Comment by jwpapi
17 hours ago
I have to give them kudos. This whole thing is the greatest swindle of all time.
AI has some use cases, but not at the price it’s currently priced at. I’ve been on AI since GPT-2 with a lot of heavy users. Every user has the same story, curiosity, surprise, hype, hate, realization. Enterprise is usually a bit behind and are right now at hype cycle, that’s where they sold all the deals and do the IPO.
It’s really a VC masterclass.
Don’t get me wrong there is are useful cases of AI, but not the way the want it to be. Quite similar to Blockchain. The idea of decentralized money has right to exist. 99% of other coins not.
AI is a faster, but still less accurate search engine. AI is great in finding bugs, it’s great at ruber duck debugging.
The reason I call it a swindle is, because along with the marketing it gives tons of people in the world the impression, they can now build their own startup, game, infra etc without the need to learn it themselves. This leads to millions of abandoned and low qualiy projects and products, because the vast majority has never built the mental modal necessary to solve the problem thoroughly. In the end they’ve wasted months and money (but burnt tokens). This is what I call a swindle.
All early adaptors I know have not drastically winded down their usage, not because of money, but because there is no new case. If you want to explore a new project you can get onboarded quickly learn a lot and then switch to documentation and live testing. For me usage is the lowest it has been the last 2 years.
I would not let AI touch my code. I have anxiety around it, because it will gripple back up. I will let it read my code and let me know what I did wrong so I’m sharpening myself.
100s of companies including open source solution can offer that for me.
All my non-tech friends are now in hype cycle and share their hype and fore forseeable frustration with me.
I have to say I’m in a way impressed in how AI has been rigorously vc-utilized (conciously or not-conciously) to generate these vast companies with the whole world watching.
Trying to parse the raw claims here maybe you can help me out
- it’s a swindle because ROI of tokens for coding models is not positive? As in it doesn’t bring enough value to charge like the $100/mo?
- enterprise customers are too dumb to see this
- IPO to max out the CEO profits for what is ultimately blockchain vaporware
Am I getting that right? Or am I putting words in your mouth?
> it gives tons of people in the world the impression, they can now build their own startup, game, infra etc without the need to learn it themselves.
I can’t speak for peoples beliefs and motivations, but this seems to be strawmanning, no? AI is a powerful tool to force multiply people. You can’t just prompt “build me an enterprise SaaS app worth $1B” or “build me GTA6 and don’t hallucinate” but is that your impression of what’s happening? Dario and Sam are saying “if you buy our coding agent subscription you can build a game with zero skill and one shot and then be rich”?
If you don’t find value in AI agents I can see reasons why that could easily be true today. Also if it just gives you the heebie-jeebies. But to say it’s a swindle on par with the blockchain I think that contradicts an enormous amount of signals and also the actual dialogue (not just headline sound bytes) around what these systems are capable of today and what we expect them to do say at the end of the year.
You kind of got it right, but the biggest loser of them all are the investors especially the index investors. They don’t even decide what they invest in but the savings that goes in funds need to invest in these stocks.
It’s quite an elaborate swindle obviously. But you generate hype with underselling your core product, you claim way more usability then there is. Users will experience usability initially. Everything multiplies with each other and then you put it on the market. Everybody involved makes money and you’ve succesfully extracted money from everyone who’s invested in NASDAQ index funds at the very least.
> Dario and Sam are saying “if you buy our coding agent subscription you can build a game with zero skill and one shot and then be rich”?
That’s Anthropics marketing, yes.
Also their offering is not uniqe that justifies a 1 trillion valuation. The first companies are already rowing back. It’s a really certain time window that they are about to hit now with their IPOs
The companies that have signed these enterprise deals haven’t done a ROI analysis. They had Fomo.
> you generate hype with underselling your core product, you claim there’s way more usability than there is
Isn’t this a contradiction?
> Everything multiplies with each other and then you put it on the market. Everybody involved makes money and you’ve succesfully extracted money from everyone who’s invested in NASDAQ index funds at the very least.
Sorry I may have totally missed what you’re saying here. Anyone in S&P has already made a lot of money thanks to effects from these companies. No one has to invest in an index fund. Markets have risk…
> That’s Anthropics marketing, yes.
Show me.
> Also their offering is not uniqe that justifies a 1 trillion valuation. The first companies are already rowing back.
That there is competition doesn’t imply they aren’t worth 1 trillion.
> The companies that have signed these enterprise deals haven’t done a ROI analysis. They had Fomo.
Also…wrong. I have seen the data at my company, everyone at scale tracks this.
> Dario and Sam are saying “if you buy our coding agent subscription you can build a game with zero skill and one shot and then be rich”?
They are saying profitable companies should replace the engineers that built their systems with a subscription (while they are hiring).
Can you point to any quotes or claims? I don’t think this is accurate
I don’t remember ever hearing Dario or Sam recommend replacing people. Rather they say that smaller groups of people can do more work, so hiring will slow because small teams can do more.
The only times when people talk about actual full replacement of people is always when they are talking about some “future AGI” that is far more capable than the tools we have today.