Do you think Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are all wrong saying that we’re in a bubble? Do they “lack imagination?”
Also? What do I need imagination for, isn’t that what AI does now?
Even beyond that, the Soviet Union had just collapsed. The US had a balanced budget and 10X less debt. Globalization was just getting started. China was nothing compared to what it was today. It was the absolute most stable time of my life. Basically the opposite of 2025.
"This time things are different because AI blah blah blah".
When you boil it down, all bubbles are based around the idea of using your imagination to image how "this time it is different".
The people who don't think this is a bubble are not seeing that their imagination is a bug and not a feature here.
Currently, investment into AI exceeds the dot-com bubble by a factor of 17. Even in the dot-com era, the early internet was already changing media and commerce in fundamental ways. November is the three-year anniversary of ChatGPT. How much economic value are they actually creating? How many people are purchasing AI-generated goods? How much are people paying for AI-provided services? The value created here would have to exceed what the internet was generating in 2000 by a factor of 17 (which seems excessive to me) to even reach parity with the dot-com bubble.
"But think where it'll be in 5 years"—sure, and let's extrapolate that based on where it is now compared to where it was 3 years ago. New models present diminishing returns. 3.5 was groudbreaking; 4 was a big step forward; 5 is incremental. I won't deny that LLMs are useful, and they are certainly much more productized now than they were 3 years ago. But the magnitude of our collective investment in AI requires that a huge watershed moment be just around the corner, and that makes no sense. The watershed moment was 3 years ago. The first LLMs created a huge amount of potential. Now we're realizing those gains, and we're seeing some real value, but things are also tapering off.
Surely we will have another big breakthrough some day—a further era of AI which brings us closer to something like AGI—but there's just no reason to assume AGI will crop up in 2027, and nothing less that that can produce the ROI that such enormous valuations will eventually, inexorably, demand.
He figured there was a credit bubble like that around the time of the dot com bubble and now but the calculation if purely based on interest rates and the money can go into any assets - property, stocks, crypto etc. It's not AI specific.
He explains it here https://youtu.be/uz2EqmqNNlE
The Wicksell spread seems to have come from Wicksell's proposed 'natural rate of interest' detailed in his 1898 book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Wicksell#Interest_and_Pri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gold_rus
Not to mention thousands of native inhabitants getting killed or enslaved:
I agree that AI is overhyped but so was the early web. It was projected to do a lot of things ”soon”, but was not really doing that much 4 years in. I don’t think the newspapers or commerce were really worried about it. The transformation of the business landscape took hold after the crash.
Its precisely why these companies are investing so much, robots combined with AI will be creating that value.
Will they? Within what timeframe? Because a bubble economy can't be told to "just hang on a few more years" forever. LLMs are normal technology; they will not suddenly become something they are not. There's no indication that general intelligence is right on the horizon.
> There's no indication that general intelligence is right on the horizon.
You dont need general intelligence for all the tasks, if a robot can do some of those tasks with limited intelligence cheaper than a humnan, that is all corporations care about.
Probably a lot. I remember my mom recently showing me an AI-generated book she bought. And pretty much immediately refunded it. Not because it was AI, but because the content was trash.
The bet is not that there will be this one seminal moment of AGI where all the investment will make sense. The bet is that it has already showed up if you look for specific things and will continue to do so. I wouldn't bet against the idea that LLMs will introduce itself to all jobs, one at a time. Reddit moderators, for example, will meet AGI (as far as they know, their entire world being moderating) sooner than say, I don't know, a Radiologist.
The universe of people getting paid to make CRUD apps is over. Many here will be introduced to AGI faster and sooner. Then it could be phone customer support representatives. It could show up for the face-to-face worker who is now replaced by a screen that can talk to customers (which already arrived yesterday, it's here). It'll appear erratic and not cohesive, unless you zoom out and see the contagion.
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Rome needed to recognize that the Barbarian hordes had arrived. Pay attention to all the places the invasion has landed. You can pretend like the Vandals are not in your town for a little bit, sure, but eventually they will be knocking on many doors (most likely all doors). We're in a time period of RADICAL transformation. There is no half-assing this conviction. Practicality will not serve us here.
You're talking about TAs. I know TAs. Their jobs have not disappeared. They are not using AI to grade papers.
> Are you really going to hire that developer because you need extra manpower to stand up test coverage?
Yes. Unsupervised AI agents cannot currently replace developers. "Oh we'll get someone to supervise it"—yes, that person's job title is "developer" and they will be doing largely the same job they'd have done 5 years ago.
> The universe of people getting paid to make CRUD apps is over.
Tell that to all the people who get paid to make CRUD apps. Frankly, Airtable has done more to disrupt CRUD apps than AI ever did.
> Rome needed to recognize that the Barbarian hordes had arrived.
IDK what to tell you. All these jobs are still around. You're just fantasizing.
Not all developer jobs will disappear, but there will most certainly be fewer available. Any new grad can tell you how hard it is to find a software engineering job nowadays.
Certainly we cannot just let an AI spin and build software unattended. But what used to take days can now be done in minutes.
That is exactly what you need in order to make AI useful. Even a baby needs to cry to signal its needs to parents, which are like ASI to it. AI working on a task lacks in 3 domains: start, middle and finish.
AI cannot create its own needs, they belong to the context where it is used. After we set AI to work, it cannot predict the outcomes of its actions unless they pass through your context and return as feedback. In the end, all benefits accumulate in the same context. Not to mention costs and risks - they belong to the context.
The AI is a generalist, context is exactly what it lacks. And context is distributed across people, teams, companies. Context is non-fungible. You can't eat so I get satiated. Context is what drives AI. And testing is the core contextual activity when using AI.
true for every marketing ever