If you don’t go fast you deprive your consumers of your product. It’s not clear why that tradeoff is good?
There was a recent petition signed by all major AI labs to slow down AI development. Would this author or you guys agree it’s a good thing?
There was a recent petition signed by all major AI labs to slow down AI development. Would this author or you guys agree it’s a good thing?
its now super clear that AI is a step improvement in coding, mathematics and other domains. the push for AI has worked out in hindsight.
there will always be people who will parrot the METR study and claim productivity didn't increase but its best to ignore them.
The AI push is going to damage our societies for a long time
Your concern seems to be profitability of OpenAI but that’s easily falsifiable. I’m not saying it’s 100% but I’m saying if they do turn out profitable, your concern wouldn’t have been valid.
FWIW my concerns aren't only for OpenAI, it's just the poster-child of the AI bubble. SpaceX AI strategy and investment is a complete joke (the S-1 they filled is an insult to a reader's intelligence). Anthropic seems to have been more cautious but has the same fundamental economic problems. Nobody in that whole industry has a moat, the top AI vendors are way too exposed to Chinese/open-weights labs. The datacenters debt investment vehicles (SPVs) look extremely shady and made to obfuscate the underlying assets. The HBM manufacturers seem to be going through one of the most violent boom-burst cycle ever. Oracle is... doing Oracle things, I would be shocked if that company is still alive in its current form in 5y. And so on
> It's a capital misallocation problem, a number problem, that has nothing to do with subjective feelings regarding LLMs
Now you say
> I would still see the technology as anti-human and would still see the concept of an agentic economy as deeply unserious, wasteful, and risky. Not exactly sure what your point is though.
You can see how someone might be confused with this. Is it your subjective feeling? Or objective economics? I’m not interested in your subjective feelings on AI.
On objective economics: your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful.
> your concern would be invalid if the AI companies overall make profit. If they don’t, then you would have been right on the point of being careful.
No, that’s fallacious reasoning. If the AI vendors are currently profitable that doesn’t mean the concerns regarding their unsustainability is invalid, but that changes the calculus depending on the details. They could be profitable right now on paper and still be economically not viable. The core problem is that the amount of money allocated to the AI bet is completely disproportionate compared to the actual economical value of the technology. That’s where the imbalance is. The exact reasons for the imbalance can change over time, but there would still be a misallocation. The companies would need to be profitable, and/or their expenditures would need to pay off, and the overall demand needs to grow exponentially, and they need to be protected from Chinese competitive pressure, etc.
I still don’t understand your overall point
Essentially you have made your concern utterly unfalsifiable - however the material world situation pans out in AI, your concern would be validated. There's a lot of emotion in all this and its a good idea for you to separate it out from your real objective concerns.
If you do go fast and don't deprive your customers of your product but the product breaks and doesn't deliver its intended value, is that a better tradeoff?
Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.
Why? Rushing.
Its not a good tradeoff if it breaks it enough that people move off your product, I obviously concede that.
Ultimately a firm should be incentivised to improve their long term profits after accounting for externalities to the world. Fast or slow is an implementation detail.
>Re: AI development, I'd say it's foolish to slow down research, but worthwhile for rollouts to the market. The time that should have been used for preparing people/businesses was wasted on fearmongering campaigns. Now we have a fire hose of slop that's out of control.
Its not clear that your subjective view of slop is reason enough for the world to slow down on AI rollout and I'm glad I don't live in a world that doesn't necessitate slowing down due to whims and fancies of a few people's subjective aesthetic takes.
Ironically for me, all the companies _do_ want to slow down their pace for reasons related to actual safety. I think you would appreciate the cause and the foresight (if any).
This is a misunderstanding of what I'm talking about. It's not about "slop" in and of itself, it's about what reality that slop inevitably creates. There's a lot of focus on the output ("ermagherd you wrote this with AI"), but very little on the ripple effects/second-order effects (people spinning up cults, ending marriages, and gambling away their money [1]). That's not just cute "look at the freaks" stuff, that's a serious, civilizational-level problem 1-2 decades out.
You're right that my subjective opinion means dick-all beyond being that of an experienced, educated user of this stuff. But I'd at least hope that people take heed of what I'm saying and start to push back when it's objectively clear that decisions are closer on the spectrum to disaster than they are to benign mediocrity.
Thank you for sharing that link, this is exactly what I'd hope to see happening behind the scenes.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chat...