The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
It is in fact normal for new technologies to be adopted, and for there to be no cycle where the technology just disappears. There was no Internet winter or railroad winter, not in the same way there was an AI winter where AI just went away.
Those technologies had valuation bubbles but the technologies themselves stuck around and changed the world beyond recognition. If someone sees the rate of change and thinks it'll stop for...some reason, then they're the ones who believe things are different this time.
I 100% agree that "AI" is not going anywhere as long as humans are here (I wouldn't be building a company in the space otherwise).
I'm challenging this specific absolute certainty that "a swarm of agents building code like ants" will be living in eternal summer. This paradigm might be completely different just 6 months from now, from all we know!
In fact there's almost nothing similar between my day to day life and the day to day life even of my grandfather, to say nothing of the Irish peasantry I came from 500 years ago, say. The number of correct everything-is-differences per year seems to be going up, not down.
Smartphones, internet, PCs, computers, semiconductors, relativity, antibiotics, telegraph, printing, electricity, steam power, …
It has stayed comms and compute summer since the end of the twentieth century. It has stayed infection summer since the beginning of the twentieth century. You get the idea.
Let's wait for Anthropic's S-1 to see if this is actually true.
Fundamentally, if Anthropic ain't profitable with all the investment and usage they get, then it's possible that it may not be economical to train new models in the future (I agree that inference for already trained models makes money, but the real question is if this money will pay for the cost of training & employees).
I don't have any clever argument to justify this, you just have to look at the ways the world is changing today and decide for yourself whether there is a clean historical analog.