It's actually sad how much AI has either not improved life at all or actively made it worse from the perspective of the average person:
Your car is still the same. Your dishwasher is still the same. The train you take to work is still the same and never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.
But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do? Apparently...nothing.
Please don't be snarky or curmudgeonly in HN comments. You can make your substantive points without either of those things, both of which the site guidelines ask you not to do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not sure if that's a fair criticism dang? I sincerely wasn't trying to be snarky or curmudgeonly, but I did want to make the point clearly that none of the benefits of AI have materialised in the eyes of the average person, only the downstream costs. To my eyes, that's a salient, reasonable, and wholly representative position to share.
Did the writing also contain emotion? Yes. As all good persuasive writing should.
As the other moderator, I'll give my own perspective on this. I haven't spoken to dang about it but I completely understand why he thinks this is not the kind of comment we want to see on HN.
The main issue is that it doesn't engage with the substance of the post, and in fact, it exemplifies the very point the post is trying to make: there is a big and growing gap between those who recognize the benefits or potential of AI and those who don't (or, to widen the point, who only see negative effects or negative trends in society).
I'll make it clear that I don't think your complaints or concerns are unfounded or invalid. There's merit and substance to all these issues, and it's fine to discuss them on HN. They are discussed all the time here, and they can and should continue to be discussed in the future.
But an important part of being the kind of curious commenter that we want everyone to aspire to be is that we can look at topics holistically. We need to be able to look at the opportunities and risks together and discuss ways that the benefits can be captured and shared throughout society, and the risks and costs adequately recognized and curtailed. Most people I know of in the tech industry are taking these matters seriously.
It's a vast and complex topic to discuss, and here's not the place for me to get further into it. But the point is that it's a bigger and more complex topic than your comment adequately recognizes, and we need people to always be making the effort to be thoughtful and curious rather than fulminatory or denunciatory in their participation here.
(Also: I can understand you may not easily recognize that your comment breaks the guidelines; it's common for people to not recognize that their words seem more inflammatory when read by others than they intended them to be.)
So, if I say, there is a big and growing gap between those who recognize the benefits or potential of my poop machine and those who don't, and you say, wtf is this shit everywhere, I can just say, you doesn't engage with the substance of my post, and in fact exemplifies the very point my post is trying to make
Your crass comment might have a point if (a) there was no real or potential upside to AI, and (b) the original comment focused on the negative consequences of AI. But it doesn't; it's just an enumeration of grievances about negative trends in the world, most of which predate the emergence of AI, and/or are orthogonal to it.
The people who are optimistic about AI believe it can help to address or reverse these trends. It's fine to debate the merits of that belief, but the original comment wasn't trying to do anything like that.
It would be really cool if you guys enforced these rules uniformly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50055304#50060177
(I guess I'll jump back in since tomhow and I seem to be reading the thread at disjoint intervals...)
> It would be really cool if you guys enforced these rules uniformly.
I agree! But we can't, because there's way too much content for us to read it all, and we can't moderate what we don't see.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You made a well-argued and wise criticism that many academics/writers/think could have written, the mod's note was off the mark.
It honestly escapes me why you would judge the juxtaposition between everyday life of everyday people and a very specialised minority as snarky or curmudgeonly. Was there too much emotional impact?
There are so many comments on HN that would justify your attention with regard to this specific rule. This is not one of them.
I think they made a really good point about this and I wouldn’t really call it snark.
How is this comment worth a moderator warning? Does not make sense to me, the comment is fine.
Maybe I don't understand the word snarky but this seemed fine.
What sets this particular comment apart from so many others on this thread that you felt the need to comment on it specifically?
Can you point out what a good way of expressing disagreement or skepticism about a subject matter looks like on HN?
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Many, many people here have already been sucked into the TESCREAL orbit, and have a quasi-religious belief that AI will be the most important thing to ever happen. Anything that challenges that stance is anathema.
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This is the core hubris of everyone behind the LLM craze. I do not want to deny their utility there absolutely is some there. But the inherent assumption behind the whole thing is that with a "country of geniuses" problems will melt away. But that's not the case. The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.
And the LLMs exist to further those problems. People can't afford houses? Well, now they won't be able to own computers either. That's a feature, not a side effect. Once the K-shaped economy progresses enough, you won't even be allowed to use the LLMs. They'll exist only to be a tool for the new feudal class who owns you.
Unless you destroy their wealth now.
Luckily, the AI bubble will destroy a decent chunk of their wealth.
The Gartner Hype Cycle [0] is real, and ubiquitous. We are teetering somewhere near the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations, about to plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment. A lot of very rich people are about to lose a lot of money, and we can only hope that they don't get bailed out (again).
Then, once the bubble and hype is over, the long, slow work of actually doing useful things with this new tech starts. That's when we'll see it affect everything else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
The hype will be over one day, but when is that?
I've done multiple life choices, away from AI, believing it to be a hype, but this hype is still growing, still not dying.
Both in 2019, as well as in 2023, i.e. not 2 or 3 months ago.
> We are teetering somewhere near the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations
I've been hearing this for a year and a half now. That word, "ubiquitous", is getting real mighty challenged. I have tried to insulate myself as best as I could and it just never happens and every other day I wonder if my foil hat needs adjusting. Does yours?
Previous bubbles were identified long before they popped too. It can easily go for the next two years.
> Luckily, the AI bubble will destroy a decent chunk of their wealth.
Even if all this is true (personally I doubt it), it assumes the bubble won’t burst before they’ve shifted the money from all our 401ks, IRAs and index funds into their own pockets.
Gartner hype cycle isn't scientific and is mostly voodoo marketing gibberish, why do people still post it as if it's real?
If the bubble bursts in the worst way it could, we are all fucked, but will recover eventually
Regardless, people have been making your prediction for a couple years now
Once capabilities catch up with the demand (~which is in few years - it just takes time to build!) average person will have much better access to higher quality and cheaper hardware. It's literally how it has always worked, I don't understand why would it be different this time. There's zero substance in your comment, just repeating tired tropes from twitter.
Companies have been trying to figure out how to get people to rent pcs for a while. Unfortunately the AI boom has shown them how, buy out all the capacity of the ram manufacturers, pay them enough consistently and the manufacturers have no reason to expand their capacity. No cheap ram means companies and then home users will have no choice but to come to you and rent their pc.
A market requires scarcity, because scarcity is what neccesitates trade.
You can't invoke market mechanisms to defend a post-scarcity scenario.
Why would the ai owners make things cheaper or even available at all once their abundance machines give them everything they want?
What would they get out of if it? What could ordinary people trade for it that their abundance machine can't give them already and that would be worth giving up their monopoly on productive force?
You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously, and yet AI accelerationists bring out both to defend their ideology.
Right. Capitalism is clearly incompatible with the proposed AI future where no jobs are needed.
> You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously, and yet AI accelerationists bring out both to defend their ideology.
Luckily I did not, you are arguing against points I did not make at all.
Oh, but you did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648472
Either way though, what's more interesting than what you specifically said is that AI boosters have no answer to this structural argument about the reality of post-scarcity. Tellingly, you didn't address that part of my comment at all, either.
> Either way though, what's more interesting than what you specifically said is that AI boosters have no answer to this structural argument about the reality of post-scarcity. Tellingly, you didn't address that part of my comment at all, either.
You've fished a comment from completely different discussion, where a point was that if AI were to displace workers, it would be different than previous waves of automation (and there meeting these capabilities was assumed, not put forward by me). But in this thread it's more down to earth discussion about manufacturing capabilities if there is no ASI. But sure, I'll bite - yes, capitalism won't work in post-scarcity society. But we are not leaving in post-scarcity society and in our current situation capitalism is amazing system. If capitalism would get us to post-scarcity society then well, you'd have to admin that capitalism is amazingly effective. Your assumption about AI-rulers (I presume altman and amodei, not governments) having abundance machines and not sharing the abundance with anyone else is really without any merit. For this scenario to work we would need to meet few conditions that are so unlikely that it's not really worth entertaining them seriousl: 1) powerless government 2) actual ASI that's abundance machine 3) ASI that's perfectly aligned towards serving altman and amodei and none else 4) altman and amodei deciding that everyone should be poor. And also as someone who I guess you'd call AI booster (so a person that's not deluded about AI capabilities and sees how powerful they are and how current concerns with AI such as water use are overblown) I can tell you how I address this - you can't stop progress. It never worked and never will. I think world would be better if we would've stopped developing AI. But it's impossible so you might just embrace it.
> That's a feature, not a side effect.
You’re implying that the deep lizard state planned the LLM craze?
Sama might be a lizard..
You don't need a back room filled with cigar smoke where supervillains coordinate their plans while twirling their mustaches when good ol' class interest does the same job.
r>g is an old hustle, LLMs just accelerate it. Lizards aren't wizards.
when there was so little capital it had to be true... the idea that it will persist forever is obviously silly.
The problem isn't that it fails to unwind, the problem is what the unwind looks like. Last time it meant global upheaval and world wide capital incineration -- mostly metaphorical in the case of the US but very literal in the case of Europe and Asia. The poor suffer more in real terms but capital suffers more in nominal terms and that unwinds inequality and the burden of furnishing runaway capital with the runaway returns it demands in excess of economic growth.
I'm sure the same "strategy" will work again, but this time around everyone has nukes and drone swarms and AI-equipped bio labs so shit's gonna be lit.
r dropping below g isn't "unwinding". r has been falling for decades now. The world is awash in capital.
r>g, not r<g. In 2025 GDP grew 2.1% and SPY grew 17.7%, which is the pattern recently and throughout time.
Historically r>g, no one is debating that. It's the idea that it will just persist which is silly. Capital isn't immune to supply/demand.
And, r is the return on all assets, not just the s&p 500, and 1 year of returns means nothing...
s/deep lizard state/billionaires/
> The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.
Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.
A great deal of the supposed smartest people have fully sided with fascism, it's not about smarts
This is broadly the same people who bemoaned the idea that the "smartest people in a generation" were all just working on adtech without any reflection about maybe that's not actually an exclusive set of the smartest people... or that a lot of the people in that set were the same one who might, twenty years ago, otherwise be chasing money as middlemen in finance vs doing productivity-expanding things anyway...
You can be smart and chase the money, but it's crazy hubris to assume that only your peer set of money-chasers are smart.
It's a small leap from there to "since we're the only smart people, we should get to have the most influence."
I’ve heard people say variations of, “Clever people can easily convince themselves of just about anything, if they’re inclined to. And then it’s nearly impossible to talk them out of it.”
Kinda seems true. And the worst people in history often don’t seem super dumb, despite their various other defects.
I'm confused by this comment, can you explain?
"Supposed" is doing a lot of work there. Compare, say, Yudkowsky et al. to the people who actually changed the world with mRNA vaccines.
Yudkowsky is hardly an example of someone who has sided with the fascists.
In America anyways, we send the “responsible politicians” to hell every 2-6 years. People vote for this.
and yet... it feels like we are actually a one party state most of the time.
Maybe underneath it all we really do want the same thing…
More like the people with power all serve the mechanism of power: Capital.
The party of corporate interest?
Duverger's law. Any elected body with FPP voting will converge to a one-party body.
That is not what Duverger's law says. (But it's a interesting hypothesis so thanks for mentioning it.)
Democrats expanded SNAP, Republicans shrank it. Dems expanded Medicaid, Republican shrank it. Dems protected reproductive rights, Republicans repealed them. Dems expanded title IX protection to LGBTQ+, Replicans eliminated them. Republicans jailed 1,200 January 6th insurrectionists, Republicans pardoned them. Democrats provide non-partisan federal emergency aid, Republicans withhold federal aid from blue states. Dems establish tax credits for electric cars, increase automotive standards. Dems didn't kill of foreign aid to need countries.
If you aren't female (reproductive rights), LGBTQ+, an immigrant now hunted by ice, someone in need of SNAP, Medicaid, or emergency aid in a blue state, it might feel like both are the same I guess. If you are one of the above, and now suffer because so many voted based on 'both are the same', you very much feel a difference today than from the US under Biden. If you were one of America's allies but are now constantly attacked, you feel a difference today. If you are Ukraine, you feel a difference today.
been a while since ive see the real talk on hacker news. its refreshing. usually I feel like I'm the only one among nerds asking to hold people accountable.
so, how do you think we can do this?
> so, how do you think we can do this?
For a lack of deep knowledge in this area, I don't think I have answers for this, but if one is interested in working on this problem, my approach would be to start with diving deeply into scientific literature about psychology and sociology to find out
- what convinces people to change their opinions,
- what causes people to take action
etc.
yeah, sure. Do you think all scientific literature is the same though? I am skeptical of thinking to just look at them all equally. Clearly, if theres a class of people being held unaccountable who have been practicing imposing their will and power on the people, that has certainly been done in the scientific community and would show in the literature, too.
So when I think of going through any media like scientific publications, I wonder how to discern and point out the captured and biased media vs the more objective ones (or at least the ones that don't have a hidden financial motive behind them). I wish our scientific community had better disclaimers and traceability for financial influence in every paper we could read.
> So when I think of going through any media like scientific publications, I wonder how to discern and point out the captured and biased media vs the more objective ones (or at least the ones that don't have a hidden financial motive behind them).
This is exactly the hard part: a topic which many people in more applied scientific disciplines worry about. Welcome to the real word, Neo. :-)
Again, I don't have definite answer, but rough guidelines are:
- is a result too good to be true?
- is some result coherent to results that are much more established?
- why would you assume that the author is unbiased or biased? (biases not only have financial reasons)
- which agenda does the author have (yes, deep pursuit for scientific truth is also an agenda? Nobody is free of an agenda)
- does the author make an effort to explain how the findings could be explained in an alternative way that makes the result look much less impressive?
- could the results be reproduced in other labs?
- which is the minimum amount of facts that you must believe in (like axioms) such that the result holds?
- ...
I like that, I can see that being true and working.
The hard part is indeed that we have to exert all this effort to get past the noise that I (and maybe you) feel a responsible author should have already done for us.
And with AI: I was hoping it would help us filter through this noise. So far, I feel lost in how to use AI to help me filter through prejudice and bias, and hidden motives and intentions, when the very filters given to us in the mainstream AIs we are sold are doing that same very bias and incoherency and hidden agendas. I retain my hope, however! Thank you for some solace and inspiration here, friend!
> Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.
People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.
People by and large don’t understand the second and third order effects of their policy preferences. It’s not that they don’t want those things, it’s that the world is more complicated than their mental model insists it is. Politicians could try harder to fix the fundamental problems but they don’t because the long-term solutions don’t manifest until after the next N (very expensive) election cycles.
Rent controls work if you go radical enough and enforce a max profit margin for the whole city, with rent limited to something like 30% over maintenance + debt repayment costs.
The amount of housing in the city won't grow but it will free up a big part of peoples income that would otherwise go to landlords. That helps the local economy with more consumer spending, and makes it easier to save up or apply for a loan so you can start a business.
You get a better economy and more money in the average persons wallet without raising taxes. The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints. And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
That policy would 1) fuck over younger generation, 2) result in total sclerosis and death of city. Prices are high because there's not enough housing, that's it. Rent control won't increase number of units so it wont solve real cause of the problem.
> The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints.
No, also people who would like to move into city would lose, because that would become literally impossible. You'd have like 15 years waiting lists for housing.
> And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
Why would anyone fix apartment that's under rent control? If you mean system like in Berlin, then I've got bad news - people there are actually frequently not allowed to renovate even THEIR OWN apartments.
The politicians are those who created the respecting laws.
"Convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell" is thus nearly isomorphic to making the masses hate politicians who create such laws, which at least very likely implies that by convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell, a different mindset emerges in the masses.
> The politicians are those who created the respecting laws.
Yes and general population LOVES these laws, even though they are harmful to them. But anyway - you've got your causality reversed - it's voting masses that incentivize rent controls and other shitty politics. Remember that to implement your policies you've got to actually win elections. And since people generally don't understand n-order effects for n>=2, it's really easy to win elections with populist policies.
> Yes and general population LOVES these laws, even though they are harmful to them.
I can only say that in Germany, where I live, in my gut feeling the situation is very different: politicians imposing various laws "for the common good" and many parts of the populations hate these laws because this implies even more red tape.
There is no evidence that reducing rent makes the rent go up - only fearmongering. It's a stopgap measure, though, since there still won't be enough housing to meet demand unless you also fix that at the same time.
Which you can also do as a city by just... building! You don't need some developer to come in, you can just do that as a local government!
The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only capital in Europe without a stifling rent or housing crisis.
There is lots of evidence for that, but before I provide it I need to know if you will update your beliefs based on that.
Really? You have evidence that smaller numbers are bigger numbers?
Don't argue in bad faith. I have evidence that rent controls increase rent, not that smaller numbers are bigger numbers. Please read some evidence about policies you are supporting - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105113772...
For that you might need the kind of geniuses who write stirring books about principles and values. Or whatever the modern equivalent of those books is. Maybe nobody would pay attention to that kind of advocacy in the present day, not sure why. But it's not tech geniuses, anyway. Much though tech has power as a catalyst.
I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.
> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell
I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.
What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"
There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.
I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.
When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.
Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.
It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."
> What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
That was not premise of fascism. Certainly not Hitlers one, he himself was self-taught and did not framed himself as highly educated. He considered himself better then educated people. The origin of his superiority was not "smart" it was "strong will and power itself".
It was not the original premise of feudalism either. That was was about military might, basically.
And origins of liberal democracy are not "smart based" either.
Yes, many of the problems are 'features not bugs'. There's no reason to think the AIs won't dream up more of these'features' too.
What I like to call at work "this is not a technical problem". There are many problems we could easily solve if we had the right structural incentives. But instead we have politics, processes, layers of management, etc. All that doesn't disappear (yet?) with AI.
I believe that’s actually one of the arguments of the boosters. Utopia will finally be reachable when we get all the human drama and bureaucracy out of the way
I’m not sold, but I’ve heard this line of thinking many times
Human drama is what people use to advocate for themselves. Bureaucracy is what people use to protect themselves. Then you have the side effects but, you may also not like a world without those at all.
> The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.
When I asked why Musk doesn't put his money towards non-profits my Musk supporting friends say it's because he "doesn't believe anything but for-profit entities can solve the world's problems".
So why isn't he solving homelessness, famines, war, etc. with capitalism?
To add insult to injury, we're being told: "Just trust us bro, however we make things worse now will totes be redeemed as the prophesied god-mind magically fixes it later."
Strangely, they never discuss the possibility that Multivac might seize all their wealth and cast them down into average-ness. What if it actually comes about, but then it tells us to do the things we already refuse to do?
Agree. I’d only add that I think there is incentive for them to be solved, but there are greater incentives worth more to those leading the charge.
This is sort of my take. You could look around in 2016 and 2026 and honestly not much has changed... at least at first glance. There is a missing piece of the puzzle.
I'm noticing this even in industry. Yea, we can build and iterate on ideas 100x faster but has this turned into anything meaningful? Not really... Hell, look at the big companies spending billions on inference... nothing shipped and things are still buggy as ever. Where is everything?
The job market had changed that's for sure.
Fair point. I have to wonder how much is because of AI and how much is from ZIRP stuff though.
Neither.
How many more software projects are there really left that make economic sense? Zuck learned the hard way re. metaverse.
Not many - the set that make ECONOMIC sense is finite. Even though many want to believe its infinite because all of a sudden everyone can vibe code an app cringe.
If anything AI is going to cause an insane amount of consolidation - what used to be across 3 diff apps, that can be consolidated will be done -> many businesses will die. It will be painful.
Google was attacked by an activist investor pre LLM hype for being bloated - they promptly laid people off. Many software firms have been allowed to bloat up do to the nature of the business.
Its always about economics.
Not sure I can agree, but the idea is interesting.
While the set is finite, software comes and goes. Just look at the tools to build software over the years.
> Many software firms have been allowed to bloat up do to the nature of the business.
I can agree with this. It will be harder to justify engineers sitting on laurels. Google could afford it before but I can see how it will be under more scrutiny now.
I know I’m right as I’m doing the very thing stated - taking 4 related businesses and consolidating - leaving behind many mortally wounded/dead.
You either get it or you don’t - not my problem.
We went from spending a lot of money on people to enshitify products and then charge more for them to spending a lot of money on agents to enshitify products to charge more for them.
And stall and sell your data quicker. It will certainly be a boon for companies and government agencies that want to profile.
As a person, I have a strong preference for the former.
That's what I'm saying.
Not only from the big companies. Where is the explosion of disruption ?
Why even bother when an AI is just going to do it better than you can? They have more money, more compute, and most importantly, will have next to zero cost of labor.
I can't even go a day without running into super frustrating bugs on the ChatGPT app.
Like what?
You could say the same about Amazon
Fck disruption. The fetishizing of disruption is annoying. The tech became all about destroying something someone else has. What about ... create good stuff, create non-gambling markets, make peoples lives better.
Sure, it did some meaningful things:
* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages
* Culture of uncertainty and fear
* Computers are really expensive now
* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health
Totally agree. IMO it's mostly behind the scenes stuff though.
I think some of the most impressive stuff to show someone from 2016 might be LLMs doing a summary of complex topics, followed by self-driving (actually) cars and intricate robots... but other than that there is no "future magic" touching the lives of every day people going on.
Actually I'm pretty sure if you showed someone the latest and greatest from these big AI companies, these AI companions that can book flights, people would go "Oh, so its like a smarter Siri" and proceed to not care at all lol.
> Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
Gosh, this has been my entire experience with AI, and I’ve never seen it this well articulated. Thank you!
Less junior hiring is a reflection of a) the maturity of the software business b) current expectations of the future
I have no doubt startups in particular are able to get away with using LLMs to produce sloppy code and ship. But this trend was on-going and sped up due to the infiltration of LLMs and marketing.
You do realise markets are highly imperfect in reality? That nonsense in econ books is fantasy.
It has greatly changed for the worse I can't get all the flashing lights out of my face now, more algorithms to hook you in, more social media, more gambling, more news, more things to catch your attention.
More noise. The world is just so noisy now.
Even in software, there are many things that haven't changed.
e.g. Why do Rust and CPython still have over 5,000 open issues each? At some point, will the superintelligence fix all the bugs autonomously? When is that going to happen?
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues
What about new features? In every thread about Rust, people are clamoring for new features and libraries. People wonder why there can't be a batteries-included standard library like Go.
So now that LLMs are so smart, is that a solved problem? Or are we still bottlenecked on the expertise of a few experts?
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Also, what happened to AI's passing the Turing test? I see tons of slop articles that are obvious to most HN readers. They haven't fooled us apparently -- the longer the interaction, the more obvious it becomes whether it's AI.
(That said, I use AI all the time and find it to be a great tool. IMO is is a tool, not an autonomous intelligence with a will of its own.)
>You could look around in 2016 and 2026 and honestly not much has changed
I find 2026 much more repulsive compared to 2016.
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I'm immensely sad every day seeing all these posts talking about billions and trillions of dollars and where I live (part of the US btw) we don't even have fully reliable electricity and water access. In fact our electricity bills have increased and there is nothing to show for it.
I don't understand why these big labs aren't doing more to improve the electricity situation. Dump a billion dollars worth of tokens into fusion analysis, research, and simulations and try to force a breakthrough. You could buy a lot of good will with unlimited cheap energy that liberates us from fossil fuel dependencies.
Mathematics and programming is verifiable and fully controllable in a digital environment.
Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
Look at all the roadblocks for data centre buildouts which the industry certainly has a financial incentive to complete as fast as possible.
> Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
When the tokens are hooked up to physical devices (robotics of various sorts), then the tokens pay for themselves by being physical workers, or human wage replacement.
And a robocop will follow whatever is passed for law, damn the masses who might vote otherwise. And subjugation will be enforced by token, LLM rule, and machine. They have no union or ethics to complain to.
The complexity of manufacturing is one reason why TSMC is one of the most important companies in the world right now and why Nvidia is the most valuable by marketcap.
If you can make a GPU more efficient and cheaper than Nvidia does you can make a ton of money. Plenty of labs around the world are working hard on this problem and yet Nvidia is still dominating (and the market believes this isn't changing any time soon)
Same things for robotics. It's unlikely you'll have a vertical stack on all the different things needed to manufacture your robot on a massive scale. What happens if some geopolitical spat makes getting rare earth minerals and battery tech from China impossible?
Compare that to tokenmaxxing in programming and math, where the only thing you need is a gpu cluster and electricity.
Who taught you economics?
OpenAI and Sam Altman are literally backing a nuclear fusion power startup.
Because they increased the demand so much they are seeking out their own supply. Nuclear has consistently been panned for decades because it's more expensive than other power generation.
"Startup"
Wait until you have clean energy sources and shut it down
Quoting startup like that makes the effort seem like it is an extremely recent venture.
It is 13 years old.
It has been making progress, the degree and date of success is debated and confidently claimed to be in many mutually exclusive states, which at the very least says that there are lots of people confidently making claims that are not true. I'm not going to join that fray to declare which of them is correct.
Is it ready to provide power? No? Then I don't care what they are trying to do while they are burning a bunch of fossil fuels in the meantime
Are you avoiding all use of fossil fuel while alternatives become available?
It is a bold claim to make but not something that usualy be done. Any abrupt halting of fossil fuel would severely impare the ability to develop and produce alternatives.
We need to transition to sustainable methods. If you want to go cold turkey, go ahead and cease driving an ICE, never travell by air or have anything delivered (and that's just the tip of the iceberg), it would be a counterproductive way to reach sustainability, that is your right, but you can decide to do that to yourself. You don't get to decide how others reach sustainability.
There is a difference between advocating for a better world and acting like a bully because you don't like the current world.
This is all incremental use. What have we gained? How many kids in Memphis should get asthma so you can code a little faster?
Some people feel like they have gained a great deal, some also disagree about the accuracy of claimed harms.
You seem uninterested in seeking a consensus and would rather prefer to impose rules that you believe in against the will of others, even when those others sincerely believe that their own path will lead to a better outcome for the world.
What would you propose that would be a mutually acceptable solution? Yo can't simply demand other people change their actions to deliver exactly what you want, especially when they think that would make the world significantly worse.
I am not taking a position on either side here. I am pointing out that you are refusing to acknowledge that you are demanding that people do things that they themselves believe will make the world worse.
You may disagree with them, that is expected if they disagree with you, but your certainty of being right does not permit you the right to override the will of others. Often, it seems that the less certain are more likely to have opinions that are correlated with reality.
Electricity infra is not a technical problem. It’s been solved for decades. It’s a political problem, and both sides of the isle have had plenty to do with getting in the way
I think this is related to the structures we’ve built in society. It’s lower friction to write software than just about any of the problems you listed.
It reminds me of the Ezra Klein quote that “OpenAl would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses."
A lot of it isn't low friction really just in terms of political will it is high friction. E.g. housing issues are due to failing to upzone to meet demand appropriately. Solving housing is therefore free. It could be done today in any city in a housing crisis with the stroke of a pen, and before long, the market will equilibriate at a level better afforded by the median wage earner in the economy. The decision not to do this is a deliberate one: prices increasing is very much the goal of this sort of policymaking.
Likewise when you see other such shortcomings in our world, ask what this incentivizes for otherwise. Then things will become obvious why they are how they are, from housing, to transit, to feeding people, to healthcare.
The priority is profit, not people.
Soon: The super-intelligent AI is telling us to cover parking lots and other flat roofs in solar panels.
What is up with this attitude in this thread? AI has taken off programming basically this year, the end of last at best. The first truly capable LLM, ChatGPT, isn't even 4 years old yet.
Just a crazy amount of doom and gloom all around this thread.
It's kind of weird to say it's "taken off" recently. Yes what we have today is far better than half a year ago and solving new real use cases, but that was far better with more uses than we had half a year before that, etc, for years now. On their best usecases LLMs were already enormously useful years ago, and it's still very spiky.
As a user of software I see no improvements. What I see is that I need to download software more often, it brings more features I don't need and it has been as buggy as ever (if not more). And I can say that about Operating System I use, social networks, games, etc.
Exactly. Where are the results? If AI is really producing value at 20X the rate software engineers produced it earlier, we should be seeing 20X the number of software projects released now. Or they should be getting made 20X faster. Or they should be 20X better. Or the projects should have 20X fewer bugs. But none of this seems to be happening. The only thing that seems to be happening is we're making the same crappy shit, but with 20X fewer people.
It took a long time for internet to transform society. Its still not fully baked in. These models that we have right now are transformational.
In other words, it's taken a highly enjoyable and lucrative vocation from vast swathes of workers - a lot of which make up this sites audience! - and instead concentrated more productive power in the hands of a few megacorps.
You gave your own example for the doom and gloom.
It has made it far more accessible to a lot more people. Being “highly enjoyable” and “lucrative” is why people try to gatekeep it.
The fact that the means of this capability is in a few hands does suck. But I’m increasingly optimistic that it’s going to be commoditized through open weight models and performance improvements. There is enormous demand for innovations on these fronts.
It hasn't made it more accessible to anyone. It's destroyed it. Who still writes code?
You’ve got to understand that coding isn’t the point for a lot of people. It’s just the thing in the way of making stuff and solving problems.
I do understand that.
That's my point, in fact. We're losing the profession just so the annoying guy that would pester you with his stupid app idea can now shit it out himself, lighting the planet on fire in the process.
I'm a rare individual that has consistently made choices to earn less money in order to have more enjoyment. I would clock fewer hours than they wanted me to during college for my internships, I left a FAANG to go back to startups, I quit a startup to work on volunteer work and try to bootstrap a business.
At multiple jobs I've noted that I felt the pay should have been less. Not so that the employers could take a bigger slice of the pie (in fact, my preference is to be in an anarchist co-op, but I understand that's a wild take and might be terrible in practice). My hope was that we could filter for people that genuinely want to do the work and take on fewer people that were there for the money. At the same time more money is more better. And I like having money. It's complicated.
As I've said many times before, I didn't come to Silicon Valley to get paid. I came here to make computers do cool things alongside other people. I need income to do that, but I try to make sure I'm in a situation where the income isn't something I need to think about all of the time. If you're doing mercenary work that's not possible.
I think being able to accomplish more from places that are a fraction the cost of Silicon Valley will also help achieve the goal of doing things for reasons other than the money.
I think the amount of protectionism we’ll see could be absolutely enormous. Not only do incumbent corporations not want to lose share, incumbent countries won’t want to share either.
Definitely. For now I'm making friends with lots of very capable people - it's not as easy to do that outside of a hub like SF.
> I think the amount of protectionism we’ll see could be absolutely enormous because corporations aren’t capable of altruistic attitudes.
On some fronts they will be powerless to stop the changes. I look forward to drinking the tears of IP owners when breaking through their DRM and recovering their source code is just a matter of sharing a model ID, prompt, and hyper parameters. Reverse engineer NVidia's firmware and drivers. Decompile and port Nintendo's latest console's operating system. We may soon find ourselves in a world where tasks like that are achievable in a few days on consumer hardware.
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That pretty much sums up my experience. Everything is more expensive and worse at the same time. And it feels like we're being screwed over from every direction and in new ways every day. People keep talking about this tech is supposed to do so much but everything just gets worse.
What time scales are you using to make this judgement?
Everything isn't getting worse constantly. The data is quite clearly the opposite. How old are you?
Let's look at the past ten years.
Food has gone way up in cost and down in quality.
Private equity bought out the healthcare system where I lived so now it takes months to get an appointment and the quality of care is horrible.
Not that matters since the health insurance I pay hundreds for a month wouldn't cover anything anyways because it's through UHC.
My job keeps getting rid of positions because they want to "do more with less" but it just means I'm doing more work while being paid the same.
If I buy a new car it will spy on me and sell my data. The state DMV already sold my personal info without my permission and now I get constant spam.
Private equity bought out many of the restaurants I liked going to and ruined them.
Third spaces in my city have been mostly destroyed.
The social media sites I used to use were overrun by bots.
I can't upgrade my PC because hardware prices have gone insane.
Gas is like $5 a gallon now so I can't really justify going on any trips anymore.
Private equity bought up most of the rentals where I live and so now I pay much more for rent on top of crazy monthly fees while the building I live in is falling apart because they refuse to fix it. Housing prices have also gone up so much that I have no hope of owning a house.
And more.
AI has fixed none of these issues.
As a middle aged man, thing are indeed getting worse every year.
From another middle aged man, part of that perception is your brain changing and also nostalgia.
It's not true that everything is more expensive. Nominal prices are higher, but incomes have risen faster than inflation. Purchasing power of the average person in 2026 is higher than it was in 2016.
As for things getting worse, I guess it depends on the domain. In hardware, things have gotten a lot better; my desktop computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than I would have expected 10 or 20 years ago. In software, I do see a lot of bloated software being written, but I don't feel that the software that I personally use has gotten worse.
Average, or median? Don’t know the answer offhand, but there are a small number of well-known people who are likely to skew the average quite a bit upward, given how much wealth they accumulated during and since covid
I was using "average person" in the informal sense. Median household income in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, has gone up 13% in the past decade.
This is a Western-centric viewpoint. I'm in Asia visiting a few different countries right now, including the big ones, and much has changed with AI and also in general over the past 10 years with cars, trains etc.
> AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Strange viewpoint. In mathematics any novel result is useful as it expands the scope of other results. Who are these mathematicians who didn't want AI to solve the problems it did? I see trepidation about the future of the field but that is not equivalent to not wanting them to be solved.
Terence Tao and the apparently newly formed Association For Human Mathematics. The post is online-famous now for the line "Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done."
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-o...
When I was a young man reading gauss, and thinking before I turned the page, I see a result here, something meaningful! and then I turn the page, and of course it is there. There is no shame in this.
A long time ago, another student of mathematics described it to me as climbing a mountain. No single step is hard, but you must make many steps to get to the point that no one else has made a step.
I'm curious, care to name a few things that have changed in Asia with AI (and wouldn't have without)?
I've watched some videos from Chinese commentary on AI usage in the industry,
Some examples are finance people directly asking for API access now so that they can make their own tools. These tools used to be maintained by teams of developers.
Many business making their own customized scripts to make their tasks faster.
From an economic point of view, it seems like there are some productivity increases, but I don't think these can be concluded for a while. The rational thinking rarely account for second order effects. Although business leaders rarely care about second order effects, a worse business is not immediately noticeable, compared to hiring cuts and the money it saves
asian vertical dramas (lol)
> much has changed
Trust me bro
No need to trust me, just look at how China was 10 or 15 years ago to now. Beijing air pollution, more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined, electrification of vehicles and economy, etc.
^ AI did this
Partially, yes.
That is not how math works. There are reasons why the Riemann integral is pervasive and the Labague integral is rarely used unless needed. Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.
> Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.
Again, strange viewpoint in the field of mathematics of all places, unlike, say, economics where doing something one shouldn't has disastrous real world consequences. Until it's discovered and proven, one doesn't know what would be valuable and what would not. I bet your sentence would not be said about humans trying to solve problems, no one would tell them they "shouldn't."
I think people in the LLM space are being far too impatient with the general public and their adoption. And I think they need to start thinking harder about building products that genuinely enrich people's lives. Look at how long home computing took to establish itself with the public, then the internet, and finally social media. None of these trends happened overnight, and some were accelerated by other technological advances (social media-> smartphones).
The adoption of these technologies spurned ton of innovation in these spaces, and I feel like with LLMs its the first time I've seen genuine frustration from the industry directed towards users for not adopting the technology fast enough. This attitude did not exist in the 1980s, it didn't exist in the 90s, and it didn't exist in the 00s/early 10s either.
Do you blame them for getting impatient? They’re burning cash and quickly running to a point of never being able to justify it. The hardware they buy will be replaced with even more expensive hardware before they start to make a profit. It’s not sustainable and the market hasn’t figured that out yet. At least they’re starting to question it.
These backward looking analogies are tiresome.
Whether you like it or not - technology causes compression of life cycles. You have a hit product? Great - I expect you to have crazy high growth rate. That’s the expectation of a world that is so deeply interconnected.
Consumer-ready LLMs have been widely available to the public now nearly 4 years if you start counting at GPT 3.5. There's certainly some compression here but Karpathy does a good job of outlining how silo'd those experiences are: the bulk of the product penetration (based on headcount rather than token usage) is "derpy chatbots" (his words, not mine). Most of the actual token spend is likely done on the STEM side. We're talking about a technology today that currently only has significant penetration with <25M users.
People need to be patient and put in the work to build great products, rather than lament its slower-than-desired (albeit still quite fast) adoption curve.
Using AI for everything digital, I end up going and doing chores while waiting for the LLM to do its thing. What an insane world, where knowledge work (dreary and uninspired as it is) is automated while I am consigned to scrubbing dishes and waiting for the machine.
Buy a dishwasher, you won't regret it!
Honestly the big reason why I use my dishwasher is that all the dishes would not fit in my drying rack. I'm not very convinced the process of me rinsing and scraping my pans before they go in the dishwasher is any faster than when I lived in apartments when I handwashed everything. Maybe my dishwasher sucks too, but I mean it doesn't hold a candle to the sort of jobs on my pans that require good old fashion baking soda paste and elbow grease. I'm still slaving with this thing. It's picking the low hanging fruit for me in other words.
I feel similar about my robot vacuum. It actually takes a surprising amount of labor facilitating the damn thing. I have to walk through the house and basically vacuum proof it so it doesn't eat various cords, rugs, lifting chairs up and putting them someplace so it can get under, etc. Not sure its really a labor save to when I was just brooming the entire apartment in 20 mins and not having to move anything around due to reach of the broom and it not having a tendency to eat things. Hand vacuum I can be more carefull too about the fringed edges of rugs and don't have to fold them over themselves.
I still do it because I already bought it mostly.
The trick is dialing the things in properly once, and then reaping the benefits over and over again.
e.g., my home is always vacuum-proofed. It automatically runs through all rooms except for the bedroom at night, finishing just before my alarm clock rings, then vacuuming the bedroom an hour after the last person's alarm clock has rung.
This way I never actually notice it, but the home is always perfectly clean as if by magic.
Similarly, if you use separate dishwasher detergent, antisurfactant and salt, and properly dial in your water hardness, it'll be able to clean everything no matter how dirty the dishes are. Including dried-on tomato sauce. Just put the dishes in, and they'll be clean the next day.
Of course it takes a bit of effort to set this up, but then it just works for a long time.
Similarly, I'm a big fan of handwriting software with care & focus on quality, which takes a bit longer at first, but then allows you to trust the software to continue running for years to come.
I've done a lot of vacuum proofing, even getting the magnetic strips, but there's only so much you can do. Like it doing a little wheel around a chair leg is just not as great of a clean as if I moved that chair out of the way. My rugs have fringe so there's no stopping that. Cables I tend to have out have to go away.
And then of course, all the cat's toys.
> And then of course, all the cat's toys.
This might be the next thing the robot vacuums all start working on. One has already released a first version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GykaEgNkkVQ
It's definitely easier in a minimalist & tidy home. Our rugs have no fringes, cables are either rolled up or permanently installed & hidden, chairs are stored at night upside-down on the tables they belong to.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it's still really convenient.
At least for me, personal agents have been quite useful. If you integrate them well - shopping, filling random government forms, keeping track of my personal life, optimizing training plan and nutrition, planning vacations, etc. I can do more home repairs or renovations myself with help of chat
So basically you get personal digital assistant - very useful - but not changing my life.
What would I need for real transformation though? Food, house cleaning, commute - "every day chores". Even if we had ASI tomorrow, what could it do to change my life, besides taking away my job? Design good house robot to help me with food preparation I guess... Maybe finally self driving cars launched in my area? Or it will take control, "optimize humanity survival chance" and realize we don't need as many people on this planet.
> besides taking away my job
> self driving cars launched in my area
It sounds like the transformation would be a massive collapse of the economy with scores of people unemployed.
> Or it will take control, "optimize humanity survival chance" and realize we don't need as many people on this planet.
Maybe, but more likely it will be the humans who control the AIs and hold the power who will make this decision.
Yes, and additionally, on the other side, there are a bunch of people using it to build exploitative products, spam, weapons, etc.
Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me. I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.
This is the kind of gap in shared understanding that is widening.
When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.
The incentives seem to be lined up to push users to the frontier of "how much can the harness around the model do and claim without most people pushing back on the claims."
The bigger the pile of stuff you have the tool create unsupervised, the more incomplete/inaccurate the overall picture of it is gonna be. That doesn't matter for most hobbyist/helper-tool/game-port/etc type of tasks.
I get a ton of value out of the tools and yet part of that value has come from being hyper-aware of the shape of the limitations, which changes much less and more slowly than the specific of the limitations.
"How'd you notice that one!?" - well, it helps to be the only person on the team who took the time to interrogate the e2e interaction of all the code...
The median piece of OSS software was already pretty rough once you had to depend on it in production at scale to make money. The median piece of the new AI-generated wave of software, also pretty rough.
The bet that OpenAI/Anthropic is making is that they can automate the interactions generally/globally enough to work around this and eliminate the need for humans in the loop. But it's a tricky problem because it's precisely where the permutations and special cases get nasty and much harder to deal with than more broadly-applicable cases of codegen/test-gen/mash-it-until-the-tests-pass-and-the-code-review-angent-is-happy.
This has all started to feel very Emperor's New Clothes-ish. "Well, if it's not working for you, then it's your fault. You're just not using it properly. You're not worthy of its wonders".
Not to say there's no value to be had. However, it's also been oversold and its error-proneness is a real problem.
But, it seems there's a steady stream of commenters and creators who are quick to remind us that it's never a problem with the tech. It's always a user problem.
Meanwhile, the errors are renamed "hallucinations", but let's not focus on those. In fact, if you just look right over here at this .md file...
It's like driving a PT Cruiser and concluding all cars are bad and swearing off them entirely.
using skills with opus 5.5 and agents for each individual task that have shared knowledge of all of your records does not lead to a significant increase in trustworthiness
> When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.
While the latest and newest should be needed for greater capability, the average should be enough to give a glimpse pf what is possible. Like a basic netbook is enough to enjoy computing, no need to purchase the latest supercomputer.
If you need to switch your setup every quarter or so, it’s not a tool, it’s a rat race.
I have ChatGPT Pro and it sources every single thing. For my Asia trip right now it's been helping me every single day to figure out optimized routes on what to do and where to go (if I feel like it, not to say I don't wander around too).
me too, but I recently blew the transformer on my boiler by following its directions to wire up a C wire to power a smart thermostat. oops. $500 mistake.
How often do you check the citations? I’ve found with the Google search AI summary it will provide answers and link to their citations, but a good chunk of the time the answer isn’t on the linked page.
It just makes stuff up (or gets it from somewhere, who knows) and then links to a tangentially related page as if it was the source. Either that or it identifies the page as being a source it wants to use, and then summarizes it incorrectly. Not sure the order of operations it’s doing internally, but regardless the citations are bullshit.
The citations provided by the free version of Gemini are comically bad. They almost never contain information which directly supports the relevant claim, and more often than not they're completely irrelevant.
Google's models are worse that OpenAI's, doubly so on Google's free AI overview versus ChatGPT paid plans. 6.1 Sol is very good at synthesizing actual information it finds without hallucinating and I've not seen any instances it failed while I checked the sources.
That sounds terrible. I like to live like a human being
What that does that even mean? Even if I grant your premise (I don't), if one is traveling and engaging these places in person....what's the problem?
Where did I say it was a problem? Using chatgpt to plan an itinerary sounds terrible TO ME
Indeed, planning an itinerary, making calculations, building excitement for a place, is part of the journey
I suspect the HN techno-brained crowd will not appreciate it, many are quick to throw away their human experience
> Indeed, planning an itinerary, making calculations, building excitement for a place, is part of the journey
Not sure how they're perceiving using ChatGPT to plan an itinerary but I'm also doing all this while using ChatGPT. As I said in the sibling comment, it's a faster Google search and route optimizer, not something where I type in "make me an itinerary for X city" and follow whatever it shits out.
Why? In the past I would've used Google so it's just a faster search engine for me that works with natural language, what do you use for planning then?
Which model? Super weird
Every time I use Google search AI for anything more complicated than a search query I feel that way. A paid model from pretty much anyone is much better.
Yeah, I’d hope that on HN, of all places, people know that free models optimize for price and speed, not for accuracy. But even with free models the accuracy was massively improved over the last year.
Agreed. Google search is still pretty rough, but it's hilariously better than it was when it was first released.
Apparently, I'm not supposed to extend that trend line though.
When is the last time you used an AI chatbot, and do you only use the free versions?
> Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me. I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.
If you talk to free chatgpt, sure.
But if you launch Opus 5.5 in claude code - for some reason Opus is the smartest for me, even for "general" type of questions, when launched from Claude Code. It has harness/prompts optimized for correctness, while more "customer-grade" products, even when used with top model tend to optimize for latency. And I tend to give "context" - e.g. I have "personal wiki" + skills for lots of those things.
I don't recall i last few weeks where Opus 5.5 in CC made an obvious lie, made an unreasonable assumption, or made a mistake that smart human couldn't make. E.g. if it "failed" it failed in a way that non-genius human could fail in similar way.
It’s sort of weird how
1) open weights and cheap models are only about 6 months behind the frontier in evals, but…
2) it’s always the premium model that only the biggest fans pay for, that’s just now finally achieved enlightenment.
Oh well, I guess we’ll see in another 6 months.
opus 5.5 uses agents and skills in chat sessions as well and maintains internal context that it tries to distill from what you provide
I tried to have it write a synopsis website for the different types of dance patterns in Dance Dance Revolution, with guides on their execution, explanations, and provided song sources. I provided all of the source articles and search websites needed for it to be able to do that, and gave it a sample set I wanted it to utilize and build off of.
It has bits and pieces of information wrong in 90% of the sections it created. Poor song choices, missing song choices, incorrect explanations, incorrect step-patterns, the list goes on.
If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius. If you are, it's untrustworthy and borderline useless.
Maybe it wouldn't be if there were ample training data on my topic, but there isn't.
It utilized the research from millions of papers many very close to the destination answer to make those proofs. What would it do on something that isn't supported like that? Be confidently wrong while sounding right. That's what we've seen repeatedly.
I think my anxieties would be different if I were confident a DDR guide full of lies would be spurned and unprofitable.
In a way, I'm not worried about the LLMs per se as much as a kind of moral and ethical collapse. A debasement of the currency of communication, a market of intellectual-lemons.
I saw electroboom's latest video lamenting facebook AI slop about electricity, such as a way to wire a three-way switch that blows a fuse when you turn the light on. For some reason, I am shadowbanned on HN.
I see your comment, perhaps it was a delay between representations or nodes?
> If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius.
For someone highly literate, llms aren't going to help you write better. If you're borderline functionally illiterate (this is > 50% of the population according to some studies), I'm sure the llms are awesome.
I've long thought the same about all the hype around coding (plenty of examples from years ago now), but will continue to test the new models. They are improving.
Personal agents are wonderful! You can ask for hiking trails and it will customize one for you, frequently resulting in emergency calls for rescues! Your purchasing/selling AI will arrange sales for you but forget to tell you, leaving you in breach of contracts you didn't know about! Your personal nutrition agent will absorb all the broscience and customize a diet that will result in hair loss, but at least your in ketosis, amiright! And instead of hiring a plumber/electrician/contractor to do work subject to code, you can just ask an AI to tell you how to do it and then wonder why your buyer is suing you for $$$!
(Those are all examples from just the past 4 days, and just the ones that made it into mainstream media.)
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AI has only been around a few years in its current form.
It might take a decade to take what we learned from AI and turn it into something that will benefit the masses.
Most of it can't be broken down into something as simplistic as a dishwasher.
Most people won't notice cancers being found faster due to AI being better at pattern recognition than a doctor, but it's still a great benefit.
A decade? Better not tell the investors that!
This is the paradox. For software engineers, the current crop of “AI” tools is magic. A huge accelerator. And then they assume the rest of the world will get the same boost. However this is not the case at all. Claude code is great because it is trained on extremely well documented git histories and stack overflow. And outcomes are binary: the code works or it doesn’t; the PR is accepted or it isn’t. Not much else in the business world is like this at all. No training data with this kind of sequential development information. And no real black and white outcomes as such.
I would love it if we can just take the win on having created an amazing tool set for coders. Can’t this be enough?
LLMs could’ve been developed a lot slower without capsizing the entire supply chain and been seen a lot more positively, China is building a lot of good AI with a minuscule of the compute power and it’s fine
there was never a need to rush other than for capitals self interest to control
if frontier labs wanna pace the frontier, they should be honest and return the compute back to the people
China is building good AI by distilling American models. I think that's a great thing, but Chinese progress is currently dependent on American progress, because China lacks the compute to train the largest models (as stated by DeepSeek's founder[1])
[1] https://sumsec.me/2026/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-transc...
i knew about the compute already (he was very public about i believe huawei under delivering the amount of chips he requested), but nowhere in that transcript does he say he's dependent on US progress for his own progress or he's distilling the US to make progress
i don't really think distilling is even that fundamental anymore (nor was the evidence ever that strong - https://msukhareva.substack.com/p/is-kimi-k3-really-distille...), the game is all RL now, and you don't need american progress for that at all (just compute and data, and the data brokers will sell to anyone no problem)
i do think there are black market proxies from china to the US trying to sell "claude" and "deepseek" access mixed together, and i do think that prompt distribution is probably going to be very nice datasets
Yes. The AI industry has to deliver some substantial value to the average citizen soon or there will be political trouble. Food, clothing, shelter, and medical care have not improved yet. Nor does there seem to be much AI can do in the next few years that will help with the basics.
We can have unlimited new entertainment content for passive consumption. That's about it so far. 17,000 new Asian vertical dramas a day now.
I was listening to a Verge podcast in which Nilay Patel remarked that of the AI companies started pushing for universal healthcare, AI would become a lot more popular. But no signs of this.
People need to eat, sleep, be healthy, have shelter, feel loved, be in communities...
Coding has been transformed but none of those areas of our lives have been substantive transformed by AI yet. Whoever does, will create a lot of value for the world.
>AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Do people need permission from mathematicians to solve math problems? Is one of the Millennium problems not worth applying a new system to work on it?
I understand the despair people are feeling at AI automating their work, but we have to be serious about the fact that the frontier labs are just responding to natural incentives. Mathematics, coding, all are just applications of logic, and it makes sense that a system trained on inferring patterns from data would work well in that domain.
You are misunderstanding what mathematics research is. Its objective is the development of human understanding of mathematics. This requires open problems to research. AI are “solving” the open problems without creating any human understanding.
At the very least, the single bit of information of whether a conjecture is true or false advances human understanding. It allows researchers to abandon paths which would not have been fruitful.
I'm pretty sure OpenAI's proofs, while difficult to understand, have a net-zero impact on human understanding of mathematics. It took the first Millenium problem years to verify its accuracy. It's only been days since OpenAI released its problems, surely it would take years to evaluate whether the solutions meaningfully advanced human understanding.
It may provide that one bit of information but it could still be a net negative if it destroys current institutions (such as graduate studies) and no new institutions can be developed that provide a clear signal of who is doing meaningful work. That was a byproduct of solving open problems that are now lost. These are not my ideas, these are things that Terence Tao and others have written about that were recently on the front page of HN, e.g.:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117395269325940185
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117394287977270632
Who determines the objective of mathematics research?
All mathematics researchers in the whole world have agreed upon that objective apparently?
This is basically the dictionary definition of the word "research". But yes, all the work they are doing is focused on this goal. They write papers for humans to read, give lectures for humans to listen to, have discussions with humans - all with the objective of improving human understanding of the subject.
Many of them - all but a couple of the living Fields Medalists - recently signed an open letter about this.
https://mathandai.org/
I don't know, this just seems like gatekeeping of the term "research" simply because you don't like the way it's being done.
Many modern medicines do not have understood mechanisms of action, yet we know they work. Are the people who found them not conducting drug research?
Do we even have a different term for what the AI labs are conducting if it's not mathematical research?
Additionally, I would argue that any work that adds to the total corpus of known facts increases human understanding, even if the path to get to each fact isn't understood. It's hard to argue we'd be better off with less total information.
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OpenAI to this day is not aware if they solved or not Navier Stokes.
Mathematicians are not gate keepers but I understand the frustration. If someone claims they spent 30 million dollars to solve one of the most difficult problems yet there’s no new knowledge, understanding, nor certainty. Then what’s the point besides marketing?
The funny thing about comments like this is that the moment LLMs are going to replace everyone in the warehouse or the trucking industry, we suddenly have to do something against the LLM. But clearly they can't actually do anything meaningful and have been a waste of energy?
So just let them spend their money and they will eventually fail and bankrupt, right?
Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up, give it some more time. We had smartphones in 2007, and e.g. By way of example, Uber didn't launch ridesharing until 2013, and then that still took years to seep into the public awareness.
By comparison, we're in the early years of AI. We're all still figuring out what this thing even means.
Uber was a massive mistake on every level.
This is what is so frustrating about this whole ai thing is we aren’t learning from the mistakes of even the very recent past
Uber has been great, I can get around to almost anywhere with a click of a button and have food delivered from a variety of local restaurants at any time of day.
I'm not sure why you think it was a massive mistake? The taxi industry was awful and unsafe, food delivery for many local places was either not available or poorly implemented.
Also many whole food chains didn't have proper delivery for groceries.
Uber is a vast improvement over the previous taxi oligopolies.
I miss being able to reliably hail a taxi A LOT. Uber may be an improvement in smaller towns where cabs didn’t exist, but in bigger cities it is mostly a downgrade. Rather than walking to the curb and immediately getting a car, I’ve got to dick around with my phone and wait for a car to come to me.
Living on the south side of Chicago, it was almost impossible to hail a cab, and often times if you called for one it just wouldn’t show up. Or I’d try to hail one downtown, and be refused once I told them my destination. I’ve not had that problem once with Uber, good fucking riddance to taxis.
What's frustrating is that at the end of an event like a concert, everyone goes outside to catch an Uber/Lyft, but we then have to match driver to passenger, instead of having a line of waiting cars, each group just gets in the next available vehicle, shows the driver a QR code, instead of the mess we currently have. Why can't we do that? Taxi regulatory capture.
Taxis were terrible and I celebrate their destruction at the hands of the rideshare companies. Even now it’s still cheaper than a cab was (though those early days of VC cheap rides were great).
I agree with you, but those examples are going to fall on deaf ears. The pessimistic mindset will say that smartphones were a terrible invention that's ripping society apart, Uber is an unethical company exploiting workers, etc.
When did Uber stop being unethical? Did I miss the memo?
Because they didn't just break laws, they built an entire system to mislead law enforcement.
(How do tech people not know about Greyball??)
I think ridesharing was a net good for ordinary people even if Uber is/was unethical.
However, the counterargument falls entirely flat. "Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up". We don't have the luxury of time because AI disrupting communities and livelihoods faster than perhaps any other technology we've ever seen, with the most capital that has ever been put into any tech since the railroads.
Even if you're optimistic we'll eventually get the cancer cures and fusion reactors, doesn't it make sense from the perspective of an ordinary American to regulate the harms like the homework cheating, parasocial relationships, job losses, cyber attacks, etc., especially if it will take years to get the benefits?
Different benefits will show up at different rates. We don't need to wait for cancer cures and fusion reactors. It's already easier than ever to start a small business and use AI for things that would have been prohibitively expensive or time-consuming before. The technology is transforming how scientific research is done, how engineering is done, etc.
I don't see much evidence in the economic data that AI is disrupting livelihoods. Unemployment has been stable around 4% for a while and productivity growth has been at historically normal rates for the past 5 years. I think a more likely explanation is that AI is increasing uncertainty in some industries, which are seeing higher employee turnover, and many of those people are moving laterally into other jobs where their skills are more likely to be useful.
I don't think anyone in this thread has argued against mitigating harms. The OP was about current capabilities and the perceived lack of benefits for the average person.
To be clear, I don't disagree with your sentiment that the disruptiveness of AI is causing a lot of grief. But magnitude of disruption is not an indicator of magnitude of benefit (or lack thereof).
Some of the most disruptive periods in history brought about the greatest long term improvements in society. This is the price we pay for changing how things are done, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. We don't know which one it is for AI yet.
Publicly-accessible AI started working 1 year ago, 2 years tops. What did you expect? It to solve war driving prices up?
I would have expected apps like Amazon and websites like various Meta properties to be even slightly less broken and shitty.
Like, just at a bare minimum.
These are “use all the AI” companies with infinite resources, after all.
Why use apps that you dislike, just ask Claude to click through them for you. And no I'm not being ironic, this is the way things are headed, you just abstract over all the crap by having an agent do it for you.
"Slop is its own cure"
The alternative is people stop using these apps, consumer demand goes down, along with the GDP of the country.
I don't think it's surprising that it hasn't improved life much, AI is new and change takes time, but the fact of the matter is that it also made things worse in some ways, ways that I think were entirely avoidable, if only the incentives weren't so warped.
The fundamental malignancy here is that powerful people have become disconnected from the foundation of society. They have suffered from model collapse. They have been talking to each other in circles for too long, and doing things that make no sense to anyone outside the elite group, and because the systems that concentrate power to the top are so strong now, they continue gaining power even while messing everything up in a nominally free competitive market.
Sounds like collective psychosis.
I think one of the hopes is they'll get smarter than us and able to solve real world problems better - disease, war, poverty etc. But they are not really there yet. Give it a little while.
AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
This is an indictment of mathematicians, not AI.
Who indicted anyone?
Correction: My car spies on me and its cruise control no longer works because it slams on the brakes in the middle of the highway whenever it sees a mirage. My dishwasher broke because it got an unasked-for software upgrade.
Things worked better before we started putting bad software in everything. As a software engineer, I know what good software looks like. The fact that almost all software is now bad -- including the software that drives AI and the software that AI generates -- makes me want to flip the table. We know how to write better software and the general public should hang us if we continue to refuse to deliver it.
Probably preaching to the choir here, but the software is just a symptom.
The problem are the power-relationships and laws which allow someone to abuse you and your stuff, block competition, and even put you in jail for trying to remove the software—or helping others to remove it.
> Correction: My car spies on me and its cruise control no longer works because it slams on the brakes in the middle of the highway whenever it sees a mirage. My dishwasher broke because it got an unasked-for software upgrade.
Never, ever connect appliances to the Internet. I thought this was common knowledge on HN. Also pull the telematics (cell modem) fuse to prevent your car from snooping on you and selling your location and driving habits to data brokers and insurance companies.
Yes, but this is ridiculous for society. It is to the level of "do not wear a nice watch if you do not want it to get stolen": there should be no need to avoid wearing a nice watch or to pull a telematics fuse from the car in the first place!
This view is too cynical. The frontier advancements are certainly going to trickle down. Take cars for example. AI driven cars are already here. AI-designed battery systems, fuel systems, materials and 3d printing capabilities will come to cars. It will likely lead to cheaper, more efficient and more effective vehicles. If will just take time for the impact to percolate.
My prediction is that while those “advancements” may come to cars, the only practical differences will be lower quality products, cost savings for the car companies, probably more expensive for consumers, and somehow it will also be collecting more data to sell to advertisers.
If you look at the average price of a new car, adjusted for inflation, it has pretty much always gone up aside from recessions. There have been plenty of advancements in car technology, they do not make them cheaper. It actually gives reason to charge more for them due to perceived increase in value.
Yes but you're getting a lot more for the same price. It's a lot more powerful, comfortable, safe and efficient while the effective cost has remained the same.
Again, the effective cost has not stayed the same, cars are getting more expensive. I am all for increased safety, I just wanted to throw a little water on the idea that cars(or really anything) is getting cheaper. You may be getting more performance or safety per dollar, but thats a value proposition that keeps people paying more. All the convenience and "power" features I can leave, I don't need a car that goes 0-60 in 2.8 seconds because why would anyone need that on public roads.
I drive a 1993 land cruiser, fwiw I would not put my kids in it for long drives because I don't think it even has air bags.
I would argue that cars are sufficiently advanced now and there are more important things to focus on. I don't care if AI moderately improves the comfort or efficiency of a new car while it took my job.
Obviously we get things in return for the social and economic fallout, carbon emissions, pollution, destruction of education, etc. that AI has provided us. I just haven't heard a compelling argument for why that is nearly enough to warrant this.
What percentage of that price is cost of good sold vs. a bunch of regulatory bs like dealers and taxes?
No idea, and it doesn't really matter because the customer ends up paying all of it.
Just a few more weeks, a few more hundreds of billions, it's right around the corner....
This only works if there remains a viable and attractive consumer market for these advanced goods. AI is both an imminent wealth shock and perhaps the largest structural change to the economy in history as it threatens to drive the value of human labor to zero over the next decades.
In American history, when previous shocks like this occurred (e.g. with the Great Depression), we needed massive economic programs like the New Deal to restore consumer demand. When such programs are not forthcoming while wealth inequalities keep increasing, one can look to other countries for what ends up happening; either the disenfranchisement of ordinary people over time or unrest and redistribution by force.
AI car navigation is here, but driving is a social act. Have you ever tried to keep an automated taxi out of a private driveway or the scene of an emergency? There is a lot of work to do and limited evidence of LLMs raising the bar.
Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory, which you may know from its smash hit "trickle down economics"! Surely this time it'll be different, right?
> Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory
While trickle down theory is dubious when it comes to economics, it's clear that it is valid when it comes to technology. Tech trickles down.
Ah yes, like my RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are trickling down right now? You're absolutely right! I love a trickle of PC parts!
This is a temporary anomaly due to the datacenter buildout, which will not last forever. Historically, tech has always trickled down. Sooner or later, hardware will again become cheap.
"Temporary" is a few months. We're looking at many multiple years before parts even _begin_ to decline in price, if even. How much will we as consumers lose in the time it takes for this to correct? This is not "temporary", this is a decimation of an entire product sector for the foreseeable future. There is no historical precedent for this. Companies are not and will not slow down gobbling up literally every tech part they can. Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us. It is a literal cancer.
> Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us.
Unless we are really going to hit the Singularity and create Godlike superintelligence that improves beyond all limits, sooner or later the models will stop improving, no matter how much compute we throw at them. After that happens, the best models will be etched into model-specific ASICs with weights fixed in mask ROM (like Taalas is already doing), which will result in massive, order of magnitude inference efficiency increase. Couple this with the training datacenters suddenly becoming available for inference, and the cost of compute will plummet.
Yes, it might take a few years, but the hardware will be cheap again. And if the result of the whole process is human-level AI, then it will be worth it in the end.
I don't think you understand the current state of capitalism very well. Absolutely nothing goes down in price once companies know people will still buy an item at a higher price. We will never see hardware at the previous affordable prices again. Sure it might go down somewhat, but going down from 500% of previous prices to 400% of previous prices is not suddenly "affordable". And that is exactly what will happen. Models will not suddenly stop improving and their consumption of hardware will not stop. The corporations won't allow it. We have too many companies in an arms race against each other. They literally cannot stop or they die.
How can you say tickle down economics doesn't work? The US has made it easier for businesses to grow and the result is the highest standard of living ib tje world.
I think it's hard to quantify "highest standard of living", but for the attempts at it (e.g. HDI, etc), the US is not number one.
Trickle-down economics specifically refers to economic policy that favors the wealthy and corporations with the argument that this will lead to wealth trickling down to the economically less fortunate. Examples include the Reagan and Trump tax cuts.
This has been studied somewhat extensively (https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315?login=... is one example), and it’s been shown over and over that this does in fact not work and leads to larger wealth disparity, across many countries where it has been attempted.
It’s possible you’re working off some other definition of the term based on your comment but that’s the generally accepted usage.
The person you replied to was the second person I've seen on HN this week try and defend trickle-down economics explicitly in more or less the exact same terms and justifications. What is going on with that? Did Peter Thiel tweet some pro trickle down dreck recently that these people latched on to?
You should see the comments sections on NYT articles, lately. It was like someone flipped a switch about two weeks ago.
It would be neat if someone did sweeping sentiment analysis on them, just to see it graphed, but I’m sure gathering the data would be prohibited.
It’s all bots anyway at this point.
Hate to break it to you, but the US doesn’t even break the top 10 in a lot of reports.
The US alone!
I think he means LLMs, we knew about RL already.
Worse, the view is largely phrased as gaslighting AI. Blaming the cause of particular grievances that coincidentally have been sourced at the same time as the rise of AI, is purposeful.
> [Your train] never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.
None of this has to do with AI.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Plain wrong on both counts.
> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do Apparently...nothing.
Nonsequitor, probably based on a personal beef. Datacenters, at best, are understood to be for hosting more AI - not for people to somehow live in as an arcology of discovery.
I think only because these are all things that AI companies are saying will be helped by AI so give us more money. Nobody advertises their product publicly as "you will be able to buy other product to do the same things you do now but pay people less and make more profits" even though that is where the value is for them.
Why fix your appliances and infrastructure and give you healthcare when the plan is to obsolete the whole lot of you?
https://nitter.xitter.cc/augeeidos/status/210940046382122618...
This reply summarizes the problem from a different angle.
As someone who is building one of these referred to systems in a major vertical in the Fortune 500, these LLMs are very much being used to eat major legacy systems and processes. There are still plenty of obstacles to overcome but the number of AI governance and steering groups that I have been apart of are indicative of what's happening in a major industry.
> As someone who is building one of these referred to systems in a major vertical in the Fortune 500, these LLMs are very much being used to eat major legacy systems and processes
> Senior Director of Product in Insurance Tech
anakin_padme.jpg
Those LLMs are not being wielded by 2 tech bros in a garage replacing the 100 000 person company.
Those LLMs are being adopted by the huge enterprise itself and being surrounded from all sides by a very complex procedural harness (aka regular programming) that stops the LLM from doing dumb stuff.
This is an interesting perspective.
Nevertheless, my counterpoint to
> If they actually had access to systems that could do "years of top professional work" across software, cyber, science, and math, they would not mostly be leaving to start more chatbot companies, agent frameworks, eval tools, and "AI for workflow" startups.
> They would be starting normal companies to disrupt the global economies of the world.
> Insurance companies. CAD companies. Compliance companies. Security auditing firms. Logistics software. Tax automation. ERP replacements. Drug discovery tooling. Industrial design. Legal ops. Accounting systems. Boring vertical SaaS with insane output per employee.
is:
Many people who work in such industries already know an insane amount of inefficiencies. Unluckily, they are not in positions and have no political power (with respect to organizational policy) in the company that they are capable of changing the situation.
Additionally, many of these sectors are heavily regulated, so it is very hard to make a difference in this sector as a startup founder, and even if there is an entrpreneur who founds a company to change the status quo, an insane amount of work in the company will be handling the big amount of red tape.
I mean there's been huge strides in electric vehicles at low prices that Americans haven't experienced.
We've just locked out a large part of modernity because the shitty American auto industry is in swing states and also gender.
Same could be said about the slow rollout of Waymo.
Lots of America is just very anti technological change, and this means any technology no matter how "magical" hits a wall.
The change will be slow, not sudden. Slow and devastating.
Why and how will it be devastating specifically?
Is it reasonable to expect AI improvements to filter into all of those aspects of life that quickly? It's only in the past month or so that we've started to see major breakthroughs in mathematics. It might take several years for that level of research capability to reach areas like engineering and medicine, at least in a way that affects the average person's quality of life. But at this point it looks very likely that it will happen eventually.
Your pessimistic view doesn't hold up against the data. For a lot of the problems you mentioned, we're in a better place today than almost any other time in history. Of course, things can always be improved and we should never grow complacent or accept injustice. But by most objective metrics, there's never been a better time to be alive.
Have you seen the shareholder value though? That’s not nothing it’s the only thing that matters!
With AI software replication, I wonder if shareholder value even increases. Services accounts for 80% of American industry, what happens when big software companies loses revenue to piracy/recompilation i.e. Adobe, Unity, AutoDesk, tax/law software, etc..
Yeah people were saying ai is the death of open source. I dunno about that but it seems to me closed source is having a bit of a crisis here too.
And the human society was entirely destroyed, but for a brief moment we were able create share holder value.
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I think that's a bit disingenuous. We've only begun to apply LLMs in the real world and a lot of industries don't move very quickly. Not to mention that we're still very hardware constrained, we don't yet have the equivalent of an ESP32 chip we can just stick into any piece of electronics to provide state of the art LLM responses. But we'll get there, soon.
I would just add that consumer products in general aren't the same - practically every business model has incorporated obsoletionism to the point it's practically cancelled out the curve of progress and evolution of tech. We could have nice things.
Same as before, really. You can have geniuses but if not used right you get nothing.
> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do? Apparently...nothing.
I suspect the real world change is going to happen unbelievably rapidly and isn't far off. Right we don't quite have the hardware to embody AI in a generally useful way, but that's coming fast.
Within a couple of years arguably any task that requires just knowledge or intelligence is something you'd be better off giving to an AI than a human. And decent humanoid robots are maybe a decade behind that.
In the same way people growing up in the mid 1900s saw rapid changes in their way of life with planes and cars replaces boats and horses, we'll see something similar with robots replacing human labours. Right now we're still in the phase where people don't think humans will ever be able to control flying machines and that cars are reliable and slow. Things will change.
I already felt our civilization was on a steep decline, but AI is the final nail in the coffin, technology kills my own job too, hooray.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
That's not fair. To first approximation, most of the progress in human condition of the last, like, forever is implementing solutions that people didn't see value in at the time of creation. Woz built a toy that could barely run software at all. The human genome project was panned as a boondoggle. Penicillin was a mistake.
The first fire pit probably looked like a dangerous stunt to the tribe faced with it, even.
Does that mean everything will come up roses? No. But LLMs only started talking to us for real like three years ago. Let's not just that fast.
You are talking like we had this capabilities for a decades but it's been just a few months of truly capable AI. Virtually all of IT switched to agents that quick. Non IT people just started to make software for themselves. Vision and translation capabilities of LLMs help millions. People talk with AI's now verbally to get advice or to just hear a friendly voice. The math thing is just few weeks old. We are just getting started. How fast did the telegraph meaningfuly changed lives for the better for bulk of people? Radio? TV? Computers? Internet? Cellphones?
Has any technology made an impact on physical world faster?
Exactly, we're all software engineers here and even for us it took weeks/months to get to a position where we can really leverage LLMs (think platform, security, observability, etc).
Imagine being in charge of a physical factory, sure you might have a 200 USD Claude subscription but you also have a floor full of physical machines that have, if you're lucky, an undocumented debug interface and a paper manual. Not to mention safety inspections, insurance, etc.
You can't vibe code a factory floor. Not yet, perhaps in 5 - 10 years but there are some very hard, non technical, problems that need to be fixed before we'll see meaningful improvement there.
I'm pretty confident with enough context, Opus 7.5 will be able to vibe code a factory floor.
How much time do we have to wait before we are allowed to criticize AI? GitHub copilot has existed for half a decade. Cursor, Claude code, codex, have all existed for over a year and have seen more investment that practically any product in history and have almost 0 barrier to entry. Where is my decade of software progress in 1 year, because that’s what 10x productivity looks like! All I see are the same old broken products and services from basically the same handful of big players, higher costs, and more bugs. Remember when every year iOS and Android saw loads of new features and a radical rethink every few years? And that happened on ancient hardware and in a significantly smaller industry. Where is anything like that happening now?
> How much time do we have to wait before we are allowed to criticize AI?
You are allowed to criticize it, just not because "the progress has been too slow". It was not.
I'll criticize Copilot with you. It's terrible and close to useless and it's a terrible shame that many companies got stuck with it due to being early adopters of this crap. I'm sorry for my friends who are employed by such companies.
Progress between Copilot and something like a gpt-6.1-sol in a good harness is at least as big as few Android versions.
> to just hear a friendly voice
This is far from being proven as a net gain and there are massive lawsuits incoming related to AI recommending suicide to kids and others.
In all fairness, depression and suicide have existed before LLMs.
Safety systems are not optimal but improving everyday and although I doubt we'll ever get a perfect safety system, it seems that we're not very far from a "good" safety system. The days of Google recommending glue on pizza and generating diverse Nazis seem behind us.
Not to mention all the untold good that LLMs have done. Personally I've seen that LLMs are incredibly good at pointing conspiracy nuts and extremists into the right (moderate) direction.
In a polarised world, we definitely need that.
What do you think happens when political ad buyer start buying inception style hints in chat bot answers?
Also, rage baiting also drives up chat bot conversation durations.
The incentives are exactly the same as for Facebook and Google Search.
What’s your point?
People didnt get a new car after they got. Internet in 2001. They didnt get new dishwashers.
>Your car is still the same.
Not for Tesla owners in select countries, where their car now drives them around 99% of the time, or the people of Austin Texas, that can now hail a fully driverless Cybercab for cheaper than an Uber!
>Food quality is worse.
Food quality is higher than ever if you want high-quality food!
Unfortunately, the people crave slop.
I'll add some...
Videos are shittier. Most songs are even shittier than the autotuned pieces of shit already were. Ads are worse (even though nobody thought that was even possible). Customer support is worse.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using)
That nobody is using and that are worse than what we used to have. And because nobody's using them, the countless issues plaguing them aren't even reported by users anymore (there are no users anymore). Full of bugs, usability issues and gigantic security holes (but which doesn't really matter because nobody's using them).
It's not even clear that it's making long-standing software (like say Linux or Emacs or Blender or QEMU) better at all.
Now I'd say though: most of the issues you mentioned have nothing to do with LLMs / AI. But it's very clear that AI ain't solving much of the world's problems and that the promises we got years ago didn't materialize.
All you said is true, but on the flip side it is giving an individual user huge power over software. To create their own, to reverse engineer proprietary ones. Decentralisation of such power can only be a good thing.
Even if a certain small group of people are also using the hype surrounding this tech to attempt to destroy the home PC market and reverse the personal computer revolution. They will not succeed. There is more of us than them. Even with "thousands of frontier LLMs". A human+llm is going to be more powerful for a long time rather than a bunch of LLMs.
The power isnt really decentralized when you see that the internal AI models are superior than anything you can self host, and the right to use those can be stripped away at any time.
This is like saying food is shittier today because there are now more restaurants. No, food has never been better, there are just a ton of shitty restaurants.
More like saying samey corporatized slop bowl copy paste jobs (eg Cava) are driving out real, quality restaurants, a thing that has actually been happening for some time.
Honestly that's true of most innovations
AI won't show itself as a big new thing, but possibly in improvements in small little things
Most people won't use AI directly, except maybe as a smarter Google. In the same way people don't use HTTP directly
It’s amazing how much the goal posts move in every AI conversation. A couple of years ago the average HN thread about AI would be filled to the brim with skepticism about AI ever being able to accomplish anything other than flappy bird clones.
Now it’s comments like this lamenting that the amazing LLMs we’ve had since early 2026 haven’t entirely revolutionized the whole physical world and even global geopolitics yet.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using),
I guarantee a lot of software you use today has substantial AI development in recent releases.
Even the Linux kernel is getting a heavy input from AI and Linus is advocating for it. Unless you’ve frozen your entire software stack in 2024, you are using software with AI generated code.
> and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Saying nobody wants those problems solved is flat dishonest. The complaints from some mathematicians are that they and their peers didn’t get to put their names on the papers, not complaints that the problems were solved.
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"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest"
When companies make profit, it doesn't mean we get screwed, nor even that they have a high profit margin. The grocery chain stores are a prime example. They typically make 2-3% net margins on revenue, and provide fresh, clean, reasonably well-tested groceries close to our home for that margin. Imagine trying to get equivalent quality fresh groceries ourselves from the producers, and I'm guessing it would cost at least three times as much.
ngl I don't think a quote from 250 years ago is all that relevant in discussing capitalism as it exists today. Adam Smith wouldn't recognize the world we live in. Nor was my point "pRoFiT bAd" but rather growth for the sake of growth is not the way to actually improve lives. Infinite growth is impossible (something I'm sure even Adam Smith would agree with me on) and yet our system is currently designed around the idea that it is not only possible, but good and necessary.
Worst system, apart from the other ones.
I've been thinking about this for 2 years. At some point it will be easier for them to create self sustaining cities - free houses cars public transportation clean food clean water -
Africa is going to look like wakanda in less than 5 years if WW3 gets canceled