How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit when they are seeing in front of their eyes every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion in the last year. Just ask basically any software engineer how much their profession has changed over the last 12 months

Obviously there is risk, but can't we really extrapolate the AI gains forward and just see how big it's ahead to become?

> every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion

Where is this disruption? The longer we go, the more people report that the supposed net-gain of easily 100s of percents is not visible.

I do strongly believe "It's just a tool" - A powerful one, but not one like the invention of the steam machine.

Tell me you weren't around during the dot com boom without etc, etc.

The benefit is neither here nor there - it's whether the borrowed money will ever be repaid on the lenders' terms.

I don't doubt that AI has benefits, but I do doubt that the major AI providers will be able to make back their investments. They've spent trillions of dollars, and yet they've barely created a moat. We're seeing open weight models being released that are only months behind them, that can run for way cheaper. This makes the future of OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly look rather bleak.

A simple analogy: If you have kids, you love them and want to give them whatever makes them happy. But on the other hand, you run a household, you pay for bills, healthcare, heating, education, and heavy overhead. You must keep things under control. You don't hand a blank check to an immature child who doesn't even know how to manage that money yet, right? So, even if your child wants to push forward at an extraordinary pace, you have to keep a level head, manage spending, and ensure everything doesn't end in ruin.

That’s the point: making growth sustainable over time.

> How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit

The internet and railroads were highly beneficial, still crashed the economy.

I know many companies are spending quite a bit of money, I don’t know if it bears out that the increased spend has resulted in increased profits, even if there has been some increase in productivity. I think this is the tough situation many orgs are facing right now, drastic adoption without material economic gains.

I use AI a lot but my final output isn’t drastically different

Writing a lot of code doesn’t mean much when the moat was never “writing a lot of code”

Stop projecting.

It’s just coding. It’s not every technical profession at all.

disruption != benefit.

I was called quite disruptive in class when I was young. I'm sure my teachers never meant it as a compliment.

How can people not trust in anecdotes and vibes while avoiding studies, do you mean?

Isn't that the point here? That everyone thinks massive disruption is happening and everyone is 100xing their productivity, but it's not actually showing up in the numbers anywhere?

> How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit

Because what many of us are seeing is meaningless “productivity” improvements.

If at the end of the day you don’t have more users paying for your product or the same users and paying more, then what’s the point of being more productive?

People aren't doubting the benefit.

Lenders are doubting their return. People's benefits have nothing to do with it. The benefits would go in a minute, if doing so yielded a better return.

People are being a little unfair to you here, I think. I think there no chance of AI not being by far the biggest technological shift in our lifetimes. BUT that doesn’t mean any of the current companies leading the charge have sustainable business models, or that the current financing around it makes sense. Other commenters have pointed out both the railroads and dot-com boom as analogies, which holds up well. Generative AI is here to stay, but that in no way means that Anthropic and OpenAI are

The Internet was hugely disruptive. The dot-com bubble burst and tech stocks flatlined for years afterward.