GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
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Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#2There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops.
The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#3It's 1999 again.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#4Feels like 2000 all over again.
The arms race to throw money at anything has "AI" in their business name is the same thing I saw back in 2000. No business plan, just some idea to somehow monetize the internet and VC's were doing the exact same thing. Throwing tons of good money after bad.
Although you can make an argument this is different, in a lot of ways, its just feels the same thing. The same energy, the same half baked ideas trying to get a few million to get something off the ground.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#5Feels like 2000 all over again. The arms race to throw money at anything has "AI" in their business name is the same thing I saw back in 2000. No business plan, just some idea to somehow monetize the internet and VC's were doing the exact same thing. Throwing tons of good money after bad. Although you can make an argument this is different, in a lot of ways, its just feels the same thing. The same energy, the same ha…
I imagine it is the same, but 2000 was hardly a dead end. So there will be lots burned but keep on at it as the tech will revolutionize the world.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#6It's 1999 again.
Truly, except now everyone's online and spending time online and spending cash online.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#7I think vibe coding will get good enough that things like vercel's "0 to POC" thing are going to stick around.
I think AI-powered IDE features will stick around. One notable head-and-shoulders-above-non-AI-competitor feature I've seen is "very very fuzzy search". I can ask AI "I think there's something in the code that inserts MyMessage into `my.kafka.topic`. But the gosh darn codebase is so convoluted that I literally can't find it. I suspect "my", "kafka", and "topic" all get constructed somewhere to produce that topic name because it doesn't show up in the code as a literal. I also think there's so much indirection between the producer setup and where the "event" actually first gets emitted that MyMessage might not look very much like the actual origination point. Where's the initial origin point?"
Previously, that was "ctrl-shift-F my.kafka.topic" and then ask a staff engineer and hope to God they know off-hand, and if they don't, go read the entire codebase/framework for 16 hours straight until you figure it out.
Now, LLMs have a decent shot at figuring it out.
I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.
But anyone expecting anything like Gen AI (being able to replace a real software engineer, or quality customer support rep, etc) is going to be disappointed.
I also think AI will generally eviscerate the bottoms of industries (expect generic gacha girl-collection games to get a lot of AI art) but also leave people valuing the tops of industries a lot more (lovingly crafted indie games, etc). So now this compute-expensive AI is targeting the already low-margin bottoms of industries. Probably not what VCs want. They want to replace software engineers, not make a slop gacha game cost 1/10th of its already low cost.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#8I'm not shocked. It reminds me a bit of the way some people talk about their personal investing. They'll talk about wins (often exaggerated) and leave out the travails and failures. Next think you know, your friend is telling you about their new day trading plan. :)
Unfortunately, the same thing is playing out here. Nobody likes being the guy that points out the gains are incremental when everyone is bragging about their 100x gains.
And everyone in the management side starts getting, understandably, afraid that their company will miss out on these magical gains.
It is all a recipe for wild overspending on the wrong things.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#9There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.
It's a bubble if the tech or audience wasn't there and capabilities weren't improving weekly.
There's definitely people who don't understand the tech talking about applying it increasing the failure rate of software projects.
Re: GenAI FOMO has spurred businesses to light nearly $40B on fire
#10There’s no question we’re in a “GenAI” bubble, the only question is how big of a smoking crater in the ground is going to be created when this thing pops. The tech isn’t going away, and is cool/useful, but from a business standpoint this whole thing looks like a dumpster fire burning next to a gasoline truck. Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up. When that slows down buckle up.
> Right now VC FOMO is the only thing stopping all that from blowing up
That was probably 2-3 years ago.
I'd be surprised if VCs hadn't already figured out they're in a bubble. They're probably playing a game of chicken to see who will remain to capture the actually profitable use cases.
There's also a number of lawsuits going on against AI companies regarding piracy and copyright. It's already an established fact in the courts that these companies have downloaded ebooks, music, videos, and images illegally to train their models.