> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.

>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.

> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.

It's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.

I get it, you think that LLMs are going to fulfill all the threats that it's proponents have been giving us. That's yet to be seen.

The irony of the dotcom crash is that a lot of 'dark fiber' service started rolling out decades later. Fiber that was laid during the dotcom era.

There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.