I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
I think there is a high risk that people will begin writing like AI, or they will stop using effective/engaging styles because AI happens to use those. I don't want to deal with people writing in contrived/awkward/imperfect ways just to appear more human. That is a losing game anyway, because AI will learn to copy everyone.
With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?
It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?
That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.
> what is a random tech employee supposed to do here?
My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not more so, and I want to program not manage programmers, artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be what we are told they are programming will become a minimum wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I can, is the best course of action.
If you're a tech employee in a large company with lucrative compensation, you should be aggressively reducing your expenses and banking your excess so you can weather what might be long period of unemployment and can adapt more smoothly to employment at more modest compensation when you manage to get back in.
Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a very high-value VIP (again, you'd know), you should assume you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few years. Possibly a long time.
You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs. Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new job will basically come down to a lottery draw.
If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it. Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for that novel you've been thinking about writing.
Do you think this has something to do with the current US policy of antagonizing most of the Western world?
Tech and software's investment balance sheet comes down to a largely fixed cost of development vs. a large customer base where every customer has little to no additional cost.
If you manage to burn the bridges or at least scare hundreds of millions of those people into exploring alternatives, that really eats into your total target market in the long run.
> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical.
The text reminded me of one of Veritasium's latest videos [1] about power law, self-organized criticality, percolation, etc... and it also has a wildfire simulation
> training compute looks more like an operating expense with a short payback window than a durable capital asset
Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand, that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further into their functional lifetimes.
There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while older GPUs continue working.
Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term functional value.
I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand. Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and better ways.
> their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
Why? NVIDIA is better positioned to produce faster and more efficient ML ASICs any of their huge customers (except possibly Google). And on top of that, the fact that there is a huge library of CUDA code that will run out of the box on NVIDIA hardware is a big advantage.
Arguably, this shift has already happened. Modern NVIDIA datacenter GPUs, like the H100, only bear a passing resemblance to a GPU -- most of the silicon is dedicated to accelerating ML workloads.
I think this is what the "circular financing" is all about actually. While you are in the 'picks and shovels' phase you want to use your high margins to buy up the value chain and become more vertically integrated. Effectively investing when the sun shines to diversify the company.
As a possibility for example I can see them transforming from a GPU based corp into a parent company for many full or partially owned "subsidiaries". They still manufacture chips to be "vertically integrated" but that becomes bread and butter as an enablement rather than the main story (e.g. Google TPU's). As their margins go down the value accrues to what they are owning (the business units/product areas).
> their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
Are we sure this will be the case? Perhaps the sweet spot for hardware that can train/run language models is the GPU already, especially with the years of head start Nvidia has?
AI is the only 'technology' that nobody knows what it solves. If it is a fridge, people buy it. If its a dishwasher, people buy it. The use cases of these technologies are immediately understood. AI is pushed down hard by the 'leaders', C-suite is pushing everyone to use AI at most companies. Nobody knows what its supposed to help with but a great many people claim 'success' with AI. Every full text search that was perfectly working before got converted to AI search and is instantly 100x worse. Same with lots of customer facing FAQs, customer support, etc.
Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.
VC is inherently high risk capital. It's by design most companies will fail or at most break even via acquisitions/acquihires, while a small few make investors massive amounts of money.
The only real difference this time around is all of the datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it much riskier and capital intensive.
There is no wildfire coming. The model providers have narrowed down to 4: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The chip manufacturers are Nvidia, Google (TPUs) and AMD is trying to break in as well. Microsoft is position very well as a middleman. All these guys are giants already. Just Nvidia, Microsoft and Google together have a market cap above ten trillion. OpenAI, Anthropic, AMD and xAI probably add one trillion more.
Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.
In other words, which companies are default alive or dead? [0]
The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time
I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a piece of cake.
I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
Gold rush comparison is an interesting one. Much of Seattle's early economy was based on "mining the miners", especially gold rushes in the Yukon. In addition to profits to local merchants, it would distort the labor pool as people abandoned logging and left the woods to work mining claims instead.
California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania.
Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic..
We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different".
"AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide.
A bad thing with some positive side effects is not a good thing. Wildfire is bad, too frequent wildfires will turn forest into savannah. I didn't see where this part of the analogy was discussed.
> Every promising engineer, designer, or operator is being courted by three, five, ten different AI startups, often chasing the same vertical, whether it’s coding copilots, novel datasets, customer service, legal tech, or marketing automation.
I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more economic impact than society can actually bear. Who should be wiped out by the wildfire? Anthropic?
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator.
This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.
Framing this as something cyclic as the rest of the world is static may be a mistake if things have deep changes outside (related or not with what is being done here), or the nature of the field radically changes.
Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.
> Businesses aren’t asking “do we want AI capabilities?” They’re asking “how much can we get, and how soon?”
This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.
The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.
Candidly, the accusation of short-sightedness doesn't really make sense when it comes to enthusiasm in a technology which often in practice falls short today but which in certain cases and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value.
If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness. They are not the sticks in the mud.
If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire.
The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.
That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.
Does OpenAI and/or Anthropic survive the wildfire? Do one or both of them become the next Google? Or do they become Netscape and Google, Microsoft, et al win in the end?
If they are profitable on inference currently, they will be able to recover. People in SWE will continue paying for current SOTA models even if better models are not achieved.
> The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.
The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.
These analogies are like fitting a curve to align with the data. Let the new data come in next year, the curve changes to fit that data as well. Any data can be curve-fitted and be seen as following some pattern.
It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe.
The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces.
For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.
> She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health.
This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."
> The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.
I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.
I think.. after reading this article twice that, if it is indeed presented accurately and if the table participants are not just trying to drive a specific agenda, is it applying the wrong metaphor.
It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'.
I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall.
Here is what I mean by this:
- the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead
- the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks
- those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use )
It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.
> the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead
Maybe it's simply less visible?
I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.
Ummm... Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal... Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator... doesn't look like a particularly virtuous trajectory to me.
It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now.
"AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies.
This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google all are profitable even despite their capex. Worst case scenario they stop spending on AI capex and go back to being ridiculously profitable instead of just comfortably profitable. There's no actual implosion for the big names.
striking|2 months ago
redrix|2 months ago
Edit: I forgot HN strips emojis.
nick486|2 months ago
I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
Bluestrike2|2 months ago
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
jakeydus|2 months ago
wakawaka28|2 months ago
spwa4|2 months ago
It's more things like AI delivering pizza that's under threat. You know, the actual value.
clickety_clack|2 months ago
PunchyHamster|2 months ago
debo_|2 months ago
almosthere|2 months ago
8f2ab37a-ed6c|2 months ago
It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI music stops? But ultimately if nothing outside of AI is growing, it's one big game of musical chairs and even that might not save you?
karlgkk|2 months ago
dspillett|2 months ago
My plan as someone who was thinking of leaving tech anyway (remote work is not for me, and practically any new tech job I get will be at least as remote as this one has become if not more so, and I want to program not manage programmers, artificial or otherwise) is to stay where I am pushing through to the other side if possible and if not, I'll find myself redundant. At that point I'll end up on a lower wage doing something else from the ground up, but if LLMs are going to be what we are told they are programming will become a minimum wage job for most anyway. Either way, sticking where I am for now, tightening the purse strings a bit, saving as much as I can, is the best course of action.
swatcoder|2 months ago
Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a very high-value VIP (again, you'd know), you should assume you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few years. Possibly a long time.
You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs. Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new job will basically come down to a lottery draw.
If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it. Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for that novel you've been thinking about writing.
torginus|2 months ago
Tech and software's investment balance sheet comes down to a largely fixed cost of development vs. a large customer base where every customer has little to no additional cost.
If you manage to burn the bridges or at least scare hundreds of millions of those people into exploring alternatives, that really eats into your total target market in the long run.
pbkompasz|2 months ago
pizlonator|2 months ago
Is the return measurable and immediate?
Is it really?
never_inline|2 months ago
com2kid|2 months ago
Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2.
A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps.
Translation teams laid off.
Documentation teams dramatically reduced.
Data entry teams replaced by vision models.
dlojudice|2 months ago
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k
Nevermark|2 months ago
Today they are a durable asset functionally, longer than they are economically. So there is no reason in a market with less demand, that their economic payback windows cannot be extended further into their functional lifetimes.
There will be energy cost incentives to replace GPUs. But turnover can respond sensibly to demand as it revives, while older GPUs continue working.
Also, the data centers themselves, and especially any associated increase in power generation, will carry forward as long term functional value.
I doubt any downturn in compute demand lasts long. The underlying trend, aside from AI, was for steady increases in demand. Regardless of bad AI business models, or investment overhangs, a greater focus by more entities on AI product-market fits, along with cheaper compute, will quickly soak up cycles in new and better ways.
The wildflowers will grow fast.
blibble|2 months ago
their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs
jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"
jonas21|2 months ago
Why? NVIDIA is better positioned to produce faster and more efficient ML ASICs any of their huge customers (except possibly Google). And on top of that, the fact that there is a huge library of CUDA code that will run out of the box on NVIDIA hardware is a big advantage.
Arguably, this shift has already happened. Modern NVIDIA datacenter GPUs, like the H100, only bear a passing resemblance to a GPU -- most of the silicon is dedicated to accelerating ML workloads.
throw234234234|2 months ago
As a possibility for example I can see them transforming from a GPU based corp into a parent company for many full or partially owned "subsidiaries". They still manufacture chips to be "vertically integrated" but that becomes bread and butter as an enablement rather than the main story (e.g. Google TPU's). As their margins go down the value accrues to what they are owning (the business units/product areas).
vb-8448|2 months ago
patapong|2 months ago
Are we sure this will be the case? Perhaps the sweet spot for hardware that can train/run language models is the GPU already, especially with the years of head start Nvidia has?
tim333|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
malux85|2 months ago
thelastgallon|2 months ago
Meanwhile, 67% of my time is gone fixing autocorrect on apple devices.
lkbm|2 months ago
You: No one knows anything AI helps with.
Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.
mNovak|2 months ago
Sgt_Apone|2 months ago
daemontus|2 months ago
lbreakjai|2 months ago
dmix|2 months ago
The only real difference this time around is all of the datacenters being built. There's real hard asset costs making it much riskier and capital intensive.
saulpw|2 months ago
credit_guy|2 months ago
Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.
nubg|2 months ago
jameslk|2 months ago
The companies that are sustainable with their own revenue, covering their runway or nearly there, are likely to be alive if there’s not investors to keep them alive. Those with ridiculous commitments expecting a hail mary until their business model materializes, are living on borrowed time
0. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html
kittikitti|2 months ago
I think the best metaphor will be the California gold rush. There is definitely gold there but most of it has already been mined. The people who are entering at this point are woefully unprepared, assuming that they can vibe their way into a fortune, when the rest of the gold requires hard earned labor.
oasisbob|2 months ago
Libidinalecon|2 months ago
Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic..
We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different".
"AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immortality or cause mass human genocide.
It is all completely rational this time.
cr125rider|2 months ago
tim333|2 months ago
d4rkn0d3z|2 months ago
orian|2 months ago
But that was the same thought for me. The other totally missed aspect: a fire kills all life in area.
devin|2 months ago
This is flat out wrong.
throw310822|2 months ago
billy99k|2 months ago
dvfjsdhgfv|2 months ago
This list of companies made me wonder a bit. Technical progress has been huge, no question about that. But as for the actual quality or experience for the user/customer - I have the impression everything got worse, starting from Google from the first wave.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
gmuslera|2 months ago
Then the cycle is broken, and there might be no survivors, or the regrowth may be so far into the future that it will make no difference for most of the survivors.
ForHackernews|2 months ago
This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.
throw310822|2 months ago
AbrahamParangi|2 months ago
If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness. They are not the sticks in the mud.
GMoromisato|2 months ago
The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.
m4rtink|2 months ago
bdangubic|2 months ago
GMoromisato|2 months ago
never_inline|2 months ago
insane_dreamer|2 months ago
vb-8448|2 months ago
The GFC doesn't have anything in common with the .com bubble, maybe we'd have see another tech bubble in the first 2010s if there were not a GFC, but it's fundamentally wrong to place those 2 things nearby.
rullera|2 months ago
zkmon|2 months ago
It is not that simple. You need to consider factors outside of the silicon valley, outside of USA, outside of technology business. There is lot of world out there. These analogies and predictions don't come out into the global scene to have a look at the what's going on across the globe.
The bubbles which happened earlier are not insulated phenomena that happened in silicon valley labs. It is a complex interaction between various forces.
For example, social and political norms may turn against all that is AI. Any AI-enabled service or product might be seen as serving plastic food.
derelicta|2 months ago
uplifter|2 months ago
This is some of the most nihilistic thinking I've read linked from this site. Also it lacks the nuance that when brush is left to accumulate over due years of forest mismanagement, the resulting wild-fires are much worse and unnecessarily destructive in ways that are hardly describable as "ecosystem health."
philipwhiuk|2 months ago
I note your AI missed the crypto hypecycle. Maybe because it really was a bubble.
tim333|2 months ago
mwkaufma|2 months ago
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2|2 months ago
It is not a bubble. It is not a fire ( cleansing or otherwise ). It is, however, a piece of technology that is, misguidedly, plopped hard into everything without regard for what it is actually good at. This is why I despair when I see AI in notepad or "ai protects okta'.
I am concerned, because I do see a big change on the horizon coming, but it is not the change that is being presented. It may not be the feared ai/agi/asi ( depending on one's particular bent ),but rather deep re-entrenchment of existing ecosystems in ways that will make things a lot more difficult overall.
Here is what I mean by this:
- the internet as we once knew it, is effectively dead - the ones who can ( money-wise and knowledge-wise ) and see the need to, move behind local networks - those that can't ( money-wise, knowledge-wise, or circle-wise ), are forced into locked systems that effectively become AML for... anything ( and if you did not experience it yet, I am assuming you did yet try to buy anything that has -- lets call it -- dual use )
It is bifurcation ( or what some media call k-shaped these days ), but it is not a fire at all. If anything, these are very, very aggressive vines.
Lapel2742|2 months ago
Maybe it's simply less visible?
I have no account at any of the social media giants (except HN but I think that does not count). I mostly use the Fediverse and specialized forums. I would argue that it feels similar to the "old" internet.
m3047|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
bgwalter|2 months ago
"AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies.
This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was based on hot air and incorrect algorithms.
qgin|2 months ago
lkbm|2 months ago
I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.