I'll push back against most of the points in your comment.
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.
This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the
aggressive marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold.
> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy.
> The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious
They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to
some productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to
mass burnout.
> The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world
Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one.
> I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but
this clearly won't hold. In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in
correctness) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.