How the AI Bubble Will Pop

How the AI Bubble Will Pop
derekthompson.org

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Mania

...and it does seem this time that we aren't even in the huge overcapacity part of the bubble yet, and won't be for a year or two.

Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI.

Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.

I'm not a hater, it could be true, but it seems to be gospel and I'm not sure why.

Mapping to 2001 feels silly to me, when we've had other bubbles in the past that led to nothing of real substance.

LLMs are cool, but if they can't be relied on to do real work maybe they're not change the world cool? More like 30-40B market cool.

EDIT: Just to be clear here. I'm mostly talking about "agents"

It's nice to have something that can function as a good Google replacement especially since regular websites have gotten SEOified over the years. Even better if we have internal Search/Chat or whatever.

I use Glean at work and it's great.

There's some value in summarizing/brainstorming too etc. My point isn't that LLMs et al aren't useful.

The existing value though doesn't justify the multi-trillion dollar buildout plans. What does is the attempt to replace all white collar labor with agents.

That's the world changing part, not running a pretty successful biz, with a useful product. That's the part where I haven't seen meaningful adoption.

This is currently pitched as something that will have nonzero chance of destroying all human life, we can't settle for "Eh it's a bit better than Google and it makes our programmers like 10% more efficient at writing code."

Now, what this sort of article tends to miss (and I will never know because it’s paywalled like a jackass) is that these models services are used by everyday people for every day tasks. Doesn’t matter if they’re good or not. It enables them to do less work for the same pay. Don’t focus on the money the models are bringing in today, focus on the dependency they’re building on people’s minds.