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AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

telegraph.co.uk

11–20 of 228 posts

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#11

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app.

There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash.

Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being invested in produces real, widespread societal value.

One could argue that one of the nightmare economic scenarios for AI is actually that it gets too good too fast and results in a wipeout of the white collar worker that we are currently nowhere near ready to deal with given how propped up our economy is on consumer spending.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#12

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here

As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because claude code isnt made by the generalozed capabilities of the tech but by good old non-generalozable hueristics and rule based engines. I dont think that will scale to other feilds at the factor these investments assume. Its the bitter lesson again. It scales with deliberate and specific design, not data, so it wont scale

We learnt this with ibm watson. Deepblue achieved chess supremacy but the last mile wasnt data driven, it was heiristic driven, and so watson, its successor, couldnt scale/generalize.

My prediction is that this speculation on LLMs with harnesses will collapse since they wont scale. We'll have another winter where the reasearchers will be leaft alone long wnough to come up with the next breakthrough (probably game theory based data driven agency) which might then create what this hypecycle is speculating

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is not production ready

Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.

[deleted]

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#14
post #12

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because cl…

you mentioned a very good point about scalability. we're seeing alot of productivity gains, but only from SWEs, which are but a very small segment of the global economy. all other economic use cases require thorough last-mile development and iteration that is not too different with current automation tools.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is not production ready

Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.

Anything we can see?

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#16

Pretty much. Given the levels of investment in capital and research if AI companies actually hit what they're aiming at they'd have to collapse the labor market to recoup, bricking the economy in the process. Given the levels of outside investment inflating valuations, if the bubble pops it's 2008 all over again. There's this incredibly narrow window of "just useful enough to extract rents" where everything doesn't g…

Extract rents? I don’t think you’re using the term rent correctly here.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.

so your company runs on a vibe-coded saas app, that sure is a confidence booster for your would-be customers.

Sounds like they’re happy.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#20

Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. I’m not worried about it…

> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash. Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being inves…

difference this time is they have "fiat money" and money printer. Market and all inv. bankers knows that in major crash they will print unlimited amounts so back to same prices or near them. printer is still printing and it's only goes to selected investments
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