Originally submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212259

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.

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.

> I don’t know any more about AI than most generalist investors.

This statement is redundant; the article screams with the author's ignorance.

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.

For anyone who hasn’t read it yet, you should know that the author never answers that question.

The amount of people who think because something has a few useful edge cases being incompatible with a bubble is staggeringly high. Dot com was a bubble, and yet we still use the internet widely today. Real-estate was a bubble, and people still need a place to live and work.

Just because YOU find the technology helpful, useful, or even beneficial for some use cases does NOT mean it has been overvalued. This has been the case for every single bubble, including the Dutch Tulip mania.

>Coding, which we called “computer programming” 60 years ago, is the canary in the coal mine in terms of the impact of AI. In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. According to my guide here, “There is no speculation about whether or not human replacement will take place in that vertical.”

This right here is the pinpoint root cause of the speculative bubble. Although many people believe this to be true, it simply isn't.

That was a lot of text to get nowhere. You can skip reading the article and predict the conclusion, and you will be correct.

about AI replacing coders, the question is not if it is doing so, but if the companies where it does so extensively will be more profitable then the others.