Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

blog.robbowley.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 489 posts

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#281

Post by redwood »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

I feel like on the one hand you're exactly right that this is kind of like a cold war level investment... and it's not necessarily being pursued through a business return lens; something deeper and more visceral is driving it.

However your conclusions are what throw me off.. you kind of have this Doom and Gloom mindset which may be fair but I don't really think it's related to this particular bubble.. in other words our decline is happening off to the side of this particular bubble rather than it being caused by that particular bubble too. To me the core take away your post is that this bubble is a little bit like the Apollo program was... in a massive investment capturing a lot of people's imagination... likely lots of great things come out of it in a sense but also not clear that it all adds up in the end for a business perspective. But that's potentially okay

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#282

Post by yalogin »

zerof1l wrote: post #181
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Very US-centric article. Written by insecure people who are clinging to power and money desperately. I don't see how some kind of big breakthrough is going to happen with the current model designs. The superintelligence, if it will ever be created, will require a new breakthrough in model architecture. We've pretty much hit the limit of what is possible with current LLMs. The improvements are marginal at this point.…

How so? I don’t see how it’s wrong. It’s US centric because the context is US specific. AI is positioned as too big to fail.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#283

Post by dsr_ »

Belphemur wrote: post #179
CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game. Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And…

There's only one problem with a race to superintelligence, and that's that nobody has evidence that mere intelligence is coming, much less superintelligence.

(There are a thousand more problems, but none of them matter until that first one is overcome.)

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#284

Post by novok »

I think this article was written with AI, it has a that contrastive sentence signature.

And if you can't think of what to do with massive amounts of matrix multiplying compute, that's pretty sad IMO. Not to mention the huge amount of energy demand probably creating a peace dividend in energy generation for decades to come.

We have also gotten a lot of open models we wouldn't of had without the AI boom competition, not mention all the other interesting stuff coming out in the open model world.

Typical pessimist drivel.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#285

Post by mallowdram »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84

This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...

AI is too dumb to succeed. It's built in symbols and statistics predicting tokens based in contexts. This has nothing to do with intelligence or general things like free navigation. Most of it is a write-off, and the things that succeed will be sequestered in pivots with expert supervision.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#286

Post by jandrewrogers »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #226
bpt3 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brutal serfdom You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom." Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.

Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years. People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.

Few people in the US are living "paycheck to paycheck" out of economic necessity. We have extensive data on this separately from BLS and the Federal Reserve. The percentage of US households that are living paycheck to paycheck out of economic necessity is 10-15% last I checked. That isn't nothing but it is a small fraction of the population. Retirees comprise a significant portion of that for obvious reasons.

There is an additional ~30% that is notionally living paycheck to paycheck as a lifestyle choice rather than an economic necessity.

The median US household has a substantial income surplus after all ordinary expenses. There may be people suffering economically but it is a small minority by any reasonable definition of the term.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#288

Post by mallowdram »

China has already won the game. We developed media and wealth management as invididualistic, they approached the problems institutionally and built infrastructure at the pivotal point renewables became affordable. They made an army of technical engineers, we scattered innovation in comp sci/VC acceleration/automation and sat on our asses as asset managers. AI works in secluded modules like robotics and revision. As a general tool it's navel gazing energy sink. AI was a lure we fell for and wasted money and energy while smart players like Apple and China knew their reality.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#289

Post by wmf »

squidbeak wrote: post #185
surgical_fire wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if they are being honest.

I'd be more surprised if they didn't know their own business costs.

There's an accounting question of whether they count free tier inference as COGS or marketing.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#290

Post by osn9363739 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #226
bpt3 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brutal serfdom You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom." Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.

Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years. People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.

Is my life as easy as my parents. Probably not. But the idea that life is bad is a wild take. But if I spent all my time on social media/reddit/watching the news. I'd be pretty depressed too and think the sky is falling. I feel like the USA could turn it round pretty quick with the slightest of social policy to support the lower income earners?
Post reply on HN