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Comment by tyleo | Hacker News Reader

I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.

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I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.

AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React.

AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case.

Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business.

Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?

Another nuance: his position is that real economic value hasn't been demonstrated, and that due to how LLMs work, it cannot really be measured. Meaning the AI crowd actual believes are based on vibes and doesn't seem to match reality

(also, of course, that there is a massive, insane misallocation of resources to the AI sector compared to the level of demand)

His position is also that it is useless. It is pretty consistent and openly stated.

That's just his own personal belief about the technology, the only relevant part of this is that he doesn't believe there will be enough demand to match the level of expanses. It doesn't matter if AI is useful or not for his arguments. Does the demand exist or is it manufactured by hyperscalers or other actors? Who cares about his take on the future of software

I have both read his blog and listened to his podcasts. Not all of it (the articles are basically books), but enough to understand his positions. The "ai is mostly useless" is very much his position, he will say it again and again and again.

This part:

> I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.

Is not true. I can agree with one of his positions and disagree with the other, but it really is fair to say he repeatedly and confidently states that ai is useless.

I think you wanted to respond to another comment? What you’re quoting isnt my words

Can you provide a link to where he has said that? I’m not an expert on Ed but I don’t recall ever reading him say that it is functionally useless, he doesn’t comment on its function, only the business, whether it has functional use is immaterial unless that generates value for the companies spending obscene money on hosting. The companies implementing AI as consumers can get a huge amount of value from it without a single cent going to any of the big labs, that’s part of why investment in AI infrastructure is so misplaced.

He often says in passing that he doesn't see value in LLMs outside of generating bad software and can help sometimes with search. But it's not really part of the AI bubble thesis itself IMHO, just him adding his personal commentary in interviews

That was the main thesis of his earlier writing. He has since acknowledged that AI is useful in a few use cases so has switched to concentrating on the much more plausible economic thesis.

It pops up fairly frequently on his better offline podcast. If you pick last or second last episode it will be there somewhere. If you pick something few months ago before he had all the financial data he is on a out them now, there is a lot more of it.

But, I am not going to relisten to it now. The episodes are to large extend stream of numbers (kind of like his writing) and I am not in mood for that.

If you like his writing, chances are you will like the podcast btw.

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