Not really relevant to this article, which is about graduate students in research programs, who get a stipend and don't pay anything. Of course, low stipends are also a big detractor for potential students
Forget AI, Google/Microsoft/Amazon could all in theory have built a clone of Jira/Figma/<x> tool by now. But large companies lack the focus and commitment needed to build true competitors to these products, especially if it's not a big enough market to make a real difference to their bottom line.
Perhaps this will change soon if AI models reach the "army of geniuses in a datacenter" level, but current models are a far cry from just being able to clone Jira or Asana.
1. Companies can hire overseas. There's some cost to it in terms of added friction, but if wages rise enough in C1, then it's worth the friction to hire in C2 instead.
2. Workers also consume and invest, raising demand for other jobs. Employment is not a zero sum game, especially at the macro scale.
How is that different from the US? Immigrants also get booted here if they lose their job. They also pay social security, Medicare, and other taxes but usually don't get the benefits unless they stay here for long enough and get a green card.
You're attributing way too much intent to what is the viewpoint of some random analyst at Goldman Sachs (who doesn't even control any purse strings). A year ago there was another big hullabaloo when a GS team wrote a long post about how AI companies would never make enough revenue.
But anyways, the order of causation is probably reversed. Cities with high density are forced to invest in good public transport by sheer public demand and pressure.
Mercedes' feature has been sunset. It only ever worked in good weather on a limited set of motorways, below a certain speed, and with a guide vehicle in front of it l.
Is there anything substantial in his list ("agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations") that Claude Code or Cursor don't already incorporate?
I empathize with his sense that if we could just provide the right context and development harness to an AI model, we could be *that* much more productive, but it might just be misplaced hope. Claude Code and Cursor are probably not that far from the current frontier for LLM development environments.
Residents of every city claim that they have the craziest drivers or toughest streets to navigate in. London isn't really that materially harder to drive in than San Francisco.
This specific bet is very targeted, but we do absolutely have commerciallly available self-driving cars in 2025 in several cities, and the list of cities is rapidly expanding.
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.