Comment by minimaxir
3 days ago
You are attempting to move the goalposts. There are two different points in this debate:
1) Modern LLMs are an inflection point for coding.
2) The current LLM ecosystem is unsustainable.
This submission discussion is only about #1, which #2 does not invalidate. Even if the ecosystem crashes, then open-source LLMs that leverage the same tricks Opus 4.5 does will just be used instead.
But it's only an inflection point if it's sustainable. When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?
I said open-source models, not locally-hosted models. Essentially, more power to inference-only providers such as Groq and Together AI which host the large-scale OSS LLMs who will be less affected by a crash as long as the demand for coding agents is there.
> When this comes crashing down, how many people are going to be buying $70k GPUs to run an open source model?
If the AI thing does indeed come crashing down I expect there will be a whole lot of second-hand GPUs going for pennies on the dollar.
Ok, and then? Taking a one time discount on a rapidly depreciating asset doesn’t magically make this whole industry profitable, and it’s not like you’re going to start running a GB200 in your basement.
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Checked your history. From a fellow skeptic, I know how hard it is to reason with people around here. You and I need to learn to let it go. In the end, the people at the top have set this up so that either way, they win. And we're down here telling the people at our level to stop feeding the monster, but told to fuck off anyways.
So cool bro, you managed to ship a useless (except for your specific use-case) app to your iphone in an hour :O
What I think this is doing is it's pitting people against the fact that most jobs in the modern economy (mine included btw) are devoid of purpose. This is something that, as a person on the far left, I've understood for a long time. However, a lot (and I mean a loooooot) of people have never even considered this. So when they find that an AI agent is able to do THEIR job for them in a fraction of the time, they MUST understand it as the AI being some finality to human ingenuity and progress given the self-importance they've attributed to themselves and their occupation - all this instead of realizing that, you know, all of our jobs are useless, we all do the exact same useless shit which is extremely easy to replicate quickly (except for a select few occupations) and that's it.
I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't. I say this, again, as someone who beyond their PhD thesis (and even then) does not produce anything of value to the world, while being paid handsomely for it.
> if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.
This doesn’t logically follow. AI agents produce loads of value. Cotton picking was and still is useful. The cotton gin didn’t replace useless work. It replaced useful work. Same with agents.
> You and I need to learn to let it go.
Definitely, it’s an unhealthy fixation.
> I'm sorry to tell anyone who's reading this with a differing opinion, but if AI agents have proven revolutionary to your job, you produced nothing of actual value for the world before their advent, and still don't.
I agree with this, but I think my take on it is a lot less nihilistic than yours. I think people vastly undersell how much effort they put into doing something, even if that something is vibecoding a slop app that probably exists. But if people are literally prompting claude with a few sentences and getting revolutionary results, then yes, their job was meaningless and they should find something to do that they’re better at.
But what frustrates me the most about this whole hype wave isn’t just that the powers that be have bet the entire economy on a fake technology, it’s that it’s sucking all of of the air out of the room. I think most people’s jobs can actually provide value and there’s so much work to be done to make _real_ progress. But instead of actually improving the world, all the time, money, and energy is being thrown into such a wasteful technology that is actively making the world a worse place. I’m sure it’s always been like this and I was just to naive too see it, but I much preferred it when at least the tech companies pretended they cared about the impact their products had on society rather than simply trying to extract the most value out of the same 5 ideas.
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