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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Do you use it or is this speculation?

The AI tooling I used 12-24 months ago if frozen in time, monetized correctly is probably 100x the capability of what software could do before (And software was already eating the world long before AI). The bull case is that we just invented the 21st century equivalent of the printing press or electricity. And that website is the 19th century equivalent of someone criticizing electricity as a concept because it would be expensive to build power lines.

If anything it's a miracle that the US economy is so efficient that we can just skip all the small talk and bullshit and build out the infrastructure to support AI immediately.

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Just to help me out a little; you're saying "printing press and electricity"

But there were printing presses before movable type, and movable type specifically allowed creation of inexpensive books and newspapers. The printing press itself wasn't all that useful alone.

Electricity (in the form of shocking fish) was used by people thousands of years ago and Volta was fiddling with electricity to make frog legs dance in the 1800s; electricity as an industrial property required a bunch of knowledge and material science to make ... lights and motors. Electricity by itself isn't all that wonderful; a flash in the pan so to speak.

So -- what "electric light" or "movable type" is the product of LLMs? I'm sure there are, but ELI5...

I can think of "Summarize this thing for me" and "Elaborate on this half baked idea" -- and honestly "summarize this for me" is actually quite useful. But I'm not sure it is "electric lights / electric appliances" or "indoor plumbing" degree of revolutionary.

That’s all great but that isn’t a bull case for getting actual money out of it at the levels needed to justify the spending. Our entire stock market (everyone’s retirement) is based on this right now. Not all amazing inventions enrich everyone involved. Sometimes it’s just pgp or the dishwasher. It’s interesting you mention electricity, because that’s what AI feels like to me. It will be important and vital, but you don’t care where it comes from, you just care if it works and nobody really makes a killing from a commodity like electricity. The valuation of these companies is based on AI being something completely different from what it will be because of hysteria. There is no difference between this and the GME meme stocks, it simply got bigger and has now swallowed the whole economy.

> If anything it's a miracle that the US economy is so efficient that we can just skip all the small talk and bullshit and build out the infrastructure to support AI immediately.

This is a good take. But then it makes you think - China can build a data center cheaper. Their non-chip cost is likely much smaller. So if there is a down-cycle in chip and memory prices and/or the technology-progress slows, whoever can build horizontal capacity has the advantage.

We have been pushing to the frontier very fast. But there will be a lot of efficiencies found. The agentic use-case has some room to run even if models stay static ie inference needs continue to grow. This puts pressure on the edge that US has of pushing frontier at higher costs. This is likely the AI bear scenario.

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