 3 but that's obviously AI writing
| pizlonator wrote:
| Yeah maybe the AI thought leaders will be replaced by AI
|
| But not in the sense of singularity and explosive
| intelligence, but in the sense of a flaming explosive
| bubble of slop
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I think.. after reading this article twice that, if it is indeed
| presented accurately and if the table participants are not just
| trying to drive a specific agenda, is it applying the wrong
| metaphor.
|
| It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ).
| It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly,
| plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is
| actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad
| or "ai protects okta'.
|
| I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon
| coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may
| not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent
| ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways
| that will make things a lot more difficult overall.
|
| Here is what I mean by this:
|
| - the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones
| who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to,
| move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise,
| knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems
| that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not
| experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything
| that has -- lets call it -- dual use )
|
| It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days
| ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very
| aggressive vines.
| Lapel2742 wrote:
| > the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead
|
| Maybe it's simply less visible?
|
| I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN
| but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse
| and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to
| the "old" internet.
| bgwalter wrote:
| It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good
| products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now.
|
| "AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon
| companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or
| who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have
| circular revenue agreements with other companies.
|
| This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot
| air and incorrect algorithms.
| qgin wrote:
| Amazon, Microsoft, Google all are profitable even despite their
| capex. Worst case scenario they stop spending on AI capex and
| go back to being ridiculously profitable instead of just
| comfortably profitable. There's no actual implosion for the big
| names.
| bgwalter wrote:
| I'm not saying they will cease to exist. I'm saying that the
| Internet bubble of 2000 had valid tech whose growth was
| (deliberately) overestimated.
|
| They can write it off and move on to other things. But that
| is not what the new wildfire talking point says. The wildfire
| framing says that the underlying tech is as valuable as the
| tech of 2000 was.
| lkbm wrote:
| I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake
| products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping
| was _maybe_ 30% as fast.
|
| I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though
| Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few
| years later.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If
| it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy
| it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately
| understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is
| pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what
| its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success'
| with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before
| got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with
| lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc.
|
| Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple
| devices.
| lkbm wrote:
| A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped
| me.
|
| You: No one knows anything AI helps with.
|
| Yeah, okay, if you ignore _everything every user says_ then it
| is indeed a mystery.
| AstroBen wrote:
| How much astroturfing is happening online? These companies
| certainly have the funds to do so on a wide scale
|
| The only thing I trust about these right now is my own
| experience
| bgwalter wrote:
| This is how it is done openly with clearly Grok-edited or
| written comments:
|
| https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1997307084853870793#m
|
| One can only imagine the amount of covert promotion.
| AstroBen wrote:
| From another industry: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comme
| nts/1p7kmbn/i_was_paid_to_...
|
| I don't have much proof, but given the incentives and the
| possibility of doing it I'd be surprised if it wasn't
| happening everywhere. How much would be enough to pay the
| top 50 influencers in a market to push something? To hire
| 100 people to be active full time on all social media
| sites? To a company with billions they wouldn't even
| notice the expense
|
| Default to skepticism and double down on your critical
| thinking skills. More important than ever today
| diamond559 wrote:
| Are these "million people" in the room with you now? Or are
| they just the bot and shill accounts you're reading on "X"?
| lkbm wrote:
| They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people.
| ChatGPT and the other big LLMs has hundreds of millions of
| users.
|
| You might not like using LLMs. You might not find them
| useful. You might think they're bad and harmful (I do). But
| to claim that _no one finds them useful_ is a completely
| different position, and one that 's about as disconnected
| as it's possible to be.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people.
|
| I have all of those. Most don't use AI at all. Some use
| it on a limited basis but it is unclear if there is any
| worthwhile gain in productivity. Remaining are two who
| use it with regularity, including one who's all in. I
| personally use it for 2 limited use cases. Sometimes it
| helps. Sometimes I'd be done sooner without it.
|
| Conversely, I need to mediate an epidemic of AI foistware
| and AI UX pollution. 100% of my userbase is subject to
| overpushy AI offerings and an endless minefield of
| shifty, unwanted AI elements. These users are clearly
| more productive when I keep AI out of their way.
|
| On balance, AI is presently a net negative for my
| clients.
| zkmon wrote:
| These analogies are like fitting a curve to align with the data.
| Let the new data come in next year, the curve changes to fit that
| data as well. Any data can be curve-fitted and be seen as
| following some pattern.
|
| It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of
| the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology
| business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and
| predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look
| at the what's going on across the globe.
|
| The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena
| that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction
| between various forces.
|
| For example, social and political norms may turn against all that
| is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving
| plastic food.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the
| companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales
| linearly) will remain after the wildfire.
|
| The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not
| sure they will have enough time.
| m4rtink wrote:
| That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost
| certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large
| scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass
| drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can
| even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural
| mass.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| Mid-Century at least optimistically. All of this will play
| out before then, but broadly, those who can code the machines
| will survive and thrive as they always do. Except for the
| older ones, it will be yet another excuse to jettison all
| that experience and talent because of the gray hair that
| makes them creatively dead from the neck up according to
| youthful disruptive beach loving Vinod Khosla.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Starlink (collectively) already has 10 times the solar power
| of ISS, with present-day launch capabilities. If Starship
| works out (not guaranteed) launch cost should drop to
| ~$100/kg, which would enable very large constellations.
|
| Musk is planning for 1 megaton/year of satellites, each with
| 100kW, yielding about 100GW per year.[1]
|
| He thinks they can do that in 4 years, but adjusting for
| Elon-time, it's probably no less than 8 years, if ever.
|
| But will the AI money last that long? Maybe not.
|
| -------------
|
| [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997706687155720229
| GMoromisato wrote:
| Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both
| of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and
| Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?
| never_inline wrote:
| If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be
| able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current
| SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply
| available compute (from the firesales of failing companies)
| to produce models that match their quality, while having to
| invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to,
| allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the
| first wave and making them go under.
| pizlonator wrote:
| > If they are profitable on inference currently
|
| Man that is the question, isn't it
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting
| the farm on AI--and getting the funding to stay alive and play
| the lottery--what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?
|
| It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the
| industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of
| the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land
| somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if
| nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical
| chairs and even that might not save you?
| karlgkk wrote:
| That "rational move" has always been a good move, regardless of
| AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come
| in a few years. While we're at it, if you're making engineer
| money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I'm not saying
| you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.
| delfinom wrote:
| > if you're making engineer money,
|
| SV & big tech engineer money.
|
| Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money
| to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the
| country, sure.
| karlgkk wrote:
| I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of
| conversation and website we're on.
|
| That said if you're making $250k+ a year and not on track
| to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement
| calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.
| ghaff wrote:
| Which is a pretty high salary in the US in tech
| generally.
|
| That said, a lot of people in US tech can probably retire
| relatively early if they run the numbers and don't have a
| lot of external expenses.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I wouldn't assume. The readership of HN is quite vast.
| I've never worked at big tech and don't plan to.
| noncoml wrote:
| $250k+ a year means ~$12k monthly salary.
|
| A semi decent apartment in SV will cost you ~$3k
|
| Bills(phone, internet, electricity, etc) another $1k.
|
| If you are married, groceries at least $1k.
|
| Even if we assume you don't do anything else in life, and
| you are in perfect health best case scenario would be $6k
| savings a month or $72k a year.
|
| It would take you 10 years to save $720k plus whatever
| you make from investments.
|
| That's not enough to even buy you a house in SV. How are
| you going to retire?
|
| Unless you assume you will get $250k straight out of
| college and keep up salary raises for 25 years.
|
| Sure, if you don't have kids, age with no health
| problems, never enjoy anything in life, you may be able
| to retire at 50 in Thailand or Philippines.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| why would you would be saving for house and renting at
| same time ?
| rkomorn wrote:
| Because you need to have enough saved for a downpayment?
| karlgkk wrote:
| Well, interest rates are high right now, but you'd be
| surprised at how little down payment you need for
| purchasing a house or a condo. If you're a tech worker
| with a stable career making that kind of money, most
| underwriters will just give you the loan.
|
| I think people commonly underestimate how accessible this
| stuff is
|
| It's easy to make a 40 year forecast spreadsheet for
| retirement, including housing costs, property, taxes,
| maintenance. Include vacation, budget, food, general cost
| of living.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I left Silicon Valley 5 years ago. Are people getting
| $1M+ loans with zero down these days?
| karlgkk wrote:
| No? What?
|
| I mentioned Lifestyle creep before but what is with
| everyone's fried brains?
|
| A small condo in a nice neighborhood in Santa Clara is
| below $500k. Yes, that's a lot, and you certainly can get
| more bang for your buck if you're going to do a little
| commuting.
|
| Why does everyone here immediately assume that I'm saying
| they should go out and spend $1 million on housing?
| swatcoder wrote:
| So you oblige yourself to an enormous long-term loan at
| high-interest, burn PMI on it because you have too little
| equity, secured against an overpriced-for-quality home
| whose value may already be at peak or plataeu, fixing
| yourself to one location, while all signs warn that you
| may be laid off at any time and facing a long period of
| unemployment.
|
| I knew a lot of people who did almost exactly that ~18
| years ago. It didn't go well for them.
|
| And then it turned out that staying flexible as a renter
| and setting aside cash set me up to buy _after_ a
| correction instead of before. That part went very well
| for me.
|
| Be careful with the assumption coded into your "forecast
| spreadsheet"
| karlgkk wrote:
| Well yes, there are tradeoffs. On the other hand, go
| ahead and burn 3k a month on rent.
|
| There is no one size fits all solution but i'm surprised
| at how many people here are inadvertently revealing to me
| that they haven't even tried evaluating.
|
| For example, you saying there's nothing "affordable" when
| the baseline assumption is an income of $250k? Can tell
| you haven't looked at what's in your price range.
| Alright, good luck I guess!
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| 6k month over the past decade is circa 1.7m today
| depending on which index fund you chose.
|
| Assuming a 4% draw down (conventionally agreed to be
| safe) is over 5.5k a month.
| lixtra wrote:
| The 4% rule is considered safe for a 30 year retirement
| period. So at 50 you might want to withdraw a little
| less.
| karlgkk wrote:
| Rent? Ever heard of equity? If you make 250k you can
| afford a nice condo. Right away that blows a huge hole in
| your math.
|
| Also $1k month on bills? Groceries too?
|
| Judging by your inflated costs for everything, and ann
| idea that a house (versus more modest accommodations) is
| what the goal is, you've got Lifestyle creep. And, things
| certainly get a lot easier when your spouse also works.
| reactordev wrote:
| Bro, not everyone has daddy to give them the down payment
| to buy anything remotely affordable in SV.
| karlgkk wrote:
| Bro, I can tell you haven't even tried. Talk to a
| mortgage advisor.
| tayo42 wrote:
| 2k a month for daycare or nursery school lol
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| $2k per month for groceries and utilities for a married
| couple is insanely high, in any part of the country.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| There are a whole lot of people here who work in the tech
| industry but aren't working in SV. There are even a
| decent number who aren't in the tech industry at all.
| throw234234234 wrote:
| Tax rates, cost of living differences, etc depending
| where you are in the world don't always make this a good
| salary.
|
| Generally outside SV:
|
| - If you are making $250+ it is at least middle
| management (not tech work) AND
|
| - Only in zones where cost of living is eating this up
| (e.g. UK/Europe/Australia/etc can get to this equilvalent
| salary but costs for example for rent, food, tax, etc are
| much higher).
|
| In most countries SWE is above average pay, but it isn't
| life changing and it still unfortunately has the
| boom/bust cycles.
|
| I've met some very good engineers who have built some
| great large scale solutions who are on less than this
| salary often in non tech firms being outside of the SV
| area due to personal reasons (e.g. can't move due to
| family, too old to do the interview dance SWE has become
| these days, etc).
| phantasmish wrote:
| ... if you're making $250+k/yr as an individual in your
| 20s, yes. If you've just hit that at age 40+, maybe
| you're just looking at a comfortable 60-67ish retirement.
| The US medical system gives you exposure to well into the
| five figures of risk _per year_ on top of at least high-
| four-figures in premiums per year (at age 50). Each extra
| year puts an early retirement without _crazy_ money
| behind it at serious risk, because your expenses could
| suddenly and unavoidably shoot up by tens of thousands
| per year for several years on end.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| When you can retire depends on how little you need.
|
| Though, of course, if you're living from investment income
| you should be aware you're living off the work of other
| people.
| anonymars wrote:
| Unless you're churning your own butter and manufacturing
| your own solar panels, isn't retirement inherently living
| off other people regardless of income?
| reactordev wrote:
| Isn't social security living off the backs of other
| people too?
| incompatible wrote:
| Isn't getting wages in a wealthy country so that you can
| afford a multiple of work hours from poorly-paid people
| elsewhere inherently living off other people?
| reactordev wrote:
| This. People act like we've gotten $200k+ for more than a
| decade. Most of us haven't. It wasn't until 10 year into my
| career that I hit $100k so this is boomer math that doesn't
| account for inflation of everything.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| A majority of software engineers don't make enough money to
| retire at 50. People who have retired so young tend to be
| very lucky in both employment and their investments. Most
| probably never got married, inherited significant amounts
| of money, and/or married into even more money. It also
| helps to be lucky enough to start with a $100k+ job at age
| 23 and never have any bad luck to set you back. I've met
| people who check some/all of these boxes, and even they
| seem to not be retiring at 50.
| swatcoder wrote:
| If you're a tech employee in a large company with lucrative
| compensation, you should be aggressively reducing your expenses
| and banking your excess so you can weather what might be long
| period of unemployment and can adapt more smoothly to
| employment at more modest compensation when you manage to get
| back in.
|
| Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius
| of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a
| _very_ high-value VIP (again, you 'd know), you should assume
| you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few
| years. Possibly a long time.
|
| You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your
| control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't
| going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs.
| Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be
| standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so
| many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with
| resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new
| job will basically come down to a lottery draw.
|
| If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it.
| Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for
| that novel you've been thinking about writing.
| pbkompasz wrote:
| That is a --good-- point.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?_
|
| My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway
| (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I
| get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not
| more so, and I want to program not manage programmers,
| artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through
| to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself
| redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing
| something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be
| what we are told they are programming will become a minimum
| wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for
| now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I
| can, is the best course of action.
| torginus wrote:
| Do you think this has something to do with the current US
| policy of antagonizing most of the Western world?
|
| Tech and software's investment balance sheet comes down to a
| largely fixed cost of development vs. a large customer base
| where every customer has little to no additional cost.
|
| If you manage to burn the bridges or at least scare hundreds of
| millions of those people into exploring alternatives, that
| really eats into your total target market in the long run.
| m3047 wrote:
| Ummm... Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal... Facebook, Airbnb,
| Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator... doesn't look like a
| particularly virtuous trajectory to me.
| striking wrote:
| I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-
| written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet
| points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's
| Y" pestilence.
| jakeydus wrote:
| You forgot the italics on _Y_
| almosthere wrote:
| I just copy-paste an article into chatgpt and tell it to give
| me 3 bullet points for the article. We should have had this
| forever.
| nick486 wrote:
| > "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
|
| I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard
| to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
| dist-epoch wrote:
| People are already prompting with "yeah, don't do these
| things":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
| ssl-3 wrote:
| "That's such a great observation that highlights an
| important social issue -- let's delve into it!"
|
| I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long
| as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd
| guess.
|
| It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output,
| noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and
| instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."
| ben_w wrote:
| Anyone lazy enough to not check the output is also going to
| be lazy enough to be easy to spot.
|
| People who put the effort into checking the output aren't
| necessarily checking more than style, but some of them will,
| so it will still help.
| phantasmish wrote:
| The trouble is "AI" is waaaaay less of a boost to
| productivity if you have to actually check the output
| closely. My wife does a lot with AI-assisted writing and
| keeps running into companies that think it's going to let
| them fire a shitload of writers and have the editors do
| everything... but editing AI slop is way more work than
| editing the output of a half-decent human writer, let alone
| a good one.
|
| If you're getting a lot of value out of LLM writing right
| now, your quality was already garbage and you're just using
| it to increase volume, or you have let your quality crater.
| evanelias wrote:
| Luckily there are plenty of other obvious tells!
|
| Biggest one in this case, in my opinion: it's an extremely
| long article with awkward section headers every few
| paragraphs. I find that any use of "The ___ Problem" or "The
| ___ Lesson" for a section header is especially glaring. Or
| more generally, many superfluous section headers of the form
| "The [oddly-constructed noun phrase]". I mean, googling "The
| Fire-Retardant Giants" literally only returns this specific
| article.
|
| Or another one here: the historic stock price data is
| slightly wrong. For whatever reason, LLMs seem to make
| mistakes with that often, perhaps due to operating on
| downsampled data. The initial red-flag here is the first
| table claims Apple's split-adjusted peak close in 2000 was
| _exactly_ $1.00.
|
| There are plenty of issues with the accuracy of the written
| content as well, but it's not worth getting into.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Even if bubble burst will be massive, the slop factories will
| not stop with using it, because it's one of the use cases LLMs
| are just good at
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I'm just glad everyone stopped posting their perfect prompting
| strategies.
| debo_ wrote:
| It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other
| languages.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| I think there is a high risk that people will begin writing
| like AI, or they will stop using effective/engaging styles
| because AI happens to use those. I don't want to deal with
| people writing in contrived/awkward/imperfect ways just to
| appear more human. That is a losing game anyway, because AI
| will learn to copy everyone.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Of course, that's exactly what won't happen. AI as "better
| spam" is not going away, it's going to wriggle in everywhere.
|
| It's more things like AI delivering pizza that's under threat.
| You know, the _actual_ value.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in
| 2008-2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber,
| and the offspring of Y Combinator.
|
| This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress
| has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual
| quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the
| impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the
| first wave.
| daemontus wrote:
| The metaphor sure seems plausible, but why does the whole thing
| read like a LinkedIn post that was fed to an LLM to farm
| attention? :(
| lbreakjai wrote:
| Because it most certainly is.
| mNovak wrote:
| Is there an elegant term to describe a severely overburdened
| metaphor? I'm getting lost in the thick bark of an intertwined
| canopy root system here..
| nubg wrote:
| Could the author please post the prompt this article was
| generated with?
| rullera wrote:
| Exclusive ceo dinners so that one can publish the insights? A bit
| odd
| derelicta wrote:
| I love how for Westerners, it's totally normal that the economy
| shits itself every 10 years and that people should welcome this.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left
| behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of
| Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned
| again in 2008-2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb,
| Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the
| same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then
| renaissance.
|
| I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it
| really was a bubble.
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