I love LLMs, I hate hype

How capable do they need to be? You can run distillations on a Pixel 10 Pro today, it's just not packaged up neatly yet.

> Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread

Depending on how good you are at this task. If typing prompts was that easy, there won't be so many tutorials, blog posts, and framework (Act as ... etc)

But there is a difference though. You can ask LLM for "how to write a prompt for ... to prompt you". You can't do that with bread.

I'm super enthusiastic about small models, but let's be realistic. A distillation is not the whole model (and, in fact, a lot of the small distillations on HuggingFace are worse than the base model...most of the Qwen 3.6 Opus/Fable/whatever distillations get weirder on some dimensions than Qwen 3.6 alone, as I understand it).

There are little models that are very good for their size. I say nice things about Gemma 4 damned near every day. But, I'm not writing code with it. I am using it for finding security bugs, though, as the 31b variant is outrageously good at it for its size: https://swelljoe.com/post/gemma-4-exceeds-expectations/ and I'm also using it as a base for my own training experiments, specifically the 12b which is small enough to train a LoRA for on my local hardware so I don't have to rent cloud GPUs. The 12b QAT can run on your Pixel 10 Pro today and is frightfully smart for its size, and has great vision capabilities.

But, I keep saying "for its size". You have to be realistic about what tasks these self-hosted models can do. They are getting better though. Gemma 4 31b is competitive with models 10 times its size from a year ago. That's remarkable, and indicates where things are going.

> all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?)

Part-time vibe coder here. As far as I can tell it's no longer "slop" in the sense that I am no longer hitting the state where AI can't maintain what it has written or can't meet the requirements. But shipping is as hard as ever. Projects get more ambitious, scope creeps, nuances keep being discovered as you work on a piece of software, etc. Right now I feel that the absence of new software explosion is best explained by the fact that the part we have automated turned out to be relatively small.

It is honestly hard to predict. We are currently in everyone is building website/mobile app/gadget era of AI. Very few places are questioning what is worth building.

Short term, we can compare this to 2-3 recent (mini) revolutions: internet, mobile, cloud. Then the answer is somewhat predictable and (somewhat sad personally). Companies owning the main distribution of intelligence (big labs) or distribution of the app/cloud layer (Google, MSFT, AWS) will make most of the money. In fact Google looks well positioned that way with owning intelligence, cloud (and even hardware, if they can get TPUs right as commercial product).

Long term view is interesting and somewhat satisfying (again, personally). We can compare this to industrial revolution, but for intelligence instead of physical labour. I hope, to borrow from Alan Kay's words, the total value generated will be more than what few big labs can capture. Though we will also see normal market dynamics of boom and bust in play. Companies building something useful, patiently will keep winning the markets. But only to get challenged by newer modes of the technology emerging.

In this long term view, the technology per se doesn't offer monopolistic profits to big labs. I think Anthropic is well aware of this and they are trying to extract as much cash from white collar work automation as they can before things are democratised. Contrary to popular opinion, they are also trying to seek a regulatory capture here by to maintain monopolistic position in the US market by scare mongering about China and open source. Its a case study how they managed to keep the good boy image of themselves while doing this.

In the end, I hope the technology emerges as electricity or combustion engine cars. Yes early pioneers (e.g. Ford) were perhaps able to make lot of money. But eventually, the technology was too important to allow one party to have monopoly and we had an abundance market which enabled jobs and money for a lot more people.

Edit, postscript : Dario, Sam and even Jensen will end up looking like the new the John D. Rockefeller's of this era. I'm personally hoping Demis Hassabis actually solves something much more important (problems in diseases, biology etc) with AI.