When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore.
Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation being far faster than typing, it's not used all that often because.. the error rate is still too high for it to be useful, because errors in speech-to-text are fundamentally an unsolvable problem (you can only get so far with background noise filtering and accounting for accents etc).
I see the parallel in how LLM hallucinations are fundamentally an unsolvable component of transformers-based models, and I suspect LLM usage in 20 years will be around the level of speech-to-text today: ubiquitously in the background, you use it here and there to set a timer or talk to a device, but ultimately not useful for any serious work.
To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker.
This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me.
I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time.
My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw.
These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure.
But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.
"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different.
Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves.
The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.
The problem is in the middle of such a change it's hard to recognize if this is a real change or if this is another Wankel motor.
Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
The other issue is nobody knows what the future will actually look like and they'll often be wrong with their predictions. For example, with the rise of robotics, plenty of 1950s scifi thought it was just logical that androids and smart mechanic arms would be developed next year. I mean, you can find cartoons where people envisioned smart hands giving people a clean shave. (Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D Sweeney Todd scifi redux)
I think AI is here to stay. At very least it seems to have practical value in software development. That won't be erased anytime soon. Claims beyond that, though, need a lot more evidence to support them. Right now it feels like people just shoving AI into 1000 places hoping that they can find an new industry like software dev.
There's another perspective you can see in the comparison with the dot com boom. The web is here to stay, but a lot of ideas from the beginning didn't work out and a lot of companies turned bankrupt.
The four technologies I look at are 3D televisions, VR, tablets, and the electric car. 3D televisions and VR have yet to find their moment. Judging tablets by the Apple Newton and electric cars by the EV1, this time is different turns out to be the correct model looking at the iPad and Tesla, but not for 3d televisions or VR (yet).
The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate.
It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was.
It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time.
AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.
That's very true in terms of how capable these chatbots clearly are, but I believe the author was using 'underwhelming' to refer to the societal impact.
So far, life goes on roughly the same as it did five years ago. This can feel 'underwhelming' in contrast to the onslaught of public discussion about, and huge investments in, AI.
Most of us here on HN are programmers, and we all know how radically LLMs have changed our code projects. Even so, the change to our everyday lives (aside from our work or hobby project) is not, just yet, glaringly obvious. This year, it's mainly... every website shoves an AI box on its site that nobody seems to want!
This statment is really annoying and getting boring. There are A LOT of us who have built careers evaluating technology with healthy skepticism, finding where it works and were it doesn't, excited to share & learn - and we've heard "this time it's different" many times. Now because we refuse to jump in without that same nuance and thought, and proclaim "everything's different over night!" we're branded as ludites when we're really trying find a balance.
I don't hear people saying "nothing is going to change", but I do hear questions about the timeline and if the current levels of investment match returns. Branding these people as stuck in some sort of negative identity is bullshit.
You’re creating a false dichotomy to alienate perceived opponents. Frankly, it’s really annoying and close-minded, and you haven’t contributed anything to the conversation.
Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.
it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.
I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get.
The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.
>Blockchain... NFTs
>The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence.
I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
> I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
Squares are rectangles. The existence of rectangles that aren't squares doesn't negate that.
You need to re-evaluate your logic here; if you were a Blockchain / NFT booster who doesn't believe AI is different you could argue you've disproved their argument. You have not.
Yeah that comparison doesn't pass the smell test. Blockchain/crypto were purely financial instruments and for better or worse, a new financial instrument is very different than a new tech innovation; tbh there was a thin veneer of tech when it comes to crypto/blockchain, but the magic was because of the money, not because of the tech.
AI is different because the magic clearly is because of the tech. The fact that we get this emergent behavior out of (what essentially amounts to) polynomial fitting is pretty surprising even for the most skeptical of critics.
I think the author is saying that a specific crowd, which happened to be very vocal and excited about web3 and NFTs, is also very vocal and excited about AI. In my personal experience they are right, a lot of the hustler types around me who were trying to get everyone to "invest" in digital land are now doomposting about AI.
It's not a very legible situation for people outside of the profession, and a lot of them believe it's just another grift that will blow up in a few years.
...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed:
> microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cloud, EVs, 5G
...and presents this as evidence that the current hyped tech (AI) will fail:
> Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming.
When the article needs to construct disingenious arguments, I'm not interested in its conclusion.
But wait! If you actually read to the end, there's a plot twist!
> The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.
Who said anything about winner takes all? You just burned a "this time is different" straw man and then conclude that "winner takes all" is not realistic?
At this moment I'm wondering if the article was in fact written by a quantized 8B LLM. Surely people don't do such non-sequiturs and then expect to be taken seriously.
But of course not. This is not an argument. This is preaching to the choir.
By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
AI is real but the socio-political environment is far from conductive to some form of productive use of it - as opposed to using it as a war-machine - AI isn't going to fail in that role but very few will be happy about it.
I mean, disillusionment is the least of my worries.
There are all sorts of algorithms in use that were once thought of as AI, but transitioned to being mere algorithms well before they entered public awareness, if they did that at all. Some are still useful and used everywhere, but they have never been thought of as AI by the public. For them, AI is a term that has long been reserved for some far-off, sci-fi future.
LLM's are not artificial general intelligence (i.e. not sci-fi AI). Why haven't they transitioned to being mere algorithms by now? Why is the public being told AI is finally arriving when it's really just another algorithm?
We have some truly slick and shady corporations involved in the bubble right now and they're marketing LLM's like tobacco. LLM's have been pushed out, at immense cost, to the public in a way that makes them more directly accessible to average people than any past algorithm. Young children can ask a LLM to do their homework for them. Middle managers can ask a LLM to create a (shitty) ad campaign for them. Corporations have gone to tremendous expense to make that widely available and, for the moment, mostly free. They seem to be following the Joe Camel school of marketing. Get them hooked while they're young so they come to you first when they're older! The only difference is that nobody is stepping in to stop the new Joe Camel from handing out free samples to kids.
Then there's the "go big" aspects of the bubble. The major competitors are trying to out-spend each other to dominance, but the suckers are so colossally big that their bubble is affecting global GPU, memory, and storage prices. This bubble is going to stress power grids wherever it operates and do considerable environmental harm. The financial games being played behind the bubble are absolutely stupid. The results, so far, are tantalizing for billionaires. LLM's offer the promise of being able to fire all their pesky and annoying human workers. It won't deliver on that, and none of these companies is ever going to make enough to pay their debts. There might be "too big to fail" government bailouts, but there are going to be some big bankruptcies too.
Useful algorithms will come out of all this, a lot of tears too, but not "AI".
> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
> but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
the end goal is productivity growth, aka the point of nearly every technology ever invented. The human story is about how we learn to do more with less.
> Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
There is a third outcome that combines both of these.
LLMs can massively displace the workforce (and cause widespread social instability) AND the companies pouring hundreds of billions into them right now could, at the same time, fail to capture significant amounts of the labor savings value as late-mover alternatives run the race drafting their progress without the massive spend.
I'd honestly be surprised if this double-whammy isn't the outcome at this point. AI is going to have a massive impact on everything, but there is still no moat in sight.
I think our little corner of the world has a distorted view of AI in that it is actually proving useful for us. Once they passed a certain level of usefulness... I remember when they were still struggling just to output syntactically correct code, you know, like, 18 months ago or so... they became a useful tool that we can incorporate.
But there's a lot of things playing out to our advantage. Vast swathes of useful and publicly available training data. The rigorous precision of said data. Vast swathes of data we can feed it as input to our queries from our own codebases. While we never attained the perfect ideal we dreamed of, we have vast quantities of documentation at differing levels of abstraction that the training can compare to the code bases. We've already been arguing in our community about how design patterns were just level of abstraction our coding couldn't capture and AI has access now to all sorts of design patterns we wouldn't have even called design patterns because they still take lots of code to produce, but now for example, if I have a process that I need to parallelize it can pretty much just do it in any of several ways depending on what I need at that point.
It is easy to get too overexcited about what it can do and I suspect we're going to see an absolute flood of "We let AI into our code base and it has absolutely shredded it and now even the most expensive AI can't do anything with it anymore" in, oh, 3 to 6 months. Not that everyone is going to have that experience, but I think we're going to see it. Right now we're still at the phase where people call you crazy for that and insist it must have been you using the tool wrong. But it is clearly an amazing tool for all sorts of uses.
Nevertheless, despite my own experiences, I persist in believing there is an AI bubble, because while AI may replace vast swathes of the work force in 5-20 years, for quite a lot of the workforce, it is not ready to do it right this very instant like the pricing on Wall Street is assuming. They don't have gigabytes of high-quality training data to pour in to their system. They don't have rigorous syntax rules to incorporate into the training data. They don't have any equivalent of being guided by tests to keep things on the rails. They don't have large piles of professionally developed documentation that can be cross-checked directly against the implementation. It's going to be a slower, longer process. As with the dot-com bubble, it isn't that it isn't going to change the world, it is simply that it isn't going to change the world quite that fast.
Leaving aside the economic shitshow and other things.
I think you're right but for the wrong reasons wrt sustainable profit.
Specifically, overcounting how much it will cost in 5 years to run AI because you're extrapolating current high prices, and at the same time undercounting how the demand will drive efficiency gains.
i think the point is AI has to go much further and faster than it has in the past 3 years to justify the investments being made from the hype. The hype did its job now the AI industry has to execute and create the returns they promised. That is still very much up in the air, if they can't then the tech was over hyped.
It's high time to stop accumulating debt while providing free picture of pelicycles, just charge the full cost for them - enough to generate profits and pay back debt.
What we see now is literally burning money and energy to generate hype. The only true measures of success are financial and macroeconomic. If the hype is real, there should be no problem for the mighty AI to generate debt-free profits for its providers while the overall price level in the US goes down.
We observe the exact opposite which makes the AI hype act only as market manipulation for capital misallocation.
unlike the old hpc, where we only burned hundreds of millions for machines that were 80% efficient to get a 5 year lead, we are burning hundreds of billions on machines that are 30% efficient to get a 1 year lead.
> most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong
I was so expecting to find this wind-up aimed at those peddling the "AI is hype" laziness.
It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on, and the deductions can be made, just not clearly to people who need to study a lot more.
It's like watching an invisible train (visible to those with strong CS) rolling down the tracks at a leisurely pace. Those sitting in their stalled car on the tracks are busy tweeting about "AI HPY PE TRAIN." Until it wrecks their car, the gimmick is free oxygen. It's a lot easier to write articles than it is to build GPUs and write programs.
> It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on
So, what CS fundamentals do you need to evaluate if AI is the real thing, or will disappoint in the future? Until a few months ago, coding agents were met with skepticism, until Anthropic introduced their new model and, with it, a hype train that cannot be rationally justified. Look, SOTA LLMs, and coding agents in particular, are impressive. However, current predictions about the future of software development (and the world in general) are speculative. There is little to no data showing whether AI can deliver on its promises. How could there be in this short time frame? No one knows what the future will hold, no one knows how coding agents will be integrated into our work life and everyday life in the long run, or what hard limitations they will reveal. No one can tell you how professions will change in the coming years; every prediction is purely speculative, and anyone making prophecies is either trying to cope with the uncertainty themselves or has some stakes in the AI bet. It would be nice if people were actually humble enough to admit that they have no idea what will happen in the future, instead of writing the hundredth doom and gloom post.
> However, current predictions about the future of software development (and the world in general) are speculative.
It's amazing to me how those willing to seize on the speculative nature of any ANY uncertainty cannot recognize the inherent uncertainty of the inverse.
And a lot of exposure to deductive reasoning, vague ideas of automated theorem proving and formalization.
I won't pretend its easy, but let's be clear, a small fraction of people who know things are being forced to entertain the hysteria of a vast majority who are unwilling to know things and just go around beating their chests and will continue doing so until the train hits them.
There are 2-3 minor architectural changes in between now and what I would identify as a completely unbounded AGI with clearly discernible dynamic, self-defined objective functions and self-defined procedures for training and inference. It can be done in megabytes. Oh god. Get me out of this forum. I wish to return to my code editor.
What exactly are you claiming here? That a handful of theorems about the limits of mathematics and provability somehow combine to show that the current LLM-based AI developments will inevitably live up to what is expected of them? And that this is obvious to a select few? That all seems unlikely, to say the least.
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
I work for an old enterprise, so far rather conservative with LLM/AI usage. However the copilot cli adoption in the last 2 weeks is spreading light wild fire. Codex 5.3, a good instructions file and it works. Features are getting done and delivered in days, proper test coverage is done, proper documentation in place. Onboarding to it is also very fast.
Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...
Many of my industry friends and I were skeptics about all the things the OP mentions, still am. And yet, I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now.
It's different just like the steam engine was different, except technology moves much 100x faster now than it did then. It's different and the same.
Just because tests pass does not mean that they're testing the right thing to begin with. Reviewing tests is as important, if not even more important than reviewing code.
> "I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now."
It is physically and physiologically impossible for anyone to be reviewing "30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day" to the extent needed to push it with confidence in a sensible development process.
I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
I'd say AR & VR were hyped to be as big as AI is now, but just haven't fully delivered on the promise yet. 3D printing was similarly hyped for a time. Same with blockchain. Nuclear power in the 50s was hyped to be the future of energy.
The point is to take the hype with a grain of salt and knowledge that not all hyped technologies transformed the world as promised. Maybe AI is like the internet or electricity. But maybe the claims about AGI/ASI and full automation are just hype.
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.
It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
There's another point, too. Detractors say LLMs will never advance to whatever threshold they consider meaningful. Fine. We're working on other paradigms, too, though. Just because a lot of o people are productizing LLMs doesn't mean the state of the art isn't advancing in parallel and AGI isn't in the cards.
Agree, LLMs are just another tool. Treating them as chatbots is a very basic way of using them. The future is intelligent engineers embedding them in traditional systems and having them perform specific roles.
Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands.
I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too.
I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too.
And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far without.
I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it.
Maybe if they could let go of some of the cynicism, they could find something to be optimistic about. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, but that doesn't mean nothing is good.
> I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it.
From the post, which is not a very long one: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists"
Fair, I read the whole post but I guess that part didn't register, maybe because I never fullheartedly believe marketing fluff to begin with. Maybe this person has too much contact with "AI will fix everything" types, and not enough with actual scientists who are really developing novel methods better than anything before, piece by piece.
I also found the "it's almost always dudes" line a bit strange, because I've seen plenty of women doing marketing for startups running on hype.
The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".
Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine.
Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today.
All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble.
AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.
"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
If you can't distinguish the actual utility and progress of AI from it's annoying hype-men then it's hard to take your dismissal of AI seriously.
Failure to appreciate changes in AI will have left you calling every shot wrong over the past 5 years. While AI models continue to improve at an exponential rate, you'll cling to your facile maxims like "dude it's just predicting the next token it isn't real intelligence".
"Today, I'm speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and and George D. Montañez, Director of the AMISTAD Lab at Harvey Mudd College–both of whom are extremely knowledgable on the topic of artificial intelligence. During the course of our conversation, they discuss the asymmetry between human intelligence & AI, the inability of AI to ascribe meaning to raw data, and the limitations of large language models. The real question though is: are we screwed? Let's find out."
I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows.
We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.
The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.
If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.
Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.
[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors.
"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.
"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.
"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.
And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.
I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application.
Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations
Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.
For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it?
for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?
OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.
I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
Just chiming in to say thanks for the Pratchett quote! I dare say he's about to beat out Douglass Adams for my top author. Feets of Clay and Hogfather should be must reads for people dealing with AI right now imo.
You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.
I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.
MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.
Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.
I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.
Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.
Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.
As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.
Why do you think that solar+battery technology or MRNA vaccines haven't been written about in excited, hype-filled ways? If a technology is successful, then looking at past accounts of that technology and why it will change the world don't come across to you reading it now as hype, they come across as a description of something normal about the world.
The web? GLP-1s? 5G? The newton was mega-hyped, failed but Apple came back with the iPhone. All the dot com failures that eventually became viable businesses (so viable in-fact that sfgate has to reach back 26 years to write their stinkpiece [1])
Hype is often early, in 10-20 years we'll start seeing the value as the rest of the world catches up
It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.
This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.
"You shouldn't eat that."
"Why not?"
"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."
"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"
"(lists names of prior victims)"
"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."
The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."
If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
Maybe I'm only noticing the times when it messes things up, but it kinda seems like these auto-edits cause a lot of confusion that could be avoided if they were shown up-front to submitters, who would then have the option to undo them.
Or maybe judicious use of an LLM here could be helpful. Replace the auto-edits with a prompt? Ask an LLM to judge whether the auto-edited title still retains its original meaning? Run the old and new titles through an embedding model and make sure they still point in roughly the same direction?
oh interesting, TIL I can go edit my submission titles! That's useful, I've definitely submitted stuff and gotten a less-good title due to the automated fixes, so I'll have to pay attention to this next time
When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore.
Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation being far faster than typing, it's not used all that often because.. the error rate is still too high for it to be useful, because errors in speech-to-text are fundamentally an unsolvable problem (you can only get so far with background noise filtering and accounting for accents etc).
I see the parallel in how LLM hallucinations are fundamentally an unsolvable component of transformers-based models, and I suspect LLM usage in 20 years will be around the level of speech-to-text today: ubiquitously in the background, you use it here and there to set a timer or talk to a device, but ultimately not useful for any serious work.
To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker.
This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me.
I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time.
My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw.
These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure.
But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.
"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different.
Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves.
The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.
The problem is in the middle of such a change it's hard to recognize if this is a real change or if this is another Wankel motor.
Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
The other issue is nobody knows what the future will actually look like and they'll often be wrong with their predictions. For example, with the rise of robotics, plenty of 1950s scifi thought it was just logical that androids and smart mechanic arms would be developed next year. I mean, you can find cartoons where people envisioned smart hands giving people a clean shave. (Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D Sweeney Todd scifi redux)
I think AI is here to stay. At very least it seems to have practical value in software development. That won't be erased anytime soon. Claims beyond that, though, need a lot more evidence to support them. Right now it feels like people just shoving AI into 1000 places hoping that they can find an new industry like software dev.
There's another perspective you can see in the comparison with the dot com boom. The web is here to stay, but a lot of ideas from the beginning didn't work out and a lot of companies turned bankrupt.
> Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years
Source?
The four technologies I look at are 3D televisions, VR, tablets, and the electric car. 3D televisions and VR have yet to find their moment. Judging tablets by the Apple Newton and electric cars by the EV1, this time is different turns out to be the correct model looking at the iPad and Tesla, but not for 3d televisions or VR (yet).
The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate.
It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was.
It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time.
AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
The only people underwhelmed by AI in February 2026 are people who have formed an identity around being AI skeptics over the last couple years and are struggling to shed it. I haven't met anyone who has seriously used the new models who isn't a at least a bit awed and disturbed.
That's very true in terms of how capable these chatbots clearly are, but I believe the author was using 'underwhelming' to refer to the societal impact.
So far, life goes on roughly the same as it did five years ago. This can feel 'underwhelming' in contrast to the onslaught of public discussion about, and huge investments in, AI.
Most of us here on HN are programmers, and we all know how radically LLMs have changed our code projects. Even so, the change to our everyday lives (aside from our work or hobby project) is not, just yet, glaringly obvious. This year, it's mainly... every website shoves an AI box on its site that nobody seems to want!
This statment is really annoying and getting boring. There are A LOT of us who have built careers evaluating technology with healthy skepticism, finding where it works and were it doesn't, excited to share & learn - and we've heard "this time it's different" many times. Now because we refuse to jump in without that same nuance and thought, and proclaim "everything's different over night!" we're branded as ludites when we're really trying find a balance.
I don't hear people saying "nothing is going to change", but I do hear questions about the timeline and if the current levels of investment match returns. Branding these people as stuck in some sort of negative identity is bullshit.
What is your position on AI?
You’re creating a false dichotomy to alienate perceived opponents. Frankly, it’s really annoying and close-minded, and you haven’t contributed anything to the conversation.
"AI is a bubble!"
"AI will change everything!"
Few seem to understand that both of the above can be true. The parallel you draw to the internet revolution is apt; dot-coms were both a bubble and changed everything.
it literally describes the gartnerhype cycle. this article is pointless, the only thing that matters is what survives it with over 1m users. AI will have billions of users when GHC is on the back end.
I think a good analogy will be the way word processors changed printing. Suddenly anyone with access to a computer had the ability to do professional level editing and layout. Most of them didn’t have the taste or skills to use the tools to the fullest, but it still opened up a ton of possibilities that weren’t available before because it was never practical to hire an actual professional to do a poster for a dinky church bake sale before. But now, church bake sales can have pretty slick looking posters (and websites) depending on whether any of the volunteers cares enough to get.
The stuff LLMs will democratize will be a lot more impactful than nice posters for car wash fundraisers though. So in that sense it will be different, but I don’t think it will crack the market for proficient experts in the field in the same way photoshop didn’t destroy graphic design and CAD didn’t destroy drafting. It may get rid of the market for a lot of the second-tier bootcamp grad talent though, so I wouldn’t be getting into that right now if I could help it.
>3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.
For what it’s worth, not a single other technology in the list made any sort of impact on my work. For better or worse, LLMs did.
Well, okay, quantum computing actually affected me a lot because I worked at a quantum hardware manufacturer, but that’s different.
>Blockchain... NFTs >The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence.
I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
> I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
Squares are rectangles. The existence of rectangles that aren't squares doesn't negate that.
You need to re-evaluate your logic here; if you were a Blockchain / NFT booster who doesn't believe AI is different you could argue you've disproved their argument. You have not.
Yeah that comparison doesn't pass the smell test. Blockchain/crypto were purely financial instruments and for better or worse, a new financial instrument is very different than a new tech innovation; tbh there was a thin veneer of tech when it comes to crypto/blockchain, but the magic was because of the money, not because of the tech.
AI is different because the magic clearly is because of the tech. The fact that we get this emergent behavior out of (what essentially amounts to) polynomial fitting is pretty surprising even for the most skeptical of critics.
I think the author is saying that a specific crowd, which happened to be very vocal and excited about web3 and NFTs, is also very vocal and excited about AI. In my personal experience they are right, a lot of the hustler types around me who were trying to get everyone to "invest" in digital land are now doomposting about AI.
It's not a very legible situation for people outside of the profession, and a lot of them believe it's just another grift that will blow up in a few years.
This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
The post nicely lists a bunch of failed hyped tech:
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.
...conveniently doesn't list a bunch of hyped tech that hasn't failed:
> microchips, PCs, the internet, ecommerce, cloud, EVs, 5G
...and presents this as evidence that the current hyped tech (AI) will fail:
> Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming.
When the article needs to construct disingenious arguments, I'm not interested in its conclusion.
But wait! If you actually read to the end, there's a plot twist!
> The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.
Who said anything about winner takes all? You just burned a "this time is different" straw man and then conclude that "winner takes all" is not realistic?
At this moment I'm wondering if the article was in fact written by a quantized 8B LLM. Surely people don't do such non-sequiturs and then expect to be taken seriously.
But of course not. This is not an argument. This is preaching to the choir.
Preach, brother, preach.
By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
AI is real but the socio-political environment is far from conductive to some form of productive use of it - as opposed to using it as a war-machine - AI isn't going to fail in that role but very few will be happy about it.
I mean, disillusionment is the least of my worries.
There are all sorts of algorithms in use that were once thought of as AI, but transitioned to being mere algorithms well before they entered public awareness, if they did that at all. Some are still useful and used everywhere, but they have never been thought of as AI by the public. For them, AI is a term that has long been reserved for some far-off, sci-fi future.
LLM's are not artificial general intelligence (i.e. not sci-fi AI). Why haven't they transitioned to being mere algorithms by now? Why is the public being told AI is finally arriving when it's really just another algorithm?
We have some truly slick and shady corporations involved in the bubble right now and they're marketing LLM's like tobacco. LLM's have been pushed out, at immense cost, to the public in a way that makes them more directly accessible to average people than any past algorithm. Young children can ask a LLM to do their homework for them. Middle managers can ask a LLM to create a (shitty) ad campaign for them. Corporations have gone to tremendous expense to make that widely available and, for the moment, mostly free. They seem to be following the Joe Camel school of marketing. Get them hooked while they're young so they come to you first when they're older! The only difference is that nobody is stepping in to stop the new Joe Camel from handing out free samples to kids.
Then there's the "go big" aspects of the bubble. The major competitors are trying to out-spend each other to dominance, but the suckers are so colossally big that their bubble is affecting global GPU, memory, and storage prices. This bubble is going to stress power grids wherever it operates and do considerable environmental harm. The financial games being played behind the bubble are absolutely stupid. The results, so far, are tantalizing for billionaires. LLM's offer the promise of being able to fire all their pesky and annoying human workers. It won't deliver on that, and none of these companies is ever going to make enough to pay their debts. There might be "too big to fail" government bailouts, but there are going to be some big bankruptcies too.
Useful algorithms will come out of all this, a lot of tears too, but not "AI".
> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
> but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Still don't understand what's the end goal here. Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
the end goal is productivity growth, aka the point of nearly every technology ever invented. The human story is about how we learn to do more with less.
> Assuming they don't deliver, then there are billions of investments that will go bust. Assuming they deliver, millions lose their jobs and there's going to be a bloodbath on the streets.
There is a third outcome that combines both of these.
LLMs can massively displace the workforce (and cause widespread social instability) AND the companies pouring hundreds of billions into them right now could, at the same time, fail to capture significant amounts of the labor savings value as late-mover alternatives run the race drafting their progress without the massive spend.
I'd honestly be surprised if this double-whammy isn't the outcome at this point. AI is going to have a massive impact on everything, but there is still no moat in sight.
I think our little corner of the world has a distorted view of AI in that it is actually proving useful for us. Once they passed a certain level of usefulness... I remember when they were still struggling just to output syntactically correct code, you know, like, 18 months ago or so... they became a useful tool that we can incorporate.
But there's a lot of things playing out to our advantage. Vast swathes of useful and publicly available training data. The rigorous precision of said data. Vast swathes of data we can feed it as input to our queries from our own codebases. While we never attained the perfect ideal we dreamed of, we have vast quantities of documentation at differing levels of abstraction that the training can compare to the code bases. We've already been arguing in our community about how design patterns were just level of abstraction our coding couldn't capture and AI has access now to all sorts of design patterns we wouldn't have even called design patterns because they still take lots of code to produce, but now for example, if I have a process that I need to parallelize it can pretty much just do it in any of several ways depending on what I need at that point.
It is easy to get too overexcited about what it can do and I suspect we're going to see an absolute flood of "We let AI into our code base and it has absolutely shredded it and now even the most expensive AI can't do anything with it anymore" in, oh, 3 to 6 months. Not that everyone is going to have that experience, but I think we're going to see it. Right now we're still at the phase where people call you crazy for that and insist it must have been you using the tool wrong. But it is clearly an amazing tool for all sorts of uses.
Nevertheless, despite my own experiences, I persist in believing there is an AI bubble, because while AI may replace vast swathes of the work force in 5-20 years, for quite a lot of the workforce, it is not ready to do it right this very instant like the pricing on Wall Street is assuming. They don't have gigabytes of high-quality training data to pour in to their system. They don't have rigorous syntax rules to incorporate into the training data. They don't have any equivalent of being guided by tests to keep things on the rails. They don't have large piles of professionally developed documentation that can be cross-checked directly against the implementation. It's going to be a slower, longer process. As with the dot-com bubble, it isn't that it isn't going to change the world, it is simply that it isn't going to change the world quite that fast.
Leaving aside the economic shitshow and other things.
I think you're right but for the wrong reasons wrt sustainable profit.
Specifically, overcounting how much it will cost in 5 years to run AI because you're extrapolating current high prices, and at the same time undercounting how the demand will drive efficiency gains.
i think the point is AI has to go much further and faster than it has in the past 3 years to justify the investments being made from the hype. The hype did its job now the AI industry has to execute and create the returns they promised. That is still very much up in the air, if they can't then the tech was over hyped.
This.
It's high time to stop accumulating debt while providing free picture of pelicycles, just charge the full cost for them - enough to generate profits and pay back debt.
What we see now is literally burning money and energy to generate hype. The only true measures of success are financial and macroeconomic. If the hype is real, there should be no problem for the mighty AI to generate debt-free profits for its providers while the overall price level in the US goes down.
We observe the exact opposite which makes the AI hype act only as market manipulation for capital misallocation.
unlike the old hpc, where we only burned hundreds of millions for machines that were 80% efficient to get a 5 year lead, we are burning hundreds of billions on machines that are 30% efficient to get a 1 year lead.
> most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong
I was so expecting to find this wind-up aimed at those peddling the "AI is hype" laziness.
It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on, and the deductions can be made, just not clearly to people who need to study a lot more.
It's like watching an invisible train (visible to those with strong CS) rolling down the tracks at a leisurely pace. Those sitting in their stalled car on the tracks are busy tweeting about "AI HPY PE TRAIN." Until it wrecks their car, the gimmick is free oxygen. It's a lot easier to write articles than it is to build GPUs and write programs.
> It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on
So, what CS fundamentals do you need to evaluate if AI is the real thing, or will disappoint in the future? Until a few months ago, coding agents were met with skepticism, until Anthropic introduced their new model and, with it, a hype train that cannot be rationally justified. Look, SOTA LLMs, and coding agents in particular, are impressive. However, current predictions about the future of software development (and the world in general) are speculative. There is little to no data showing whether AI can deliver on its promises. How could there be in this short time frame? No one knows what the future will hold, no one knows how coding agents will be integrated into our work life and everyday life in the long run, or what hard limitations they will reveal. No one can tell you how professions will change in the coming years; every prediction is purely speculative, and anyone making prophecies is either trying to cope with the uncertainty themselves or has some stakes in the AI bet. It would be nice if people were actually humble enough to admit that they have no idea what will happen in the future, instead of writing the hundredth doom and gloom post.
> However, current predictions about the future of software development (and the world in general) are speculative.
It's amazing to me how those willing to seize on the speculative nature of any ANY uncertainty cannot recognize the inherent uncertainty of the inverse.
> what CS fundamentals do you need
1. Tarski's undefinability theorem 2. Gödel's incompleteness theorems 3. Curry Howard correspondence
And a lot of exposure to deductive reasoning, vague ideas of automated theorem proving and formalization.
I won't pretend its easy, but let's be clear, a small fraction of people who know things are being forced to entertain the hysteria of a vast majority who are unwilling to know things and just go around beating their chests and will continue doing so until the train hits them.
There are 2-3 minor architectural changes in between now and what I would identify as a completely unbounded AGI with clearly discernible dynamic, self-defined objective functions and self-defined procedures for training and inference. It can be done in megabytes. Oh god. Get me out of this forum. I wish to return to my code editor.
What exactly are you claiming here? That a handful of theorems about the limits of mathematics and provability somehow combine to show that the current LLM-based AI developments will inevitably live up to what is expected of them? And that this is obvious to a select few? That all seems unlikely, to say the least.
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
I work for an old enterprise, so far rather conservative with LLM/AI usage. However the copilot cli adoption in the last 2 weeks is spreading light wild fire. Codex 5.3, a good instructions file and it works. Features are getting done and delivered in days, proper test coverage is done, proper documentation in place. Onboarding to it is also very fast.
Can you give an example of such features?
Porting tons of untyped js legacy front end code to vue with typescript and figma designs. Highly configurable business to business app (i.e lots of permutations). Everyone seems to have a “system”. I recommend looking at the OpenAI Cookbook for long running plans and do TDD to the extreme. https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/articles/codex_exec_p...
What's the feature that was built though? This sounds like low-value refactoring. They are fundamentally different development workflows.
Many of my industry friends and I were skeptics about all the things the OP mentions, still am. And yet, I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now.
It's different just like the steam engine was different, except technology moves much 100x faster now than it did then. It's different and the same.
What job are you in where you can even come up with problems that -need- 30-40k lines of code a day?
And how do you know they are nearly perfect?
My 20k lines of unit tests say so?
Just because tests pass does not mean that they're testing the right thing to begin with. Reviewing tests is as important, if not even more important than reviewing code.
If you are pushing 40k lines of code per day you are an idiot and should be fired.
yeah... maybe he is working alone or bootstrapping a brand new thing?
Otherwise his entire team must collectively groan when a Slack message appears: "Got a new PR ready for review everybody!"
> "I am able to push 30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day now."
It is physically and physiologically impossible for anyone to be reviewing "30-40K lines of nearly perfect code a day" to the extent needed to push it with confidence in a sensible development process.
do you understand every line of code you churn out?
> 3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.
I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
I'd say AR & VR were hyped to be as big as AI is now, but just haven't fully delivered on the promise yet. 3D printing was similarly hyped for a time. Same with blockchain. Nuclear power in the 50s was hyped to be the future of energy.
The point is to take the hype with a grain of salt and knowledge that not all hyped technologies transformed the world as promised. Maybe AI is like the internet or electricity. But maybe the claims about AGI/ASI and full automation are just hype.
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.
It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
There's another point, too. Detractors say LLMs will never advance to whatever threshold they consider meaningful. Fine. We're working on other paradigms, too, though. Just because a lot of o people are productizing LLMs doesn't mean the state of the art isn't advancing in parallel and AGI isn't in the cards.
Agree, LLMs are just another tool. Treating them as chatbots is a very basic way of using them. The future is intelligent engineers embedding them in traditional systems and having them perform specific roles.
to me, ai seems likely to become a new user interface, just like gui did from cli.
abstract away a lot of the mechanics of working with data/information.
helpful, when literacy seems to be trending in a downward direction.
Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?
Their Ninebot escooters are pretty damn good, far better than most random brands.
I spent most of Covid in VRChat and met my current live-in gf, so the metaverse was real for me too.
I also made decent money selling crypto, so that part was real for me too.
And AI coding, for as dumb as even the best models are, still enabled me to create things that I wanted to, but wouldn't have had time or gotten nearly as far without.
I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it.
Maybe if they could let go of some of the cynicism, they could find something to be optimistic about. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned, but that doesn't mean nothing is good.
> I dunno if the author realizes, but all the things they mentioned did materialize in one way or another, just not exactly how the hype described it.
From the post, which is not a very long one: "All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists"
Fair, I read the whole post but I guess that part didn't register, maybe because I never fullheartedly believe marketing fluff to begin with. Maybe this person has too much contact with "AI will fix everything" types, and not enough with actual scientists who are really developing novel methods better than anything before, piece by piece.
I also found the "it's almost always dudes" line a bit strange, because I've seen plenty of women doing marketing for startups running on hype.
Heh - that went right off the cliff, when... well, I will let the reader research that themselves...
The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".
That’s dark. But.. accurate.
I see hoverboards everywhere, which are the self balancing scooter tech from the Segway. Many little ebikes as well making deliveries.
75% of restaurant orders are delivery now due to widespread personal electric transportation. It already has fundamentally changed humanity.
https://youtu.be/KOSUEFqszK8
A very cynical article.
Actually IT IS different. Actually if they manage to create a viable small nuclear reactors or Quantum computers the world will change like it changed with the Watt thermal engine.
Why he is not talking about the Internet, trains, electricity, nuclear bombs, rockets,aviation or engines? Because they worked, like AI works today.
All of them were bubbles at the time and they changed the world forever. AI is changing the world AND it is a bubble.
AI is here to stay. It will improve and it will have consequences. The fact that a robot could do things with its hands is actually significant, whenever you like it or not.
Said elsewhere on this post... "AI is a bubble!" "AI will change everything!"
Is just propaganda...
Iran is 2 weeks from a nuclear weapon We obliterated Iran's nuclear dreams
Russia is fighting with shovels Russia is on the verge of swarming Europe
What would Joost Meerloo say about it, I wonder.
For me, this captures it:
"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
- Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"
When non-programmers make sweeping statements about LLMs.
Deep disconnect from reality.
If you can't distinguish the actual utility and progress of AI from it's annoying hype-men then it's hard to take your dismissal of AI seriously.
Failure to appreciate changes in AI will have left you calling every shot wrong over the past 5 years. While AI models continue to improve at an exponential rate, you'll cling to your facile maxims like "dude it's just predicting the next token it isn't real intelligence".
This Andrew Klavan interview on AI is worth your time, if not an independent submission:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw
"Today, I'm speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and and George D. Montañez, Director of the AMISTAD Lab at Harvey Mudd College–both of whom are extremely knowledgable on the topic of artificial intelligence. During the course of our conversation, they discuss the asymmetry between human intelligence & AI, the inability of AI to ascribe meaning to raw data, and the limitations of large language models. The real question though is: are we screwed? Let's find out."
I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows.
We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.
The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.
If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.
Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.
[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors.
"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.
"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.
"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.
And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.
I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
Is this “nothing ever happens”
Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application.
What is meta-technology?
Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations
Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.
Lazy.
Use the reader view button.
For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it?
for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?
I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way.
New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.
OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.
I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
Just chiming in to say thanks for the Pratchett quote! I dare say he's about to beat out Douglass Adams for my top author. Feets of Clay and Hogfather should be must reads for people dealing with AI right now imo.
You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.
I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
> For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world.
Well, no, the ratio is most definitely not 1-to-1.
The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.
MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.
Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.
I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.
Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.
Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
> write an article dismissing ai
> usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini
the jokes write themselves
That's the most recent time. But I've bounced around all the LLMs - they're all superficially amazing. But if you understand their output they often wrong in both subtle and catastrophic ways.
As I said, maybe I'm wrong. I hope you have fun using them.
Unrelated to the conversation but:
> Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I like that, going to use it as the motivation to get some things out of my own head.
Yes! More blogging :-)
Why do you think that solar+battery technology or MRNA vaccines haven't been written about in excited, hype-filled ways? If a technology is successful, then looking at past accounts of that technology and why it will change the world don't come across to you reading it now as hype, they come across as a description of something normal about the world.
The web? GLP-1s? 5G? The newton was mega-hyped, failed but Apple came back with the iPhone. All the dot com failures that eventually became viable businesses (so viable in-fact that sfgate has to reach back 26 years to write their stinkpiece [1])
Hype is often early, in 10-20 years we'll start seeing the value as the rest of the world catches up
https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/rise-fall-bay-area-start...
It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.
This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.
"You shouldn't eat that."
"Why not?"
"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."
"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"
"(lists names of prior victims)"
"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."
The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."
If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):
https://theblundervault.substack.com/p/the-segway-delusion-w...
Nuclear weapons - this time is different
Internet - this time is different
iPhone - this time is different
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
That sounds like an interesting article. You should write it.
Or have an LLM write it and then we can judge whether the OP is wrong about whether "this time is different".
I would suggest editing the title to "This Time is Different". I think that captures the essence much better.
Love the Sir Terry reference.
I wonder if that was an automated HN edit?
Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.
Usually HN only auto-edits on first submission. If you go in and undo it manually as the submitter, you can force it to read how you intend.
Maybe I'm only noticing the times when it messes things up, but it kinda seems like these auto-edits cause a lot of confusion that could be avoided if they were shown up-front to submitters, who would then have the option to undo them.
Or maybe judicious use of an LLM here could be helpful. Replace the auto-edits with a prompt? Ask an LLM to judge whether the auto-edited title still retains its original meaning? Run the old and new titles through an embedding model and make sure they still point in roughly the same direction?
oh interesting, TIL I can go edit my submission titles! That's useful, I've definitely submitted stuff and gotten a less-good title due to the automated fixes, so I'll have to pay attention to this next time
And the HTTP headers
Agreed--I clicked to read an article about the physics of time or something. Was sorely disappointed.
Title got mangled somehow, the original title is "This time is different".