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Comment by drivebyhooting | Hacker News Reader

Do you build things for yourself? I’ve unlocked tremendous value just by scratching my own itches so to speak.

But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.

The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.

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If you are building for yourself instead of buying from someone else, you haven’t unlocked any value in the economic sense. Perhaps by making NVIDIA richer, but who knows how much they have indirectly spent through AI companies these years to get your couple dollars a month back to Jensen’s pocket.

I've been using it to build things that don't exist in the market (or GitHub). Either where the product just doesn't exist, or existing products do not fully meet my requirements.

For example I got a smart cat litter box and wanted to pair it to Home Assistant. There's an existing integration for the manufacturer, but it seems that although my box has the same model number, it's a different revision with completely different data point mappings - so the existing integration doesn't work. I pointed AI at it, and it figured it out, and it works.

Could I have done it? Sure, if I'd spent an entire afternoon doing it. I don't care that much about my cat litter box though.

They have unlocked value by paying for their AI subscription. They paid $X and using it produced for themselves more than $X worth of value

A company/person that writes its/their own application that shaves 1% off capex or opex will absolutely unlock value in the economic sense.

> If you are building for yourself instead of buying from someone else, you haven’t unlocked any value in the economic sense.

The articles says "AI needs $6T in annual revenue."

That is definitely adding to the annual revenue figure.

It appears that out of a desperate urge to show your "Well Actually" Club Card that you've proved their entire point.

So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money?

So where is the value? Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?

> Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?

Yes, more than one and I use them a lot. Not being good at design and not liking front-end, among a few other things, work always stopped from from building them before,

> So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money?

No, I also don't make money from my coffee machine, but it provides value.

The idea would be its deflationary I guess. Your dollar goes further with these tools.

GDP is known to have shortcomings. The example from HN a bit ago is mowing the lawn. If I mow my own lawn and my neighbor mows there, the GDP doesn't move. If I mow my neighbors for $200 and they mow mine for $200, $400 gets added to the GDP. So the software I wrote for myself won't show up in any GDP calculation. How happy (or not) I am over that software doesn't show up in the GDP. My subscription to the AI provider is the only thing that will. Now, will that, multiplied over millions of users reach $6T? I have no idea. GDP is a metric like any other and is just as subject to Goodhart's law.

You explained the problem brilliantly. Frontier models are great at making you tinker and come up with shit you wouldn’t have done because there is zero value in it and you would have had to bet a value N (time, money) to obtain before this investors-subsidized almost-free software existed. This is deluding individuals and CEOs and everyone who seems incapable to abstract from the sycophantic personal experience into systemic thinking. To be fair, LLMs have been engineered to give this illusion, so the fault lies with the grifters controlling them.

Now are there useful applications of these tools (not gods) that might justify a sizeable new tech market? Absolutely yes! Is that market ever be going to be worth trillions a year? LOL hell no.

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