More less you could say similar things about most of the crypto space too. I think maybe it's because we're at the point where a lot of things that tech can do, it's more than capable of doing, but they're just not easy to do out of a dorm room and without a lot of domain knowledge.
I disagree. The hype is wearing people down and making it think it's a waste of time but LLMs just came out a couple years back and even the trendline from the past decade (pre-LLMs) is up up up.
The amount of interest to explore this opportunity is worth it. The bubble is worth it. I don't think it's lost years, and even if it is, the technology is compelling enough to make the gamble worth it.
The fatigue of reading the same shit over and over again makes people forget that it's only a couple years. It also makes people forget how ground breaking and paradigm shifting this technology was. People are complaining about how stupid LLMs are when possibly just 5 years back no one could even predict that that such levels of intelligence in machinese was even possible.
It’s not just the AI bubble. Think of all the public services, rights, and scientific and medical research being destroyed by rightwing extremists and their billionaire enablers. It will take years, decades perhaps, to undo the damage they’ve already done, in just over 6 months in power.
The amount of money that's been spent on AI related investments over the past 2-5 years really has been astonishing - like single digit percentage points of GDP astonishing.
I think it's clear to at there are productivity boosts to be had from applying this technology to fields like programming. If you completely disagree with that statement I have a hunch that nothing could convince you otherwise at this point.
But at what point could those productivity boosts offset the overall spend? (If we assume we don't get to some weird AGI that upturns all forms of economics.)
Two points of comparison. Open source has been credibly estimated to have provided over 8 trillion dollars of value to the global economy over the past few decades: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 - could AI-assisted programming provide a similar boost over the next decade or so?
The buildout of railways in the 1800s took resources comparable to the AI buildout of the past few years and lost a lot of investors a lot of money, but are regarded as a huge economic boost despite those losses.
While I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view, there's another angle here too. The largesse of investment on a vague idea means that lots of other ideas get funding, incidentally.
Every VC pitch is about some ground-breaking tech or unassailable moat that will be built around a massive SAM; in reality early traction is all about solving that annoying and stupid problem your customers hate doing but that you can do for them. The disconnect between the extraordinary pitch and the mundane shipped solution is the core of so much business.
That same disconnect also means that a lot of real and good problems will be solved with money that was meant for AGI but ends up developing other, good technology.
My biggest fear is that we are not investing in the basic, atoms-based tech that we need in the US to not be left behind in the cheap energy future: batteries, solar, and wind is being gutted right now due to chaotic government behavior, the actions of madmen that are incapable of understanding the economy today, much less where tech will take it in 5-10 years. We are also underinvesting in basics like housing, or construction tech. Hopefully some of the AI money goes to fixing those gaping holes in the country's capital allocation.
ZIRP->AI/enshitification is the one-two punch combo that I think is going to devastate our economy for 50 years or more. We have an entire generation of executives, financiers and government that have only ever operated in an era of free money.
They've never had to generate a real return, create a product of real value, etc. This wave-of/gamble-on AI slop just shows that they don't even know what value looks like. We've operated for ~40 years on a promise of...something.
I wonder about the world where, instead of investing in AI, everyone invested in API.
Like, surfacing APIs, fostering interoperability... I don't want an AI agent, but I might be interested in an agent operating with fixed rules, and with a limited set of capabilities.
Instead we're trying to train systems to move a mouse in a browser and praying it doesn't accidentally send 60 pairs of shoes to a random address in Topeka.
I've been watching this my whole life. UML, SOA, Mongo, cloud, blockchain, now LLMs, probably 10 others in between. When tools are new there's a collective mania between VCs, execs, and engineers that this tool unlike literally every other one doesn't have trade offs that make it only an appropriate choice in some situations. Sometimes the trade offs aren't discoverable in the nascent stage, a lot of it is monkey-see-monkey-do which is the case even today with React and cloud as default IMHO. LLMs are great but they're just a tool.
>What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better?
What could have been if instead of crypto trillions were invested in something actually useful? What about the housing bubble of which we learned nothing as we are falling into it again?
There is a lot of stinky garbage in AI, but at least you can rescue some value from it, in fact it could be most of the activity out there, but you only notice what stinks.
> What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better?
This is a bit like the question "what if we spent our time developing technology to help people rather than developing weapons for war?"
The answer is that, the only reason you were able to get so many people working on the same thing at once, was because of the pressing need at hand (that "need" could be real or merely perceived). Without that, everyone would have their own various ideas about what projects are the best use of their time, and would be progressing in much smaller steps in a bunch of different directions.
To put it another way - instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later.
the recent stackoverflow survey said that only 25% of developers are actually happy at work https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/work#job-satisfaction-j... . Gallup said its only 33% of employees are engaged in the economy in general. Not everyone gets to go to conferences and network for Godot game engine like the author, most are doing super repetitive jobs. I definitely want an AI to automate as many as possible ASAP
A lot of how I use AI is to assist me to build the software manually. I focus 1 function and ask it to fix or implement it. That's a good way to use AI. But if you mean using AI to improve existing systems, I also think that's being a done a lot. For instance, you know Krita the KDE drawing program? They naturally added a way to prompt image generation, based on your initial doodles, which makes a lot of sense.
Maybe the epitome of shoving AI into everything is Gemini showing up in my Gmail to help me write (which I do not need) but their spam filters still allowing obvious phishing emails through.
I understand organizationally how this happens, and the incentives that build such a monstrosity but it’s still objectively a shame.
>There isn’t a single day where I don’t have to deal with software that’s broken but no one cares to fix
Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal computers. It continues to today.
This is another genre of AI article that annoys me: The one where the author starts by agreeing with you that AI is a definitely a bubble, and we’re gonna just “know” that for the rest of the article, no argument necessary.
I don’t feel like this article is trying to start a conversation, it wants to end the conversation so we can have dessert (aka, catastrophizing about the outcome of the thing “we know” is bad).
> What could have been if instead of spending so much energy and resources on developing “AI features” we focused on making our existing technology better?
The implied answer to this question really just misunderstands the tradeoffs of the world. We had plenty of money and effort going into our technology before AI, and we got... B2B SaaS, mostly.
I don't disagree that the world would be better off if all of the money going into so many things (SaaS, crypto, social media, AI, etc.) was better allocated to things that made the world better, but in order for that to happen, we would have to be in a very different system of resource allocation than capitalism. The issue there is that capitalism has been absolutely core to the many, many advances in technology that have been hugely beneficial to society, and you if you want to allocate resources differently than the way capitalism does, you lose all of those benefits and probably end up worse off as a result (see the many failures of communism).
> So I ask: Why is adding AI the priority here? What could have been if the investment went into making these apps better?
> I’m not naive. What motivates people to include AI everywhere is the promise of profit. What motivates most AI startups or initiatives is just that. A promise.
I would honestly call this more arrogant than naive. Doesn't sound like OP has worked at any of the companies that make these apps, but he feels comfortable coming in here and presuming to know why they haven't spent their resources working on the things he thinks are most important.
He's saying that they're not fixing issues with core functionality but instead implementing AI because they want to make profit, but generally the sorts of very severe issues with core functionality that he's describing are pretty damaging to the revenue prospects of a company. I don't know if those issues are much less severe than he's describing or if there's something else going on with prioritization. I don't know if the whole AI implementation was competitive with fixing those - maybe it was just an intern given a project, and that's why it sucks.
I have no idea why they've prioritized the things they have, and neither does the author. But just deciding that they're not fixing the right things because they implemented an AI feature that he doesn't like is not a particularly valid leap of logic.
> Tech executives are robbing every investor blind.
They are not. Again, guy with a blog here is deciding that he knows more than the investors about the things they're investing in. Come on. The investors want AI! Whether that's right or wrong, it's ridiculous to suggest they're being robbed blind.
> Unfortunately, people making decisions (if there are any) only chase ghosts and short term profits. They don’t think that they are crippling their companies and dooming their long term profitability.
If there are any? Again, come on. And chasing short term profits? That is obviously and demonstrably incorrect - in the short term, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and everybody else is losing money on AI. In the long term, I'm going to trust that Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, whether you like them or hate them, have a whole lot better idea of whether or not they're going to be profitable in the long term than the author.
This reads like somebody who's mad that the things he wants to be funded aren't being funded and is blaming it on the big technology of the day then trying to back into a justification for that blame.
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadThe amount of interest to explore this opportunity is worth it. The bubble is worth it. I don't think it's lost years, and even if it is, the technology is compelling enough to make the gamble worth it.
The fatigue of reading the same shit over and over again makes people forget that it's only a couple years. It also makes people forget how ground breaking and paradigm shifting this technology was. People are complaining about how stupid LLMs are when possibly just 5 years back no one could even predict that that such levels of intelligence in machinese was even possible.
The amount of money that's been spent on AI related investments over the past 2-5 years really has been astonishing - like single digit percentage points of GDP astonishing.
I think it's clear to at there are productivity boosts to be had from applying this technology to fields like programming. If you completely disagree with that statement I have a hunch that nothing could convince you otherwise at this point.
But at what point could those productivity boosts offset the overall spend? (If we assume we don't get to some weird AGI that upturns all forms of economics.)
Two points of comparison. Open source has been credibly estimated to have provided over 8 trillion dollars of value to the global economy over the past few decades: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4693148 - could AI-assisted programming provide a similar boost over the next decade or so?
The buildout of railways in the 1800s took resources comparable to the AI buildout of the past few years and lost a lot of investors a lot of money, but are regarded as a huge economic boost despite those losses.
Every VC pitch is about some ground-breaking tech or unassailable moat that will be built around a massive SAM; in reality early traction is all about solving that annoying and stupid problem your customers hate doing but that you can do for them. The disconnect between the extraordinary pitch and the mundane shipped solution is the core of so much business.
That same disconnect also means that a lot of real and good problems will be solved with money that was meant for AGI but ends up developing other, good technology.
My biggest fear is that we are not investing in the basic, atoms-based tech that we need in the US to not be left behind in the cheap energy future: batteries, solar, and wind is being gutted right now due to chaotic government behavior, the actions of madmen that are incapable of understanding the economy today, much less where tech will take it in 5-10 years. We are also underinvesting in basics like housing, or construction tech. Hopefully some of the AI money goes to fixing those gaping holes in the country's capital allocation.
They've never had to generate a real return, create a product of real value, etc. This wave-of/gamble-on AI slop just shows that they don't even know what value looks like. We've operated for ~40 years on a promise of...something.
Like, surfacing APIs, fostering interoperability... I don't want an AI agent, but I might be interested in an agent operating with fixed rules, and with a limited set of capabilities.
Instead we're trying to train systems to move a mouse in a browser and praying it doesn't accidentally send 60 pairs of shoes to a random address in Topeka.
Well maybe for you and not the millions of people that use this technology daily.
I think we'd still be talking about Web 3.0 DeFi.
There is a lot of stinky garbage in AI, but at least you can rescue some value from it, in fact it could be most of the activity out there, but you only notice what stinks.
This is a bit like the question "what if we spent our time developing technology to help people rather than developing weapons for war?"
The answer is that, the only reason you were able to get so many people working on the same thing at once, was because of the pressing need at hand (that "need" could be real or merely perceived). Without that, everyone would have their own various ideas about what projects are the best use of their time, and would be progressing in much smaller steps in a bunch of different directions.
To put it another way - instead of building the Great Pyramids, those thousands of workers (likely slaves) could have all individually spent that time building homes for their families. But, those homes wouldn't still be around and remembered millenia later.
I understand organizationally how this happens, and the incentives that build such a monstrosity but it’s still objectively a shame.
Since when does this have anything to do with AI? Commercial/enterprise software has always been this way. If it's not going to cost the company in some measurable way issues can get ignored for years. This kind of stuff was occurring before the internet exists. It boomed with the massive growth of personal computers. It continues to today.
GenAI has almost nothing to do with it.
I don’t feel like this article is trying to start a conversation, it wants to end the conversation so we can have dessert (aka, catastrophizing about the outcome of the thing “we know” is bad).
The implied answer to this question really just misunderstands the tradeoffs of the world. We had plenty of money and effort going into our technology before AI, and we got... B2B SaaS, mostly.
I don't disagree that the world would be better off if all of the money going into so many things (SaaS, crypto, social media, AI, etc.) was better allocated to things that made the world better, but in order for that to happen, we would have to be in a very different system of resource allocation than capitalism. The issue there is that capitalism has been absolutely core to the many, many advances in technology that have been hugely beneficial to society, and you if you want to allocate resources differently than the way capitalism does, you lose all of those benefits and probably end up worse off as a result (see the many failures of communism).
> So I ask: Why is adding AI the priority here? What could have been if the investment went into making these apps better?
> I’m not naive. What motivates people to include AI everywhere is the promise of profit. What motivates most AI startups or initiatives is just that. A promise.
I would honestly call this more arrogant than naive. Doesn't sound like OP has worked at any of the companies that make these apps, but he feels comfortable coming in here and presuming to know why they haven't spent their resources working on the things he thinks are most important.
He's saying that they're not fixing issues with core functionality but instead implementing AI because they want to make profit, but generally the sorts of very severe issues with core functionality that he's describing are pretty damaging to the revenue prospects of a company. I don't know if those issues are much less severe than he's describing or if there's something else going on with prioritization. I don't know if the whole AI implementation was competitive with fixing those - maybe it was just an intern given a project, and that's why it sucks.
I have no idea why they've prioritized the things they have, and neither does the author. But just deciding that they're not fixing the right things because they implemented an AI feature that he doesn't like is not a particularly valid leap of logic.
> Tech executives are robbing every investor blind.
They are not. Again, guy with a blog here is deciding that he knows more than the investors about the things they're investing in. Come on. The investors want AI! Whether that's right or wrong, it's ridiculous to suggest they're being robbed blind.
> Unfortunately, people making decisions (if there are any) only chase ghosts and short term profits. They don’t think that they are crippling their companies and dooming their long term profitability.
If there are any? Again, come on. And chasing short term profits? That is obviously and demonstrably incorrect - in the short term, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and everybody else is losing money on AI. In the long term, I'm going to trust that Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, whether you like them or hate them, have a whole lot better idea of whether or not they're going to be profitable in the long term than the author.
This reads like somebody who's mad that the things he wants to be funded aren't being funded and is blaming it on the big technology of the day then trying to back into a justification for that blame.