Agreed! I recently listened to a podcast (video) from the "How Money Works" channel on this topic:

"How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY

The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.

If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.

I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.

> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade

You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.

Looking forward to the OpenAI (and Anthropic) IPOs. It’s funny to me that this info is being “leaked” - they are sussing out the demand. If they wait too long, they won’t be able to pull off the caper (at these valuations). And we will get to see who has staying power.

It’s obvious to me that all of OpenAIs announcements about partnerships and spending is gearing up for this. But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?

Problem with "it will hurt" is that it will actually hurt middle class by completely wiping it out, and maybe slightly inconvenience the rich. More like annoy the rich, really.

Yeah, it started with the whole Wall Street, with all the depression and wars that it brought, and it hasn't stopped, at each cycle the curve has to go up, with exponential expectations of growth, until it explodes taking the world economy to the ground.

How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards

It's like when a child doesn't want something, you "give them a choice": would you like to put on your red or white shoes?

This assumes fair competition in the tech industry, which has evaporated without a path for return years ago.

> you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

I'm not hoping for a market correction personally, I'm hoping that mobs reinvent the guillotine

They deserve nothing less by now. If they get away with nothing worse than "a correction" then they have still made out like bandits

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

At this point I think it might actually be both rather than just one or the other.

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - Keynes.

Convention here is that AI is the next sliced bread. And big-tech managers care about their reputation.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

This discourse needs to die. Incompetence + lack of empathy is malice. Even competence in the scenario they want to create is malice. It's time to stop sugar-coating it.

> At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic

Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.

It's mass delusion

Pure greed is stupid greed.

Also, if the current level of AI investment and valuations aren't justified by market demand (I believe so), many of these people/companies are getting more money than they would without the unreasonable hype.

you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.

> Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits.

Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie).

There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE

Given that they aren’t meeting their sales targets at all, I guess that’s a little bit of encouraging about the discernment of their customers. I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

They think we're all stupid.

As time goes by, I'm starting to think they may be right more than they're wrong.

And this is a sad and depressing statement about humanity.

is this really the best use case you could come up with? says it all really if so.

Is she going to pay enough to fund the multitrillion dollars it costs to run the current AI landscape?

I think there are 2 things at play here. LLMs are, without a doubt, absolutely useful/helpful but they have shortcomings and limitations (often worth the cost of using). That said, businesses trying to add "AI" into their products have a much lower success rate than LLM-use directly.

I dislike almost every AI feature in software I use but love using LLMs.

> People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con.

Quite the strawman. There are many points between “worthless” and “worth 100s of billions to trillions of investment”.

> There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI

Bullshit

this idea that AI is the only thing anyone could possibly do that might be useful has absolutely got to go

> And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

Are you arguing that if LLMs didn’t exist as a technology, they wouldn’t find anything to do and collapse?

The cost of the boat sinking is also very high and that’s looking like the more likely scenario. Watching your competitors sink huge amounts of capital into a probably sinking boat is a valid strategy. The growth path they were already on was fine no?

There's no such thing as antitrust in the US right now. Google's recent slap on the wrist is all the proof you need.

Under the current US administration the only thing Microsoft is getting is numerous piles of taxpayer bailouts.

Trump has ushered in a truly lawless phase of american politics. I mean, it was kind of bad before, but at least there was a pretense of rule of law. A trillion dollar company can easily just buy its way out of any enforcement of such antitrust action.

I don't see how people don't see it. LLMs are a revolutionary technology and are for the first time since the iPhone are changing how we interact with computers. This isn't block chains. This is something we're going to use until something better replaces it.

> "someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was."

I think that. It's new technology and it always takes some years before all the implications and applications of new technology are fully worked out. I also think that we're in a bubble that will hose a lot of people when it pops.

Two things can be true:

1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted.

---

If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really get traction.

All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic

outside of the recovery community, this is known as 'fraud'

If rationalization comes back, everyone will talk like in Michael Moore’s documentary about GM and Detroit. A manager’s salary after half a career will be around $120k, like in an average bank, and that would be succeeding. I don’t think we even imagine how much of a tsunami we’ve been surfing since 2000.

Riding hype waves forever is the most polar opposite thing to “sustainable” that I can imagine

I'd consider hallucinations to be a fundamental flaw that currently sets hard limits on the current utility of LLMs in any context.

> Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

Ok, but that isn't useful to me. If I have to hold the bot's hand to get stuff done, I'll just do it myself, which will be both faster and higher quality.

You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research.

At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.