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Comment by bandrami | Hacker News Reader

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce.

The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

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>the market always finds a way

That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be.

If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate analysis. Something that is easily generated by an LLM obviously has low value and there is no moat.

Agentic coding is a bit different, particularly if a great deal of effort and intelligence goes into it, but that's a quite different thing than just cranking out slop apps.

Yeah there is no doubt that some companies are going to radically change their operations because of agentic coding in particular. But the revolution that is being promised, and the investment that has gone along with it, is going to smash against some pretty nasty shoals of reality sooner rather than later

Some are going to radically change their operations, but we have yet to actually see if the ROI on that comes through for them. It will be an interesting thing to watch.

Fair point. My implication (though I completely failed to indicate it lol) is that for some companies it will be a huge, mostly positive change I imagine. But it won’t be the majority of the companies trying to make that happen right now that’s for sure. Unless we want to consider every company deploying a chat bot for user support I guess…though I wouldn’t exactly say that is the massive leap in technology AI is promising

I've thought the 3D-printing analogy is pretty apt for about a year now. It had a lot of promise at first but it never quite has the impact people thought it would. There are still 3D printers for sale, and people still prototype with them, but nobody's printing out a dustpan when they need one.

Um, have you heard about the drone warfare in Ukraine?

There is a lot more then 3d printing going into that.

Yes, but would they have been able to develop the production capacity for resistance without it?

Certainly seems like the advantages of 3D printing came in clutch exactly when they were needed.

I think you’re missing the thrust of my comment and the responses. Nobody is saying 3-D printers are worthless, but if you remember what it was like when they were first emerging into the mainstream, you would think we would all have one in our living rooms by now just spitting out everything we need constantly. We would all be building our own furniture and repairing every niche thing in our house with them. We’d all be on some magical network sharing files with each other. We’d have a massive surge in printed guns.

Everything was theorized and it all was a variation of “nothing will be the same for anyone ever again,” not “some specific areas will be really different.”

Not quite. Ultimately the lions-share of income of model producer's is coming from firms.

Firms are only going to pay out to model producers if they are getting more in excess of the cost of financing projects over time. If a firm does not see this happen, they reduce their spend on tokens. Simple.

Its a whole lot more nuanced than some shitty game theory.

“Firms are only making perfectly rational decisions that result in meaningful real outcomes” - not my experience.

Firms waste literally billions on some bullshit that gets them nothing.

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