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Comment by gpt5 | Hacker News Reader

How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit when they are seeing in front of their eyes every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion in the last year. Just ask basically any software engineer how much their profession has changed over the last 12 months

Obviously there is risk, but can't we really extrapolate the AI gains forward and just see how big it's ahead to become?

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> every technical profession getting disrupted to oblivion

Where is this disruption? The longer we go, the more people report that the supposed net-gain of easily 100s of percents is not visible.

I do strongly believe "It's just a tool" - A powerful one, but not one like the invention of the steam machine.

All I see is a flattening of the technical curve. Which is great, but the number of people who want to download an app is still the same. So all you have is 100,000 apps with no users instead of 10,000 apps with no users

You increased the amount of code written by 10x but unless there’s a 10x increase in demand, its worth nothing

https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html

Actually, I think that the analogy with the steam engine is a very good one.

Prior to the steam engine, almost all energy used by the human civilization has been generated by human and/or animal muscles. Yes, there have been other (water/wind mills, sailing boats), but the application of those has been rather limited to very specific tasks and/or locations.

Prior to current AI, almost all 'mental' work has been done by human minds. There have been some intrusion by calculators/computer systems, but their applicability has been rather limited. AI promises to do to mental labour what steam engine (and later power tools) did for manual labour. (Including the atrophy of muscle/mind ...)

Regarding 'It's just a tool': How much emphasis do you put on 'just'? Starting to use a new tool (especially if it is a powerful one) has many downstream consequences, and 'how' the tool is used (not only by an individual, but as a society as a whole) matters a lot.

I don't doubt that AI has benefits, but I do doubt that the major AI providers will be able to make back their investments. They've spent trillions of dollars, and yet they've barely created a moat. We're seeing open weight models being released that are only months behind them, that can run for way cheaper. This makes the future of OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly look rather bleak.

Tell me you weren't around during the dot com boom without etc, etc.

The benefit is neither here nor there - it's whether the borrowed money will ever be repaid on the lenders' terms.

> How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit

The internet and railroads were highly beneficial, still crashed the economy.

A simple analogy: If you have kids, you love them and want to give them whatever makes them happy. But on the other hand, you run a household, you pay for bills, healthcare, heating, education, and heavy overhead. You must keep things under control. You don't hand a blank check to an immature child who doesn't even know how to manage that money yet, right? So, even if your child wants to push forward at an extraordinary pace, you have to keep a level head, manage spending, and ensure everything doesn't end in ruin.

That’s the point: making growth sustainable over time.

People are being a little unfair to you here, I think. I think there no chance of AI not being by far the biggest technological shift in our lifetimes. BUT that doesn’t mean any of the current companies leading the charge have sustainable business models, or that the current financing around it makes sense. Other commenters have pointed out both the railroads and dot-com boom as analogies, which holds up well. Generative AI is here to stay, but that in no way means that Anthropic and OpenAI are

People aren't doubting the benefit.

Lenders are doubting their return. People's benefits have nothing to do with it. The benefits would go in a minute, if doing so yielded a better return.

I know many companies are spending quite a bit of money, I don’t know if it bears out that the increased spend has resulted in increased profits, even if there has been some increase in productivity. I think this is the tough situation many orgs are facing right now, drastic adoption without material economic gains.

Not seeing any significant disruption showing up in revenue etc from inside the industry, there’s growing skepticism about these tools and the claims made for them. They can be useful but are not world changing or actually replacing jobs.

We’ll see how they develop but so far they are not capable of operating independently.

How can people not trust in anecdotes and vibes while avoiding studies, do you mean?

Isn't that the point here? That everyone thinks massive disruption is happening and everyone is 100xing their productivity, but it's not actually showing up in the numbers anywhere?

I use AI a lot but my final output isn’t drastically different

Writing a lot of code doesn’t mean much when the moat was never “writing a lot of code”

disruption != benefit.

I was called quite disruptive in class when I was young. I'm sure my teachers never meant it as a compliment.

> How can people in Hacker News still doubt AI's benefit

Because what many of us are seeing is meaningless “productivity” improvements.

If at the end of the day you don’t have more users paying for your product or the same users and paying more, then what’s the point of being more productive?

Stop projecting.

It’s just coding. It’s not every technical profession at all.

The Internet was hugely disruptive. The dot-com bubble burst and tech stocks flatlined for years afterward.

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