Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026.
> nearly 100% of code would be written with AI in 2026
I feel like this is kind of a meaningless metric. Or at least, it's very difficult to measure. There's a spectrum of "let AI write the code" from "don't ever even look at the code produced" to "carefully review all the output and have AI iterate on it".
Also, it seems possible as time goes on people will _stop_ using AI to write code as much, or at least shift more to the right side of that spectrum, as we start to discover all kinds of problems caused by AI-authored code with little to no human oversight.
It's hard to see as anything but a button anyone with enough money can press and suddenly replace the people that annoy them (first digitally then likely, into flesh).
If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how powerful their AI will be, they could easily brag about ending cancer, curing aging, or solving climate change. They're doing a bit of that, but also warning it might get out of control and kill us all. They're getting legislators riled up about things like limiting data centers.
People saying this aren't just company CEOs. It's researchers who've been studying AI alignment for decades, writing peer reviewed papers and doing experiments. It's people like Geoffrey Hinton, who basically invented deep learning and quit his high-paying job at Google so he could talk freely about how dangerous this is.
This idea that it's a marketing stunt is a giant pile of cope, because people don't want to believe that humanity could possibly be this stupid.
They're marketing AI to investors, not to end-user plebs.
This is a pump-and-dump scheme.
"Last chance to jump on the AI train, invest into your future robot overlord or be turned into biodiesel for datacenters in the future."
Also, you can probably make a shitton of money as an out-of-control-AI-investor while the world is in the process of being destroyed.
I agree that short-term greed is driving investment, but it would drive just as much investment if AI companies were not warning of apocalypse. Probably it would drive even more, because there'd be less risk of regulatory interference, and more future profit to discount into the present.
So why are they making those warnings? It doesn't benefit them. The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
Because "we built a chatbot that can generate technical debt" is not a good proposition for investors. "Invest into our AI before it takes over the world and fires all knowledge workers" is.
> The simplest explanation is that this stuff actually is dangerous, and people who know that are worried.
LMAO. Please.
I would be surprised if there were any top company where it's above 5%.
The slop Claude generates isn't going anywhere near production without being edited by hand.
In reality it's extremely rare that AI generated code isn't combed through line-by-line and refactored.
(For real software, that is, not VC scams like OpenClaw or litellm or whatever.)
HN is the only place I have heard it seriously suggested that anything like this is happening or likely to happen. We certainly get a lot of cheerleading here, my guess is that in the trenches the fraction is way lower.
It makes more sense if one breaks that "everyone" into subgroups. A good first-pass split would be "investors" versus "everyone else."
From their perspective: Rich Investor Alice rushing over with bags of money because of FOMO >>> Random Person Bob suffers anxiety reading the news.
One can hone it a bit more by thinking about how it helps them gain access to politicians, media that's always willing to spread their quotes, and even just getting CEO Carol's name out there.
It seems more reasonable to me to think that they know it's bullshit and it's just marketing. Not necessarily marketing to end users as much as investors. It's very hard to take "AGI in 3 years" seriously.