bilater

The line is not just AI. It’s our whole story. You can extrapolate it to Moore’s law, automation, agriculture, and so on. And there's no decay. It's just perception.

We are already in the singularity. We’ve always been. It just gets faster at each step.

I reject the premise that we need to go back to some old ways of living to find meaning. My life is full of meaning, but it would probably look like meaningless abundance to someone who was toiling on a farm 18 hours a day or being chased by saber-toothed tigers.

The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will have to change. What does that look like? Do we create content and share our art? Do followers and attention become the new currency?

I agree with you that there is no certainty, and in fact the future will almost certainly not look like anything we imagine. I think that's what makes it exciting.

We think about starships and humans mining Mars, and it'll probably be nothing like that. It might just be humanoids or AI drones that actually end up colonizing the solar system, with the humans never really leaving earth except as mind uploads...

But at the end of the day, things are changing. Things are accelerating. And our mental models of what works or doesn't work will almost certainly break. I don't fear the future, nor do I project any confidence on what that's going to look like, but I know I want to be part of it.

The demand for frontier intelligence is basically infinite. The frontier doesn't just complete a task more effectively, it creates new tasks and new problems and new solutions. It grows the pie exponentially. It's like looking at the internet the first time and trying to imagine the economy that will be built using it: social media, YouTube, Online job boards, Blogs etc.

I encourage you to use your imagination once in a while.

woa your nephew lives inside a height-optimization machine that gets redesigned every few months (weeks), learns from every growth chart on Earth, and keeps proving it can grow faster?

That is the question, and it does f** with me. But the existential nihilism that comes with it is not an argument against it not happening.

At least I have trends backing up my claim. What precedent is there for saying, "Yeah, AI has kept getting better, and keeps doing things that we thought it would never be able to do, but now I think it’s going to plateau because I just can’t see the model writing good poetry or being smart enough to make determinsitic tool calls" or whatever?

I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?

AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?

No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.

Yeah not only is it totally unsubstantiated, the benchmarks are getting less useful to really show the difference between these models. Big model smell is still a thing and GLM 5.2 while impressive is not Fable class.

Here is something I would like people to chew on. Perhaps the smartest researchers in the world across multiple labs know more about this than we do? Perhaps they are aware of issues like the data wall and diminishing marginal returns. And perhaps they are being honest when they tell you there is no wall?

If you ask a surgeon if you need surgery...

In general most developers are going to find themselves fighting incentives which will color their opinion. AI isn't there yet but if you are going to abase your whole world view on a point on a graph and not on the trajectory you are in for a bad time.

Nice - I built an npm package in a similar fashion called Agent Order: https://github.com/btahir/agent-order

I think there is alpha just have to be very careful how you let the models com up with solutions and collaborate.

This is like saying we only need 100 websites when the internet came out. We have no idea what second third fourth order effects of frictionless and abundance are. What you think is software itself will change.

I’m so sick of this scarcity mindset.

We will have better and cheaper intelligence in the future than we have now. This is not Uber. Inference is profitable for these companies. Looking at API pricing and assuming that reflects the cost basis is dumb.

It costs less for OpenAI to serve GPT-5.5 than it did to serve GPT-4. An H100 is more valuable today than it was five years ago because it can serve more intelligence per token.

Jevons paradox and short-term crunches may cause some swings, but the value of a token keeps increasing while the average token price decreases.

Chinese models are already a fraction of the cost, and we will have a mythos/fable-level open-source model by the end of the year. There is no “gotcha” where every AI company rugs you in unison.

Stop trying to figure out how this screws you. Start figuring out what cool shit you can build with it.

That's fair but I felt you held up these companies and founders as these demigods running this well oiled operation and yet I remember looking up those companies and all quietly folded within a few years of your book coming out.

My point is you were not able to demonstrate any correlation with your suggested methods with startup success. A company could do the exact opposite of what you recommend and be successful. Or follow it to a tee and fail which is what all of them did (happy to hear about any counter examples here from the original book). So what exactly is the point if you can't even move the needle a little bit?

Hey Eric - does it bother you all the startups in your first book you held up as examples are dead?

every week I see this guy on HN. only forum where ppl still buy this c**

you're being a doomer and only looking at how AI will take your job or suppress your wage. try to flip it around and see how you can do more. layoffs are coming and I have said as much in other posts but the top AI engineers will make a lot more money. ultimately they will get replaced to but in that scenario we should have reached AGI abundance.

The bitter lesson is that there is no domain that will be left which AI won't get good at eventually. So really you have two options: if you actually believe the timeline is long you can keep retreating to the sectors that will be taken over last (emotional support nurse etc) or you can just say if you can't beat me join em and try to supercharge your career/project/life with AI now so it improving helps you rather than hurts you.

Reminds me of this story.

Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”

Reminds me of the buggy whip makers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOcz-H5u3Rk

Yup I was going to comment that's the closest analogy to tulips. You might hate AI but at least that's one thing you can't do (if you're even trying to be fair).

A brief post on why I still write despite no human ever reading my ramblings.

Create shows and movies. I, like you and everyone else, will figure it out. And it'll be better than what we have today just like its better to drink coffee and code vs toil at a farm 20 hours a day.

Author here. Seeing comments that this is a doomer article for some reason. I'm an AI optimist. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla. My toy projects and my job can disappear and I'm fine with it.

I talk more about the gran future here

https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...

Nope - I'm as optimistic about AI as they come. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla.

Yes! Hopefully with AI we'll get more adaptations of Pratchett. I've only read Going Postal so far. The Discworld universe would be so cool to see.

The black bill that is coming that nobody is prepared for is that the value of a token varies greatly depending on the human. Companies will quickly find out its much better to give your top 10% engineers a lot more tokens and lay off your average engineers. The 10x engineer will become the 1000x engineer.

Wrote about this and the impact of to jobs here: https://x.com/deepwhitman/status/2058324179506831372