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I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves

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Have you considered that the people in the 1990s were mostly correct, and it's you that has been corrupted by modern marketing influences and external pressures?

There's no shortage of "Chicken Little" technologies that look great on-paper and fail catastrophically in real life. Tripropellant rockets, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, flying cars, the list never ends. There's nothing that stops AI from being similarly disappointing besides scale and expectation (both of which are currently unlimited).

Again another common take; hint: if you’re against AI or the current investment in AI you have so many better and more nuanced arguments at your disposal than “AI is chicken little”. It’s already here. I’ve built so much stuff with Claude and Codex I’d have never have been able to build at a speed that is already incredible and it’s getting better and better every 6 months. Be worried about alignment or centralized unregulated power, worry about what wars will look like and how this is a pre packaged Stasi for any dictatorship. But “this is a fad equivalent in stupidity and hype to cryptocurrency and tripropellant rockets” is just kind of silly

I use AI regularly, it regularly disappoints me. I won't worry about alignment or centralizing the singularity because AI does nothing that we haven't seen already.

The one thing that AI hasn't done that was promised a million times over is make money.

Do you genuinely believe this? That AI is not making money? Maybe you just are referring to another tired refrain of people who don’t appear to understand the strategic play of pure AI companies which is that they operate at a loss?

I don't have to believe anything, I just look at the S&P 500 and see the same old stuff. Nvidia is enjoying the shovel shortage, but none of the gold-rushers have discovered anything better than CUDA. Nothing new under the sun.

> people who don’t appear to understand the strategic play of pure AI companies

Get a load of this guy. Strategy in isolation is worthless; Russia has excellent strategic deterrence that is utterly useless for deterring Ukraine. Pure crypto companies had strategic foresight, but none of it was worth a damn when they had to compete with each other on merit.

The strategic play is perfectly well-understood. The tactical side is not, so far Nvidia is the only company that has gone to war and won.

“Russia has excellent deterrence” is what you’re trying to say sanctions are not working to stop what Russia is doing to Ukraine? That not only demonstrates a bad understanding of geopolitics and how sanctions work, but also distracts from what we are actually talking about.

It’s not really clear to me what you are trying to say. There will be winners and losers and it will be hard to know who they will be. That has nothing to do with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc not being rational in their strategy...

Some of us do, and actively root it out. I’ve never in my life been more excited to sit alone in a room with an editor and a compiler than I am these days.

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