The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.
I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.
Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.
A lot of that adoption is completely useless crap tho. Like ai in vacuum cleaner that ads absolutely nothing useful to anything. AI buttons intentionally at places I randomly click at, so that I am forced to open it. Google search that defaults to ai, so that we have to use it after then nerfed real search.
There are useful usages of LLMs. But huge bulk of the adoption is companies realizing they wont get investors money if they dont add ai button, it does not have to be useful.
Wrote about this recently (from a vibe coding perspective) [1]. This applies to corporations, too, as they're betting their futures on fewer engineers, more AI.
[1] https://graybearding.bearblog.dev/they-got-something-on-the-...
It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.
Europe has done this and look how advanced it is! While Americans talk to computers, we have flying cars, colonies on Mars, and even a cure for cancer. We just had the courage to go forward with that one socialist trick and look how it all worked out so wonderfully!
Today we have low tax rates and can’t make chips, still working on that moon landing, can’t build high speed rail, can’t build nuclear, and are trying to tariff our way back to a manufacturing sector
This place is full of shit too.
Theres plenty here who complain about the state of comp sci etc, but no one ready to take a pay-cut to go work for a proper leader.
However, part of the problem of why the wealthy elite don't invest in production is because of the Petro-dollar. When the USA moved to the Petro-dollar that is when the economy started to go K-shaped. The British Empire had the same problem. The Chinese absolutely do NOT want to become the World's reserve currency as they know the same fate will befall them. Perhaps the USA should have listened to Keynes with his Bancor currency after all.
If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in the west if we can’t prevent the rich from inflating and buying all the assets you will own nothing and rent everything from them.
I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?
There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.
Wow, you just solved economics!
Your argument is so incredibly reductive as to be nonsensical. The understanding of the allocation of capital is seemingly below grade school level. Even moreso, your understanding of the business cycle and how it interacts with governments and banks seems to be even more immature.
"manufacturing" didn't "go away", it moved to China so investors could capitalize on lax environmental laws and cheap labor. This engineered trade off of wealth had devastating results to massive parts of the US. On top of that, not every city can become Seattle. There isn't enough 'service economy' to go around and do that, especially as technology tends to concentrate wealth.
Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.
But at present AI seems to be just eliminating the junior programmer positions. That is, the apprentices. Once the more experienced engineers retire and die off who will replace them? AI? Who will have the knowledge and expertise to know what is crap software is and what isn't?
Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".
> adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive,
Funny, the strategy of creating a company entirely dependent on mercy of another company, vulnerable to destruction with any simple change in TOS has been criticized on HN previously.
yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale
but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?
not to say that we shouldnt be investing in efficient models, but the efficiency comes after we create another mega shoggoth that we can make more efficient
The alternative is that there will always be problems, and we could spend as much as possible trying to compute solutions, but they will not be found.
Are you sure we are talking about the same species?
Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.
It's a continuation of both low code development tools and the ongoing compaction of development groups through DevOps. AI is enabling (vibe) code development by non devs. It's enabling a BA or even direct business rep to take requirements into a prototype or example.
LLMs are out of the box and will continue developing. How/If you use them is up to you.