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I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

louwrentius.com

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Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#121

Post by kalkin »

danesparza wrote: post #89
kalkin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm quite influenced by Ed Zitron's reporting Zitron has been predicting an imminent bubble pop since 2023 (although in less and less falsifiable terms), as OpenAI and Anthropic revenues have steadily grown 3-10x per year, but people keep listening. Zitron has done a lot to misinform the public but at some point you have to conclude it's demand-driven, and people won't re-evaluate his credibility because he tells t…

Revenue and profit are not the same. And you didn't even mention the debt these companies have accrued in the last 3 years. References: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/ai-tech-... https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/techs-ai-debt-b... https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertszczerba/2026/07/17/bond-...

Right, I didn't mention anything about profit or debt.

The question is whether this is a bubble that's going away - whether "AI will just be turned off". A revenue trajectory indicating a vast increase in actual consumer/enterprise usage every year indicates otherwise. This is true regardless of whether or not forward-looking investment becomes too much at some point. If CSPs or AI labs have bought more compute than they can sell at current prices, maybe they'll go bust, but at that point supply and demand mean compute and therefore AI inference becomes much cheaper, which is unlikely to make it go away.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#122

Post by foxyv »

dd8601fn wrote: post #101
foxyv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that my requirements and acceptance criteria are much less clear than I think they are. AI reveals when you are being too vague, almost instantly sometimes.

They always are. When you think you’ve got it all… ya don’t. Unfortunately this recent experience wasn’t that as much as it producing rapid-fire misses when it did have the constraints. It regularly just violated X to kinda-solve Y. Or made up a solution to both that solves neither. And this wasn’t some wildly complicated scenario. Sure made me solidify some opinions (we ended up pretty close to where I had started w…

Yeah, sometimes you just have to throw out the current solution and start over/rollback. AI will go down some weird rabbit holes to solve a problem with the wrong requirements. Sometimes I feel like I'm just coding in English instead of Python or TypeScript.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#123

Post by [deleted] »

dcow wrote: post #85
krupan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day." Lol! Feynman's quote is in fact for everyone. Refusing to consider that it might apply to yourself is proof of that!

It’s not a consideration. I am more productive with AI. Period. Maybe that’s not the reality for you, but it is for me. I don’t need a study to prove it.

[deleted]

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#124

Post by archagon »

pentaphobe wrote: post #65

The responses to this post made me really sad. Sure - it was light on the meat, But it's an opinion blog post, not a full article. the author ventures to cite their refs, acknowledges potential bias.. way more than you get with a tonne of front page articles (many of which probably should have been short opinion pieces like this) Sure - it's not particularly notable or high entropy enough to save, but it's far from o…

Dig down and I think you’ll find that AI boosters are really quite insecure.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#125

Post by Gud »

simonw wrote: post #84
pwillia7 wrote: post #17

Now imagine if this was written about the first steam engines being used inefficiently to pull coal up out the ground and pump out the water. It's so expensive -- is this really more effective than just hiring 50 men? We all know how that ended up...

> We all know how that ended up... It ended up with investors losing their shirts time and time again - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893 for example - but we did get some very useful infrastructure out of it.

That's not really how it "ended up"? Yes, there are always losers when investing in new technologies.

But the steam engine was an amazing invention, and ended up propelling humanity forward.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#126

Post by leecommamichael »

kalkin wrote: post #119
leecommamichael wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let the downvotes get you down. They don't know who funds or constitutes METR. If you actually read these papers, you'll find they cite themselves 4-5 times each publication. They also consider "hosting an HTTP server using Python" to be a "long time horizon" task.

The OP cited a METR study... if you don't think they're credible, fine, but it's hard for me to see how it could be intellectually honest to cite them when their research is helpful to your argument and discredit them when it's not. One might even call this approach "fooling yourself".

The OP is not citing their claims, but their commentary. Do you understand why I find that to be different than citing their findings? We're not talking percentages here.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#127

Post by pentaphobe »

archagon wrote: post #124
pentaphobe wrote: post #65

The responses to this post made me really sad. Sure - it was light on the meat, But it's an opinion blog post, not a full article. the author ventures to cite their refs, acknowledges potential bias.. way more than you get with a tonne of front page articles (many of which probably should have been short opinion pieces like this) Sure - it's not particularly notable or high entropy enough to save, but it's far from o…

Dig down and I think you’ll find that AI boosters are really quite insecure.

It certainly seems that way from this - admittedly tiny - sample

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#128

Post by sho »

eudamoniac wrote: post #120
sho wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is one side of them automatically delusional? Could they know something you don't? I wrote and deleted a couple of answers to this - they didn't satisfy, so I'll just be honest. No, they don't know anything I don't know. There's now only one reason for denying that AI is helpful in software engineering, and that is emotional, be it fear of change or cultural point-scoring. The only honest answer to the question…

I disagree and I think the distinction is what we mean by "helpful in software engineering". Is Fable helpful in that it can write some code that does what I told it to do? Yes, obviously. I don't think anyone is arguing that, because it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough. Is Fable helpful in that over the span of six months of using it, the codebase…

> it's trivial to see that if you tell a frontier model to do a coding task, it usually does it well enough

So you do not disagree? You agree 100%? Yes, it is trivial to see. Hence my near-anaphylactic reaction to articles like this, which specifically claim that it is NOT useful. Do you just mentally filter that out or something?

> Is [..] the codebase and my brain's relation to it is in a better state than if I had not used it?

But now this is a different question. It will not be the same, that's for sure. With new tools we must learn new patterns, new best practises. I have come around to the opinion that we must collectively move to a higher level of abstraction and accept that we will understand the code less - but I don't agree it must necessarily be worse. That will all depend on the new techniques we discover and apply.

> So somewhere on the spectrum between no-AI and vibecoding is probably ideal. Where on the spectrum is the argument, and everyone is going to have their own opinions based on their own domains. I don't see this as anyone being wrong or emotional.

I think that anyone planting a big flag at 0 (no AI) in 2026, with what we have available, is indeed doing it for emotional reasons, and when they claim there's no benefit being anywhere else, they're wrong. Which is what the article we're talking about is doing - hence my, and other's, scathing reaction.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#129

Post by watwut »

sho wrote: post #76
danesparza wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah - near the bottom where he is disclosing his own bias. Got it. So do you disagree that AI companies are in very large amounts of debt? And do you also disagree that debt will have real consequences (and one of those consequences might be either the lights going out or a buyout or merger)?

Tell me, when the dot com bubble burst, and all those debt-laden companies collapsed and had buyouts and mergers, was the internet turned off?

Internet existed before dot com bubble.

Re: I think you might be fooling yourself with AI

#130

Post by orangecat »

runtime_terror wrote: post #27
dcow wrote: post #11

AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s ab…

> AI costs aren't going to stay this high Why do you feel this way? Are you talking about frontier models from US companies or smaller weight open source models? From the perspective of US companies, it seems pretty clear they're severely under water and will need some way to become profitable or risk collapse, so how else will they do that or they than jacking up prices or some unknown future miracle advancement? I…

so how else will they do that

By selling more tokens, which by all reasonable accounts are profitable on the margin.

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