You forgot - cheating on job interviews, writing resumes to be repetitive, and adding an annoying flowery tone to non-native English speakers who think AI wrote something for them that isn't AI-obvious.

How many people graduate from a US software engineering degree each year? About 100k? If they (the 100k in the US) earn $100k each in the first year, before gaining the skills to earn more, that's $10 billion a year, every year. If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion.

Except… can you capture it? A junior dev is… not exactly someone you want connecting to your business-critical database without supervision, and a real human dev will get better with a predictable rate. Will LLMs get better? The makers are betting on that, but we'll only know after the model releases, and even then after we play with them for a bit to differentiate between the record performance on whichever benchmark and the actual work we want them to do.

Then there's the question of can you really keep an edge for 20 years with investments today: Sometime between 2030-2035, there's likely to be models matching 2025-SOTA performance that run on ${year}'s high-end smartphone.

(Well, unless we all die in WW3 because of Russia getting desperate from its failure to remove Ukraine's sovereignty, or because China has a hot war with Taiwan and/or the USA messing with global consumer electronics supplies, but I don't think those get priced into the market…).

That's the same mistake made with every new, and eventually successful, technology - we haven't found a valuable application yet, so the technology is not valuable.

Finding the valuable application is often the hardest part. That it hasn't happened yet is meaningless. Some technologies sit on the shelf for decades.

AI seems to have a lot of potential: It may be the most valuable technology ever; it may not provide more value than it does now, or something in between. Nobody actually knows. The challenge of innovation is managing that irreduceable risk. It starts by accepting risk, accepting that you don't know. One wrong way is to deny the risk - denying uncertainty - by either saying it's worthless or that success is guaranteed.

> The implied promise was that these things were going to “revolutionize the workplace” i.e. massively automate middle class office jobs

Promise by who? I think the bet is that it would lay off nearly everyone white collar and let AI take its place.

The hardware also wears out really fast. And every replacement is more expensive. How long can that party keep going when none of the companies make enough revenue to cover the expenses?

GPUs have massive applications such as Alphafold, CRISPR, Medical Imaging, Meteorology.

The massive planetary investment is not to make more AI chats that summarize text. That's just short sighted.

its helping people be more productive but its not helping firing people which was the wet dream

> thinking of automating away junior software engineers and low end design work.

And it's really still very arguable imo if it's even doing this

Like you said, it still needs strict supervision. In my opinion it is not a good use of your supervisory time to be babysitting an LLM versus mentoring actual juniors

Ok, ignoring any AGI or massive advances, let's just say an LLM can help the average office worker be 15% more productive... what do you think the economic value of that is?

The value of LLM is reliable high quality translation between all languages. The economic value of this is at least trillions of dollars per year. The cultural and humanitarian value is equally gigantic, even if it can't be measured in dollars and cents.

Not only that, but it’s devaluing the sacred cows of the very same companies that are investing heavily.

Search is dead or dying

Social media is dead or dying

Content creation is dead or dying

If they cant make AI work, then they are left with AI at a level that continues to devalue their core business.

They have no choice. They made a deal with the devil. And the devil means to collect.

This is why I think Apple is lucky their attempt failed so bad. They dodged a bullet. They have an opportunity to guide a lost tech industry through a post AI bubble world.

> That nobody knows how high, that they still haven't figured out applications, and that the technology and its tools are still far from refined, might be a sign that the technology shouldn't be valued this highly at all

That might be true, but it also might be true that it's tremendously valuable. The conditions you identify exist for every new technology; obviously the outcomes vary greatly.

From what I've read, people spent a long time looking for the 'killer application'. Google didn't know how to make money off its search engine. Social media didn't exist in any mass form. Internet access on phones, beyond email, didn't exist in any usable way.

Proprietary, walled garden services, with their own dial-up numbers, such as AOL and CompuServe, were seen as the future. Microsoft thought their similar service (MSN?) was the way forward and didn't integrate the Internet into Windows 95. That was after Netscape's browser was released and (relative to the time, I'm sure) very popular.

There was a recent Bezos talk about the fact that (much like the dot-com) we've overspending on infrastructure that'll bubble and implode but then we'll have all this amazing infra for companies to build off of... but the process of that overspend and implosion is essentially a massive debt erasure - a lot of people are currently propping up this market with their capital and the companies they're propping up will collapse and those obligations liquidated - and that will result in massive society-wide pain. We may end up in a better place for the next generation because of this investment - but if you're a retail investor don't expect your 401k accounts to weather that burst gracefully... and, unlike the boomers, this will largely hit Millenials and Gen Z both of whom are currently under massive financial stress.

What are the clear military applications that differ from civilian ones?

An essential point.

Yep. It seems somewhat inevitable to have a readjustment at some point. Both Web 2.0 (online retail) and AI are (rightfully, I believe) creating a lot of buzz and stimulating a lot of investment. It's all very new and exciting and there is bound to be a lot of hit and miss activity. Once the dust settles, the misguided bets will become more obvious and there will be a culling, just as we had during the dot com bubble.

> The value of modern AI seems very hig

Very useful, clearly. But valuable? In aggregate it seems clear that it is. But where does that value acrue? It seems to me the value will be thinly spread while the costs are concentrated.

It does not seem possible that any conceivable business can pay for all the announced plans for developing data centres, nor energy available to power them.

If AI systems can be developed to be trust worthy enough to act on their own, none so far (?), then I can see where the value could acrue, but as things stand?

Also, video games in the 1980s.

Both are great points.