Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment
whatwelo.st
whatwelo.st
You have to look more deeply into the scheme. It appears that they sell the SaaS, but what they are actually selling is the selling/referral system itself which makes it exactly a pyramid scheme.
Just like the tupperware was never the money-maker, is the referral system.
In the author’s example, Replit has a very high chance of making a profit on those folks’ desperation.
It’s not exactly an MLM. But the predatory mechanism is close. Loan sharking might be a more exact analog for the financial bit, but the social-media marketing strikes closer to MLMs.
There was actually gold in the California hills. Nobody is starting a business the way the Replit ads seems to be pitching.
This one’s a simple pump and dump before the attorneys general get wiser.
Keep in mind the vast majority of gold miners found no gold.
Source? We would do panhandling trips as Boy Scouts in the California hills. On each outing at least someone found gold. Which means every one of us would have eventually found some given a few days.
Most panhandlers didn’t break even. But I’m challenging even that threshold for Replit. I’m guessing most of their vibe-coded businesses never make a penny of revenue.
Every scam plays to people's hopes and dreams. As do most legitimate opportunities.
Not trying to be overly cynical, but isn't that just marketing?
A lot of marketing just getting people to picture a better future version of their life and then making them think that your product will get them there. They're not actually buying the product for the product, they're buying it to try to get that imaginary future. I don't really see how Repilit ad telling people they can built the app of their dreams is very different than a gym ad telling people that they can get ripped or something like The Container Store showing someone with a messy house magically getting organized and cleaned.
I'm not saying that any of those examples are particularly good or moral, but I don't get how what Repilit is doing is any different than just standard marketing tactics we see every time we watch a block of ads.
I guess im wondering where is the line that makes this evil but my made up frying pan ad just a harmless exageration.
"you can cook better food" and "you can drastically improve your economic situation" are two very different promises (or implications) that should be held to very different standards.
> I don't like LLMs because:
>
> [ ] They steal from artists
> [ ] They're destroying the planet
> etc
That’s what gets my upvote, anyway.
Replit (formerly repl.it) has been around for a decade as an online IDE / runtime, productized from work from 2009 for editing environments on udemy and co.
But like many companies they pivoted their marketing schtick to AI because that's where the money is. Cursor and Zed are editors, but because they capitalize on the AI hype and investor money they're "worth" tens of billions.
I mean Zed is cool and all because they dared to start a new editor from scratch with performance in mind but that in itself isn't tens of billions.
When my neighbour decided to pack it all in, he paid me 50 quid to pull his car into my workshop and take all the branding vinyl-cut off. Less than an hour for me, he'd been at it for days.
If all you saw means that's all there is then that itself is incorrect, why? People are building better solutions and you just havent seen them yet.
I know so because I am building one, you didn't know about it, if you are interested in seeing a sample of what it produces, the architecture etc, though not perfect but it should cause you to rethink because some of us are building the solutions to the problem you saw, you just didn't know it yet.
It's who has funding support around them that you hear of and see often.
Anyone can vibe code. I’m doing it right now as well. The difference then is who is doing it and why are they doing it. That is what will lead to different outcomes.
It doesn't fucking matter to the success of a business.
I spent much of my early career unfucking large codebases that had been thrown together by sysadmins or teenagers or HTML guys who knew a bit of Perl on which an enterprising person had built very, very successful businesses. The software got fixed by pros long after profitability when it started to matter.
There are very few businesses where the quality of the software makes any real difference. What matters is execution, marketing, commercialization, but programmers see every business problem as a technical problem requiring technical excellence, because they're gigantic hammers.
Take this article for example
https://ericwbailey.website/published/modern-health-framewor...
Someone in a genuine health crisis seeking help but can't receive it could have deadly consequences. It doesn't matter to the business, but it does matter to people. Life is messy and complex, and if our software doesn't work correctly it does add to the suffering of others. Maybe it pushes some people past the point of no return. There are consequences to what we do, good or bad.
This is what I fear most about the rise of vibe coding. Businesses profit, people get hurt, and the incentives are all wrong.
I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads.
At this point I automatically dismiss writing like this, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Their distaste for the character and general vibes of the AI industry trap them in blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now.
I am all for well-researched criticisms of these companies and their claims, but please start at the facts and use them to derive your conclusions, rather than the other way around.
>> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses
I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration.
Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.
1. Benchmark performance of LLM's and AI models did not fully represent skill in real-world domains
2. Most jobs span far more requirements than their specific job descriptions, many of which lie, even in simple jobs, in the realm of highly adaptive, context rich multi-modal information processing that most humans do still better than AI
However, there is nothing fundamental that prevents LLM's from scaling and improving, aided by better scaffolding, to the point of replacing many white-collar jobs, especially ones which have limited, specific requirements and output parameters. This is an enormous chunk of the white collar work force, and displacement is already happening in limited sections, and will surely continue as AI capabilities diffuse.
It seems however deeply entrenched in many people's identity to deny this fact, because to accept it requires accepting that many of the essential claims of AI CEO's are somewhat true to a degree, and that LLM's are a genuinely useful technology.
It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.
No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested.
Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.
> we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months.
Oddly I seem to interpret that in the opposite manner that you do. The output became noticeably more cohesive sometime around the new year although it certainly still has plenty of shortcomings.
I’m not predicting it will be fine. I’m saying we have enough evidence to cast the opposite prediction, made on specific timescales in the past, as BS.
If I understand you correctly you are saying, CEOs predicted X and they were wrong. Now CEOs are predicting Y, and since they were wrong about X you predict they are also wrong about Y.
But Y's success seems independent of other people's ability to predict X?
Which means that they were lying.
Or they were wrong. But best to assume malice given their incentives. (No, that certain saying is just stupid.)
We’ve heard Claude is good enough now that you no longer need SE and founders will just do their coding for a year already. It hasn’t happened. And guess who develops CC and other Anthropic/OpenAI products?
I would also have wished for some substantiation for how this and that were a lie.
As it stands though it’s an argument against multi-level marketing. And it really doesn’t hold up that your everyman will be able to make money off of vibe coded apps. Maybe build their own very personal software gadget? Yeah, but there’s no money in that.
The Reasoned Case Against AI Disruptors does not need to be covered in such a piece.
The thing is... many prominent figures, both individuals and companies, in the AI industry just lend themselves to being hateable.
Sam Altman personally completely fucked up the RAM market with his double dealing. Every single one of us felt the consequences of that and we will feel it for years to come. And it is why I will call for his arrest, speedy trial and imprisonment every time I have the misfortune of reading his name. I wish to see this person suffer from the bottom of my heart.
Elon Musk, well, there are so, so many valid reasons to hate him. Regarding AI itself, the mechahitler incident and the "undress her in a bikini" CSAM generator are the worst issues. Regarding him as a person, the "pedo diver" incident, the shady stuff surrounding virtually all of his children's mothers, the complete clusterfuck around his daughter, DOGE, the right-arm salute his fanbase keeps denying being a nazi salute, him stoking racial riots in the UK twice, his constant overpromising in all of his ventures (some of which would normally fall under "investor defrauding" claims if there were a functioning legal and regulatory world), the trashcontainer on wheels...
Google has no (notable) individual persons to raise the pitchforks against, but as a company, they severely degraded the quality of their "ordinary" search and have gone to steal clicks and thus money from creators by distilling their work into the AI results box at the top of every search.
Microsoft keeps shoveling AI down everyone's throats no matter if we want it.
Anthropic has literally ripped books apart to scan them for Claude. Google, back when they created the dataset for Google Books, at least didn't destroy the books. Destroying books at that scale is a sacrilege.
Every single AI company is guilty of using questionably sourced materials - either outright stolen or human input based on exploitation.
And on top of that, it's not just RAM that has gotten expensive. The entire rest of the economy - both individuals and companies of all sizes - are priced out of personal and even cloud compute, as the blown-up AI giants scoop up everything they can and the scraps and aged hardware that's available gets fought over by everyone else.
> blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now.
It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.
RAM prices were going to go up no matter what given the demand for AI. To so strongly want someone to suffer for fulfilling his fiduciary responsibility to the company he runs seems a bit disproportionate.
> It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.
I honestly can't take your claims that AI is a huge artificial bubble seriously when you make it very clear how much you want it to be a bubble. The mark of a mature mind is being able to admit that people you personally dislike actually may be right about a few things.
That these people whom you hate so much are also cartoon villains who have taken the entire world economy for a ride is a very satisfying narrative because it implies a future point when all of their crimes will be revealed and they will be held accountable. It is however not a realistic thing to hope for. This is all because of one very real but hard to admit reality: AI is a very useful technology and is worth the billions of dollars that are being paid for it. To deny this reality at this point, when AI models have already proven unsolved Erdos problems and are driving such huge demand on both the consumer and enterprise side, is unreasonable, and consequentially smart people who would otherwise take your points seriously are going to see right through your claims as just being emotional self-soothing.
Companies are a part of society. Destroying its foundations in the name of "fiduciary responsibility" is everything but that - it prioritizes short term profits over long term survivability.
It would annoy me more if those AI figureheads were not such hateful people.
That is simply not true. It can be better or it can be worse - depends on who directed it.
I understand where the point comes from, but someone who has coded and architected a lot of applications for many years, does get the good side. But a user who see code as an alien language - they are ultimately going to get the bad side of it.
There was a theory floated around by an youtuber (and a tech geek), on how to vibe code better - and how to let agents run the show. I tried, more than once - it failed badly. Not failed at the output or the UI - failed at writing good and well architected code.
> What happens when things go wrong
- this is the most important question - can the human step in?
For me the answer is a unequivocal yes. I may not be able to fix it in 10 minutes, but I know I will fix it in 10 hours or 100 hours - whatever it takes. But when a user who "can't read code" comes in - and asks me to fix their problem, it is going to cost them a lot more than their total subsidized vibe coding tool cost. They're going to be like - the app cost me 100-200$ to vibe-build, but the dev is going to charge me 5-10x for a 2 line fix.
For some the decision will be like - better buy a new phone than repairing the old one, for others - they can't replace things easily.
What used to take 1.5 years to build 10 years ago, and 6-9 months to build 5 years ago, takes 1.5 months or faster to build today (if it is done with the same rigor).
> The GDPR example
How is it different from having a human dev team hired? The CEOs or founders are responsible - they can't go and say "that dev did the wrong thing, fine them" - will you work for such a person?
> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie
It already is displacing, unfortunately. It has been taking apart both jobs and businesses - one role at a time - within 6 months of AI coming out. Some are experiencing it now, some have experienced it earlier, some will experience it later.
For example - a good tech guy in finance domain and having good domain knowledge - gets fired. After a while, he will end up competing for jobs in the finance domain - because he needs to survive. The domino effect will be seen. And hope it does not become a race to the bottom.
And new roles are likely to come up and stabilize - but the bar will be high and you will need AI all the time. Otherwise you will be seen like ploughing the farm by hand instead of using a tractor.
Of course it's all within legal limits (or at least pre-legal, as the AI people call it[0]), but it smells like MLM. They'll stretch it as far as they can until there is push-back.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revsw...
Is all non-vibe-coded software "good"? Are so-called real companies (with professional software development and IT staff) impervious to these threats?
> Also, would the person who developed the app know that, under legislation like GDPR, they can be financially liable for data breaches? Because they would be! And the whole point of the financial penalty system (at least, with respect to GDPR) is to be dissuasive — to act as a deterrent to other people who would be cavalier with other people’s data.
> I can very easily imagine a national data protection authority — like the UK’s ICO — giving someone a massive, massive fine in order to dissuade other people from deploying their own AI-generated, unvetted slop code.
Thousands of companies have been hit with GDPR fines, including some of the biggest companies in the world. Why the apparent assumption that vibe-coders are any more cavalier about people's data than companies that in many cases exist solely to profit from it?
I think you can make a legitimate argument that companies selling vibe coding dreams to laypeople are selling something generally unrealistic but the tone of this person's article seems like gatekeeper bait. It feels like he just doesn't like the idea that non-engineers might try to use tools (oversold or not) that allow them to do things he thinks non-engineers shouldn't do.
It's very much a "keep out", "stay in your lane" vibe.
Problem found. NEXT!