Posted by delaugust 9 hours ago
If you tell me, though, that "We installed AI in a place that wasn't designed around it and it didn't work" you're essentially complaining that your horse-drawn cart broke when you hooked it up to your HEMI. Of course it didn't work. The value proposition built around the concept of long dev cycles with huge teams and multiple-9s reliability deliverables is not what this stuff excels at.
I have churned out perfectly functional MVPs for tens of projects in a matter of weeks. I've created robust frameworks with >90% test coverage for fringe projects that would never have otherwise gotten the time budget allotted to them. The boundaries of what can be done aren't being pushed up higher or down deeper, they're being pushed out laterally. This is very good in a distributed sense, but not so great for business as usual - we've had megacorps consolidating and building vertically forever and we've forgotten what it was like to have a robust hacker culture with loads of scrappy teams forging unbeaten paths.
Ironically, VCs have completely missed the point in trying to all build pickaxes - there's a ton of mining to do in this new space (but the risk profile makes the finance-pilled queasy). We need both.
AI is already very good at some things, they just don't look like the things people were expecting.
I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation.
They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you"
They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and nothing else matters.
Academic fraud really is the killer app for this technology. At least if you're a 19-year-old.
I wish more AI skeptics would take this position but no, it's imperative to claim that it's completely useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/
https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/
https://facetation.blogspot.com/2015/03/white-collar-product...
I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be built somewhere. The deals made to develop this kind of property are political — they affect cities and states more than just about any other business run within their borders.
I could be wrong, this could be nonsense. I just can't make sense of it.
Unless AI can change the laws of physics, extremely unlikely.
Like the way we can daydream about a galaxy, then snap-back to work. It's the same mechanism, but with enhanced focus you go from not just visualising > feeling > embodying > grounding in the new location.
We do it all the time, however because we require belief that it's possible in order to maintain our location, whenever we question where we are - we're pulled back into the reality that questions things (it's a very Earth centric way of seeing reality)
Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.
If you just wanted land, water, and electricity, you could buy them directly instead of buying $100 million of computer hardware bundled with $2 million worth of land and water rights. Why are high end GPUs selling in record numbers if AI is just a cover story for the acquisition of land, electricity, and water?
When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style, you have a sudden imbalance of power that looks like a cancer spreading within a national body.
- Trump is threatening an oil rich neighbor with war. A complete expensive as hell army blowing up 'drug boats' (claim) to make help the press sell it as a war on drugs. Yeah right.
- Green energy projects, even running ones, get cancelled. Energy from oil and nuclear are both capital intensive and at the same time completely out-shined by solar and battery tech. So the energy card is a strong one to direct policy towards your interests.
If you can turn the USA into a resource economy like Russia, than you can rule like a Russian oligarch. That is also why the admin sees no problem in destroying academia or other industries via tariffs; controlling resources is easier and more predictable than having to rely on an educated populace that might start to doubt the promise of the American Dream.
Most of this feels like people trying to get rich off VC money — and VCs trying to get rich off someone else’s money.