Agreed that he has an extreme POV (or more accurately that he trolls for views/subscriptions). But his central argument is valid: if AI underdelivers financially, this bubble will burst and this bubble is magnitudes larger than what we've seen before, so there could be very rough seas ahead.
The question is: what does "underdeliver" mean here? the pro-AI arguments I am seeing in this thread are equating mass adoption to agentic coding. Er, I dont know of any trillion dollar cap companies that sell dev tools. The point is Zitron doesn't have to be 100% right for his central prediction to come true.
As a Euro/American, it's kind of shocking to me that the US is fast re-inventing communism (and fascism) from first principles: apparently, industries and technologies are 'good' or 'bad' based on their alignment with the ideology of a vocal 'elite'. Last time this happened (70s) we put nuclear energy on a shelf and ended up with global warming.
The West has invented a perfect mechanism for controlling the use of resources for the common good: money. If water is a scarce resource, charge a lot of money for it. If AI (or whomever) can pay for it, so be it, other sources of water (desalination perhaps?) will be invented.
I am saying this as a liberal and an AI-sceptic: Ideology should never outweigh outcomes.
The problem isn't that. The problem is that I can't go to a German bank with a non-German tax ID (and without German residency) and get a loan. I am limited to the handful of banks in my country (and Germans to theirs).
FICO doesn't just do aggregation, they also do integration: as an American, running away from credit card debt to a small credit union (a community bank in the States) is as bad as stiffing Citi or JPMorgan.
The American credit market is far more liquid than Europe, partly because it's much larger (one market as opposed to 27) but also because its graded and stratified: as a bank/fund you can choose the risk you want to take and take it accordingly. We're definitely missing that down to individual/SME scale.
You got it, FICO/Equifax/Transunion stop it. The $20k is basically raised on the founders' credit, not the LLCs; richer founders can get a lot more credit right up front. And yes, FICO is probably infeasible in the EU with current laws, that's the point. Fix that first, these businesses are just as critical as actual banks.
As an entrepreneur with businesses in both the US and EU, a federation is probably several steps too far from political will. Instead:
- Let banks operate and merge across borders, especially neobanks/fintechs. European banks are easily 10+ yrs ahead of the US in terms of tech and customer service but they lack scale and capital, especially in the credit side of things.
- Credit, again: we need the equivalent of D&B/Fico for Europe: a single credit bureau that can judge creditworthiness of people and organizations. Even the US has solved this through private companies, why can't Europe? Fellow Euros are shocked when I tell them that a 0-day LLC in the US can get $20k in credit card limits almost immediately.
The rest are easy, especially for web/internet companies. But if we have to raise credit/money based on the rules of the biggest (and slowest!) economies, then the EU is fucked.
Same background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?
If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).
So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).
After years with a mini, I jumped to an Air just so I could finally get a proper 'netbook' experience. Don't like Chromebooks, Windows is too complex; there is room for a simplified laptop that is easy to use and update but let's you use proper apps without going all the way to a full laptop with pro tools.
I've started to see this as a generational challenge. I am Gen X, I used to run FreeBSD and Linux, I don't mind the complexity and upkeep of a Windows laptop with all the trimmings (I do mind the complexity of the unixes, sorry). But what about Gen Z who are used to simple, powerful technology with simplified apps and UIs? why would they/should they put up with legacy UX and ways of working?
My guess is that where Microsoft is going with the new Office apps which are just web apps with thicker clients. Simplify, simplify until we can all work with iPads, Windows/ARM or whatever. Makes sense to be honest, although I'll probably keep a Thinkpad around the way old mechanics keep a set of tools in the garage although they will probably never use them again.
Yes, this. Microsoft has other businesses that can make a lot of money (regular Azure) and tons of cash flow. The fact that they are pulling back from the market leader (OpenAI) whom they mostly owned should be all the negative signal people need: AGI is not close and there is no real moat even for OpenAI.
This reminds me of the old XKCD about inventing new standards... fine, you get an EU Inc corporate model. What's the labor law applied for employees? what is the tax regime, and which countries will take in taxes? what about oh, I don't know liability, insurance, debt and bankruptcy, etc, etc.?
A company is a legal person within a jurisdiction --of which all of the laws apply to every person. You can't have an EU Inc without a federal EU. Heck even the US doesnt have a US Inc. This is naive at best.
UI is fashion-driven like clothing or furniture or car design. That's not new, it's just hard to admit for us techies that such a thing exists in our world. And just like with fashion, some changes are not for 'better' but for 'cooler' or 'more interesting'. The question is how far on the 'worse' scale you're willing to go to get up on the 'cool' scale. Otherwise, we'd all still be running Windows Server 2000...
Agreed. Text is used for a lot of things. A fantastic text parser/generator that doesn't need regex and can extract /meaning/ would have been a sci-fi fever dream even a decade ago. So, LLMs will definitely have their use and will probably disrupt several industries.
But this hype-storm just reminds me of the fever-dream blogs about the brave new world of the Internet back when hypertext became widely used in '93 or so (direct democracy, infinite commerce, etc, etc). Yes, of course, the brave new world came along, but it needed 3G and multi-touch screens as well and that was 15 years later and a whole different set of companies made money and ruled the world than those that bet on hypertext.
I havent coded in years, so I'll take your word for the potential of AI in SWE. But, software development has guardrailed against bad code with unit testing, CI/CD, etc. Also, productivity / output can be measured more-or-less well. Partly for that reason, it's also used to efficiency shifts (say from C++ to Java; or Perl to anything...) and those are not usually massive, all-or-nothing changes.
Where's the equivalent in customer support? or document creation? or any of these other mythical AI use cases? genuinely asking.
The article makes a good case that the SaaS bubble is deflating and needs a new hype cycle to keep investment up. AI makes sense for that, so at least that's one good use case :-)
So, serious question: if OpenAI is "a few thousand days from AGI" and about to dominate the GenAI space, why can they not hold on to execs? why is there no amount of options/money they can use to retain them with?
Agreed; I dont remember the source but I much prefer the Marines → Navy → Police continuum. Some circumstances require a highly capable team with high communication, aligned goals and motives, who can take decisions individually or at a low enough level. Some circumstances require bureaucracy, process, external and internal controls.
The dumb "Founder mode" discourse hides away two things: a) scale forces you to climb that ladder towards bureaucracy and controls anyway, b) it's scope-specific. You don't want to go "Founder mode" on phone support. Or accounts payable, or probably HR. There are specific objectives, projects and also circumstances that need a more hands-on approach. And honestly a "Marines" analogy where the team is tight and authorized to make decisions, is better than some micro-managing, coke-fueled "Founder mode".
The cry to "break up the monopolies" bugs me. Maybe because I am old enough to remember the failed Microsoft case or to have lived the re-unification of AT&T into, well, AT&T.
If you really do believe that the tech giants need to be reigned in, breaking them up is NOT the way to do it. It's a red herring, a quixotical quest that will eat up time, money and opportunity costs for newer, better companies. Break-ups will be litigated endlessly, we'll end up talking about who benefits from what and at the end either nothing will happen or some business unit(s) will be spun out as sacrificial lambs so that the main behemoths can keep printing cash.
The correct answer IMHO is "tax and regulate". Recognize that big tech are now infrastructure companies, massive railways on which international commerce happens and that they need to be taxed as such and regulated. As in regulated for minimum service levels, for liability on what happens on their rails (see Crowdstrike), for access to their platforms to others, for competing against their own customers. Regulate them, tax them, squeeze their margins down to something reasonable, turn them into, well, AT&T.
No, that won't kill them and it would be much less dramatic than a breakup (and would feel less satisfactory, for sure). But it could actually happen relatively quickly and would push them to their natural place, i.e. platforms and utilities on top of which younger, hungrier companies can build.
Google can be more easily understood as a bunch of businesses that funnel traffic into an ad marketplace. Search, Android, GMail, Maps, Chrome, everything is just about having enough traffic and enough behavioral data to make them the biggest ad seller ever. But they are also the broker and price-setter. That's how they make money, not on the quality of their services --which OK, they have to maintain to a competitive standard: easy to do when you are printing money.
So, the solution is relatively simple: break off their ad marketplace business. Break off their ad display business. Let the funnels fend for themselves.
After being initially dazzled, I've drifted firmly into the camp of "this hype cycle is nonsense". I get why VCs/Startups/investors/legislators want (or even need) a hype cycle in a post-ZIRP economy, in an election year, with geo instability. But there's nothing, neither data/evidence that LLM === AGI or even a path that points towards LLM → AGI.
AFAICT, LLMs are stochastic predictors of words within a large context. If you transfer (pun intended) that behavior over to humans, you would call a person like that a bullshitter, or at best a salesguy :-) A bullshitter as a person or team member is useful, but not scalable in the singularity sense: you can scale its output in terms of quantity, but not quality: the stochastic parrot may move prospects through the funnel (necessarily to a higher-IQ actual salesperson) but it will not create a patent from scratch (and probably will not close a deal).
So, we're not getting AGI. Given that the stochastic approach has hit scalability limits (there's no more data to feed), we need a new approach. Are there approaches that can bring AGI outside of LLMs? (AlphaZero?) Or is our industry just a bunch of stochastic parrots that complete every sentence with "eventually we'll have AGI and everything will be either great or destroyed" (which is exactly what an LLM would say at this point)?
The question is: what does "underdeliver" mean here? the pro-AI arguments I am seeing in this thread are equating mass adoption to agentic coding. Er, I dont know of any trillion dollar cap companies that sell dev tools. The point is Zitron doesn't have to be 100% right for his central prediction to come true.