In terms of startups, predicting tech, and all the things Hacker News is about, it mostly matters what the clever hacker can do, not whether the tool is ready for the mainstream.

If a clever hacker can get 10x results with an LLM, they're gonna outcompete the 90% that can't figure out how to replicate that result, and they'll be able to get about as much work done without that 90%

Factories, Agriculture, etc. - this is hardly the first time that pattern has played out.

So, I'm using AI both at work and for a personal greenfield project, and I have 20 years of pre-AI software development. Which isn't to say I'm amazing, just putting some context here of what my experience level is and the contexts I've used this tech in. First off, I doubt the "10x" number in general (I'm not seeing it personally or from other people), but lets say I pretend it's true for a second. 10x better/faster at what exactly? Like, if you have an unreleased greenfield app then sure, you can bang together features a lot faster. But what if you have an established app with real users? It's not just the time it takes to make the feature, you also have to consider documenting the feature, making sure it works well with the other features, making sure it's something customers actually want, making sure it's part of a larger coherent design, training customers, marketing the feature, etc. Like this notion of "we'll just go 10x faster!" falls apart really quickly when you're talking about making something that people will actually depend on and use.

I keep thinking about that (so far anonymous) company that blew 500 million dollars worth of tokens in a month, and what I desperately want to know is WHAT DID THEY BUILD WITH THAT?! Like, for that sort of money they should have created an earth shaking new business or something instead of becoming a cautionary tale that's rightfully too embarrassed to publicly own it.

The other thing with regard to factories/agriculture/whatever is, in revolutions with those things nobody needed to be convinced. Sure, people were (rightly!) concerned about the societal impact, but the utility of a factory was fairly obvious. And yet last year OpenAI spent more on their marketing budget than Coca Cola. The way this stuff is hyped and pushed has an air of extreme desperation. If it was so good people wouldn't need so much convincing!