> Feels like a false equivalency.

It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias.

In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.

It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.

And coding is the lowest of low hanging fruits.

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ThrowawayR2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history". Some of those bets were prescient but too early but many of those bets never made any sense. The dotcom bust was worse than the software industry crash we're experiencing now.

"It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history" perhaps but it's not at all obvious how it's going to shake out or which bets are sensible.

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locknitpicker 3 days ago | parent [-]

> In the 90s was also the dotcom boom, and the vast majority of those who placed an all-in bet on it being everything lost it all in the dotcom bust and also "ended up being forgotten by history".

I think you are missing the point, and also the very site you're posting on.

Look at the top 50 list of most valuable companies in the world. Over half of the total market value reported today is attributed to companies which were either dotcom startups or whose growth was driven by the dotcom growth period. Dismissing the advent of the internet as anything short of revolutionary is disingenuous, no matter how many zombo.com companies failed.

LLMs have the exact same transformative impact on humanity.

	▲	danaris 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> LLMs have the exact same transformative impact on humanity. But this is begging the question. Yes, we can see that the internet was radically transformative. But you are arguing that this somehow proves that LLMs are too, when there's wildly insufficient evidence—either on where LLMs are going in themselves, or in the comparison—to credibly make that claim.

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disgruntledphd2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time.

It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.

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locknitpicker 3 days ago | parent [-]

> It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads.

I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overflow just so happens to be a specialized service with a very specialized audience whose demand is perfectly dominated by LLM chatbots.

	▲	disgruntledphd2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean the first decline happened well before ChatGPT so it can't just be that.

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kjkjadksj 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Internet is something new. By definition llm coding isn’t doing anything you couldn’t have done already. Once the agents aren’t writing a human syntax based language but are spitting out opaque functions in binary machine code, then they are doing something new and compelling imo because there are real performance gains with that.

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bitwize 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, this is wrong. AI has drastically shortened the time and effort between idea and implementation. The upshot being, that not only do you get things done faster, but things you wouldn't otherwise countenance doing are now within reach.

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kjkjadksj 3 days ago | parent [-]

So where is all the new tech years into ai? Turns out that wasn’t the limiting factor. The limiting factor is still what it was 10,000 years ago in business: accumulating capital to start and finding a fit in the market to last.

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ctoth 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wait. Which one is it? Is Show HN overwhelmed with too much new stuff because of AI? Or is there no new stuff? I am so confused!

	▲	ThrowawayR2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		As someone who does monitor /new, Show HN is overwhelmed with copycat low effort AI rubbish, not innovative AI generated tech that is interesting or useful. How many AI powered coloring book generators and AI powered anime-ification sites does the world really need?

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irishcoffee 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.

Allow me to introduce you to the dot-com boom, where everyone who bet on the internet went broke.

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aworks 3 days ago | parent [-]

The Google founders did ok.

	▲	irishcoffee 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Google raised only a single large round of institutional funding before going public, with the investors contributing $12.5 million I can be much more specific about “everyone” if you’d like.

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lapcat 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history.

Almost all people are "forgotten" by history.

In any case, people who were not even born yet in the 1990s are using the internet today, very successfully, so clearly you can wait.