Comment by dbcpp
2 months ago
The thing that drives me crazy is that it isn't even clear if AI is providing economic value yet (am I missing something there?). Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.
The messaging from AI companies is "we're going to cure cancer" and "you're going to live to be 150 years old" (I don't believe these claims!). The messaging should be "everything will be cheaper" (but this hasn't come true yet!).
> Right now trillions of dollars are being spent on a speculative technology that isn't benefitting anyone right now.
It has enormous benefits to the people who control the companies raking in billions in investor funding.
And to the early stage investors who see the valuations skyrocket and can sell their stake to the bagholders.
Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?
It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.
Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.
If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.
People attacked leaded gasoline as a collosal mistake even as the fuel corporations promoted it.
"Because people attack it, it therefore means it's good" is a overly reductionist logical fallacy.
Sometimes people resist for good reasons.
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> If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important
I don't think that's such a great signal: people were viciously attacking NFTs.
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"vicious"? Temper your emotions a bit.
In fact I would make a converse statement to yours - you can be certain that a product is grift, if the slightest criticism or skepticism of it is seen as a "vicious attack" and shouted down.
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I've tested the "emerging new thing", and it's utter trash.
I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT report that "found AI to be a flop" (remember the "MIT study finds almost every AI initiative fails"), that also found that virtually every single worker is using AI (just not company AI, hence the flop part).
At this point, it's only people with an ideological opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.
Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.
The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.
When I can replace a CAD license that costs $250/usr/mo with an applet written by gemini in an hour, that's a hard tangible gain.
Did Gemini write a CAD program? Absolutely not. But do I need 100% of the CAD program's feature set? Absolutely not. Just ~2% of it for what we needed.
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You’re attacking one or two examples mentioned in their comment, when we could step back and see that in reality you’re pushing against the general scientific consensus. Which you’re free to do, but I suspect an ideological motivation behind it.
To me, the arguments sound like “there’s no proof typewriters provide any economic value to the world, as writers are fast enough with a pen to match them and the bottleneck of good writing output for a novel or a newspaper is the research and compilation parts, not the writing parts. Not to mention the best writers swear by writing and editing with a pen and they make amazing work”.
All arguments that are not incorrect and that sound totally reasonable in the moment, but in 10 years everyone is using typewriters and there are known efficiency gains for doing so.
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It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...
The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up
> I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.
Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.
I’m a senior developer and it has been hugely helpful for me in both saving time and effort and improving the quality of my output.
You’re making a lot of confident statements and not backing them up with anything except your feelings on the matter.
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If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.
I kinda agree. We've been told for years it's a "massive productivity multiplier", and not just an iterative improvement.
So you expect to see the results of that. The AAA games being released faster, of higher quality, and at a lower cost to develop. You expect Microsoft (one of the major investors and proponents) to be releasing higher quality updates. You expect new AI-developed competitors for entrenched high-value software products.
If all that was true, it doesn't matter what people do or don't argue on the internet, it doesn't matter if people whine, you don't need to proselytize LLMs on the internet, in that world people not using is just an advantage to your own relative productivity in the market.
Surely by now the results will be visible anyway.
So where are they?
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I have never seen a counter-argument to this. Why its being forced on the world? Lets here some execs from these companies answer that. My bet is on silence every time. Microsoft is forcing AI chat applications into the OS and preventing people from removing it.
You could easily have a side application that people could enable by choice, yet its not happening, we have to roll with this new technology, knowing that its going to make the world a worse place to live in when we are not able to chose how and when we get our information.
Its not just about feeling threatened. its also about feeling like I am going to get cut off from the method I want to use to find information. I don't want a chat bot to do it for me, I want to find and discern information for myself.
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Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.
Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.
I'm both, I have a day job and run a side business as well. My partner has her own business (full time) and uses AI heavily too.
None of these are tech jobs, but we both have used AI to avoid paying for expensive bloated software.
I'm a worker, I love AI and all my coworkers love AI.
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Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.
Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots and image generators.
AI has a massive positive impact, and has for decades.
> Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots
And as long as that used to be the case, not many people revolted.
Sure, but that honestly isn't the part which is getting trillions of imaginary dollars are being pumped into. Science AI is in the best of cases is getting the scraps I would say.
Yeah, comparing this with research investments into fusion power, I expect fusion power to yield far more benefit (although I could be wrong), and sooner.
What I’m afraid of is the combination of cheap fusion power and AI. ;)
Well it made the Taco Bell drive through better. So there's that.
Genuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)
You talk to an AI that goes incredibly slow and tries to get you to add extras to your order. I would say it has made the experience more annoying for me personally. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things but just another small step in the direction of making things worse. Although you could break the whole thing by ordering 18000 waters which is funny.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgyk2p55g8o.amp
I think it is a reference to this previous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45162220
AI Darwin Awards 2025 Nominee: Taco Bell Corporation for deploying voice AI ordering systems at 500+ drive-throughs and discovering that artificial intelligence meets its match at “extra sauce, no cilantro, and make it weird."
Andrej talked about this in a podcast with dwarkesh: the same is true for the internet. You will not find a massive spike when LLMs were released. It becomes embedded in the economy and you’ll see a gradual rise. Further, the kind of impact that the internet had took decades, the same will be true for LLMs.
You could argue that if I started marketing dog shit too though. The trick is only applying your argument to the things that will go on to be good. No one’s quite there yet. Probably just around the corner though.
How convenient for people like Andrej. He can make any wild claim he likes about the impact but never has to show it, "trust me bro".
It's the Red Queen hypothesis in action - AI is a relative and compounding capability with influence across broad sectors; the cost of losing out for the parties involved is severely more than the cost of over-investing. It's collective rational panic.
It’s definitely providing some value but it’s incredibly overvalued. Much like the dot com bust didn’t mean that online websites were bad or useless technology, only that people over invested into a bubble.
Are you waiting for things to get cheaper? Have you been around the last 20 years or so? Nothing gets cheaper for consumers in a capitalist society.
I remember in Canada, in 2001 right when americans were at war with the entire middle east and gas prices for the first time went over a dollar a litre. People kept saying that it was understandable that it affected gas prices because the supply chain got more expensive. It never went below a dollar since. Why would it? You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away? Or would you maybe take the difference as profits? Since then it seems the industry has learned to have its supply exclusively in war zones, we're at 1.70$ now. Pipeline blows up in Russia? Hike. China snooping around Taiwan? Hike. US bombing Yemen? Hike. Israel committing genocide? Hike. ISIS? Hike.
There is no scenario where prices go down except to quell unrest. AI will not make anything cheaper.
>You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away?
The thing about capitalism that is seemingly never taught, but quickly learned (when you join even the lowest rung of the capitalist class, i.e. even having an etsy shop), is that competition lowers prices and kills greed, while being a tool of greed itself.
The conspiracy to get around this cognitive dissonance is "price fixing", but in order to price fix you cannot be greedy, because if you are greedy and price fix, your greed will drive you to undercut everyone else in the agreement. So price fixing never really works, except those like 3 cases out of the hundreds of billions of products sold daily, that people repeat incessantly for 20 years now.
Money flows to the one with the best price, not the highest price. The best price is what makes people rich. When the best price is out of reach though, people will drum up conspiracy about it, which I guess should be expected.
Except petrol is significantly cheaper than it was once you account for inflation.
And once you account for externalities, is it still cheaper?
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For who?
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Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.
Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.
Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.
Education, health care, housing...
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buzzer sound
Zero incorporation of externalities. Food is less nutritious and raises healthcare costs. Clothing is less durable and has to be re-bought more often, and also sheds microplastics, which raises healthcare costs. Decent TVs are still big-ticket items, and you have to buy a separate sound system to meet the same sonic fidelity as old CRT TVs, and you HAVE to pay for internet (if not for content, often just to set up the device), AND everything you do on the device is sent to the manufacturer to sell (this is the actual subsidy driving down prices), which contributes to tech/social media engagement-driven, addiction-oriented, psychology-destroying panopticon, which... raises healthcare costs.
>Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped.
Energy bill.
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You are correct that the AI industry has produced no value for the economy, but the speculation on AI is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy from dropping into an economic cataclysm. The US economy has been dependent on the idea of infinite growth through innovation since 2008, and the tech industry is all out of innovation. So the only thing they can do is keep building datacenters and pray that an AGI somehow wakes up when they hit the magic number of GPUs. Then the elites can finally kill off all the proles like they've been itching to since the Communist Manifesto was first written.