The amount of flak that this article is getting on HN is telling of something. Not sure of what, but it's for sure indicative of something.

Whether it's a bubble depends on pricing. Is it worth the price, is it worth the future price, and by how much?

In the case of AI coding, yes: AI does exceptionally well at search (something we have known for quite some time, and have a variety of ML solutions for).

Large codebases have search and understanding as top problems. Your ability to make horizontal changes degrades as teams scale. Most stability, performance, quality, etc., changes are are horizontal.

Ironically, I think it's possible that AI's effectiveness at broad search give software engineers additional effectiveness, by being their eyes. Yes, I still review every claude code PR I submit, and yes, I typically take longer to create a claude code PR than a manual one. But I can be more satisfied that the parallel async search agents and massive grep commands are searching more locations, more quickly, and more thoroughly than I would.

Yes, it probably is a bubble (overvalued). No, that doesn't mean it's going to go away. The market is simply overcorrecting as it determines how to price it. Which--net net, is a positive effect, as it encourages economic growth within a developing sector.

Bubble is also not the most important concern--it's rather a concern that the bubble is in the one industry that's not in the red. More important to worry about are other economic conditions outside of AI and tech, which are causing general instability and uncertainty rather than investor appetite. Market recalibrating on a developing industry is fine, as long as it's not your only export.

"Coding, which we called "computer programming" 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI."

And before that

"Grace Hopper: [I started to work on the] Mark I, second of July 1944. There was no so such thing as a programmer at that point. We had a code book for the machine and that was all. It listed the codes and what they did, and we had to work out all the beginning of programmingand writing programs and all the rest of it."

"Hopper: I was a mathematical officer. We did coding, we ran the computer, we did everything. We were coders. I wrote [programs for] both Mark I and Mark II."

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...

>I find the resulting outlook for employment terrifying. I am enormously concerned about what will happen to the people whose jobs AI renders unnecessary, or who can’t find jobs because of it. The optimists argue that “new jobs have always materialized after past technological advances.” I hope that’ll hold true in the case of AI, but hope isn’t much to hang one’s hat on, and I have trouble figuring out where those jobs will come from. Of course, I’m not much of a futurist or a financial optimist, and that’s why it’s a good thing I shifted from equities to bonds in 1978.

It's no wonder that the "AI optimists", unless very tendentious, try to focus more on "not needing to work because you'll get free stuff" rather than "you'll be able to exchange your labor for goods".

> To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything in living memory.

Do we know this? Smaller more carefully curated training sets are proving to be valuable and gaining traction. It seems like the strategy of throwing huge amounts of data at LLMs is specific to companies that are attempting to dominate this space regardless of cost. It may turn out that more modest and better optimized methodologies will end up winning this race, much like WebVan flamed out taking huge amounts of investment money with them but now Instacart serves the same sector in a way that actually works robustly and profitably.

Of course it's a bubble. Valuations are propped up by speculative spending and AI seems unable to make enough profit to make back the continued spending.

Now, that's not to say AI isn't useful and we won't have AGI in the future. But this feels alot like the AI winter. Valuations will crash, a bunch of players will disappear, but we'll keep using the tech for boring things and eventually we'll have another breakthrough.

The AI/LLM movement is either utterly transformational or it’s not. By the former I mean there is no daylight between it and the latter.

If it’s not transformational then this is a bubble and the market will right itself soon after, e.g buying data centers for cheap. LLMs will then exist as a useful but limited tool that becomes profitable with the lower capex.

If it is transformational then we don’t have the societal structure to responsibly incorporate such a shift.

The conservative guess is it won’t be transformational, that the current applications of the tech are useful but not in a way that justifies the capex, and that some version of agents and chat bots will continue to be built out in the future but with a focus on efficiency. Smaller models that require less power to train and run inference that are ubiquitous. Eventually many will run on device.

I guess there’s also another version of the future that’s quasi-transformational. Instead of any massive breakthrough there’s a successful govt coup or regulatory capture. Perfectly functioning normal stuff is then replaced with LLM assisted or augmented versions everywhere. This version is like the emergence of the automobile in the sense that the car fundamentally altered city planning, where and how people live, but often at the expense of public transportation that in hindsight may have sorely been missed.

This thread is just full of people discussing why industrial looms are bad. The factory owners don’t think looms are bad. You can either learn how to be useful in the new factory or you can start throwing shoes.

I bought a subscription to claude code to use at work. I’ve never paid for a tool to use at work that wasn’t paid by my employer. I have to admit, it may not just be a flash in the pan.

Too long and aouthor does not have a clue on the fact that currently generational models are almost only useful for software development. Other than that it is mostly fluff.