Whens the last time you saw management tell you which compiler or toolchain you need to use to build your code ? But now we have CEOs and management dictating how coding should be done.
In the article the author admits: "I started coding again last year. But I hadn't written production code since 2012" and then goes on to say: "While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping.".
Then I ask myself, what are they selling ? and lo and behold, it is AI/ML consulting.
Every praise of LLM is invariably preceded by some form of "I don't really understand their output but it looks great". That right there is the strongest signal I've caught so far that the whole thing is just a funny money pyramid.
In Sirens of Titan Vonnegut tells a story where governments decided to boost the space industry to drive aggregate demand.
This is exactly what is happening. When you realize that the whole thing is predicated on building and selling more $100,000 GPUs (and the solution to every problem therein is to use even more GPUs), everything really comes into focus.
The biggest issue with AI isn't AI itself, but the fact that it seemingly "saved" an overinflated economy. Economy needs a deep reset with high rates for longer and the AI narrative is just kicking the can down the road
This seems like the point of the hype and why it has so much traction.
I suspect this hype cycle won't end until a new one forms, whether technology or some catastrophic event (disease, war) changes focus and allows the same delaying tactics.
We're building AI workflows at my company. Yes chatbots, but also more interesting/complex workflows that I won't get into. Let's just say we have the data, expertise, and industry structure to leverage AI in valuable and useful ways.
As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI, orchestrating containers and job, etc.
All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like Westworld, and not so boring...
Not a bad position to take, and very similar to my personal one (that gets immediately conflated as "LOL AI DOOMER" by the AI Booster Club): yes, this is a bubble, and yes, it will eventually pop, but the tools won't go away. What's been democratized isn't the entirety of human skills, but the narrow field of custom ML-based tooling, and that's going to change quite a lot in the decades ahead as people utilize them in unexpectedly novel ways.
It'll never be AGI or superintelligence, it won't create or cause the singularity, and it'll never be a substitute for learning, practicing, and honing skills into mastery. For the fields LLMs do displace in part or in whole, I still expect it'll largely displace the mediocre or the barely-passable, not the competent or experts. Those experts will, once the bubble pops and the hype train derails, find the novel and transformative uses for LLMs outside of building moats for big enterprises or vamping for investor capital.
I especially enjoy the on-prem/locally-run angle, as I think that is where much of the transformation will occur - in places like homes, small offices, or private datacenters where a GPU or two can accelerate novel tasks for the entity using it, without divulging data to corporate entities or outright competitors. Inference is cheap, and a modest gaming GPU or AI accelerator can easily support 99.9% of individual use cases offline, with the right supporting infrastructure (which is improving daily!).
I think a key point from this article that I agree strongly with is the simple point that it is crucial that everyone recognise we are currently in an AI bubble.
I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No, it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may even be supporting evidence for it. Compare with the dot com bubble : nobody would tell you there was no value in the internet. But it was still a bubble. A massive hyper inflated bubble. And when it popped, it left large swathes of the industry devastated even while a residual set of companies were left to carry on and build the "real" eventual internet based reworking of the entire economy which took 10 - 15 years.
People would be well advised to have a look at this point in time at who survived the dot com bubble and why.
I agree, although bubbles don’t always have to pop in huge ways like it did in the dot com crash.
E.g. crypto displayed many, many characteristics of a bubble for a number of years, but the crypto bubble seems like it has just slowly stopped growing and slowly stopped getting larger, rather than popping in a fantastical way. (Not to say it still can’t, of course)
Then again, this bubble is different in that it has engulfed the entire US economy (including public companies, which is the scary part since the damage potential isn’t limited to private investors). If there’s even a 10% chance of it popping, that’s incredibly frightening.
I think this is a really insightful point. Even if we are in a bubble now, in the sense that current LLM technology (impressive though it is) does not quite live up to the huge valuations of AI companies, there is a plausible future in which we get enough technological progress in the next few years that the bubble never really pops and we are able to morph into a new AI-driven economy without a crash. There are probably good historical examples of this happening with other technologies, although it’s hard to identify them because in retrospect it looks like the optimists invested rationally, even though their bets maybe weren’t all that justified at the time.
I personally think a crash is more likely than not, but I think we should not assume that history will follow a particular pattern like the dot com bust. There are a variety of ways this can go and anyone who tells you they know how it’s all going to shake out is either guessing or trying to sell you something.
It is for sure an interesting time to be in the industry. We’ll be able to tell the next generation a lot of stories.
Cryptocurrencies have survived and thrived, but anyone who went all-in on NFTs or blockchain gaming (or anything other than currency on the blockchain?) has been zeroed out.
Agreed. I think most of the arguments are premised on AI getting infinitely better for some reason, without anyone outlining clear arguments addressing the inherent architectural limitations of today's LLMs. I have been in this space since 2021 and honestly, beside maybe voice and Gemini Deep Research, things aren't much better than GPT-4.
The fact everyone thinks we are in an AI bubble is practically proof we are not in an AI bubble.
The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too.
What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall of worry.
technical ICs actually trialing the AI tools think we’re in a bubble. Executives, boards, directors and managers are still tumbling head over heels down the mountain in a race to shovel more money into the fire, because their engineering orgs are not delivering results and they are desperate to find a solution
Not really. Worked through the dotcom bubble. It was obvious to some people on the ground doing the work. It was obvious to some execs who took advantage of it. Feels similar. Especially if you are burning through tokens on Gemini CLI and Claude Code where the spend doesn’t match the outcomes.
There is absolutely FOMO. It's even being deliberately stoked. "AI won't take your job. People using AI will." This is this hype cycle's "have fun being poor."
This is a good article, but it has a flaw that I keep seeing in these. Articles like this say "I built this app, and that app, and another app, and another one". Ok, let's see them. Are they any good? Please post the github link, or link to the webpage.
I'm reminded of the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba.
Have we made some significant advancements similar to what happened with the Internet back in the 90's with HTML? Yes. But, this is a bubble we are currently in just like the .com bubble with lots of irrational exuberance.
That said, that job market is not as crazy as it was during .com, in fact right now most technologists are finding it more difficult to find work at the moment. Most of this AI hype started when the employment market started to slow down. Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts when crazy money enters the picture. So if, for example the fed really starts to cut rates and/or investment starts to really pick up and we have another boom period, the tail end of that seems to historically be when the bubbles pop.
Put another way, there is a good chance that the bubble will continue to inflate for a few years before it pops.
> Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts
Meta has been offering 7 figure salaries for AI talent. This is a very different bubble from the .com bubble. The hiring frenzy in this limited to a very small group of people with unique skills/experience that few people posses. While at the same time thousands of other people are being let go in order to pay those big salaries to a few people (and in order to buy more GPUs). The C-suite has become obsessed with the idea that they're going to need much fewer engineers and they're hiring/firing like it.
Somewhat related to the article, but mostly anecdotal. In SF, i have had chats with (~15) engineers who after some prodding admitted that they feel the whole AGI thing is passing them by (not that it is close). In a sense that they want to be doing something deeper, build/research something which is more than an API call (paraphrasing and not disparaging making API calls), and want to build where the action is (read: train models or be at the forefront). I understand you need a specific skillset to be in that position, just that it's slightly off putting that to do any meaningful work in this field you need a lot of compute. I understand they raised funding and what not, yet want something more than they are working on. I am not sure of the solution, but the cause sure seems to be the hype that is created currently.
Readit News
>Look inside.
>Written by someone having a stake in LLM business.
Every time.
Whens the last time you saw management tell you which compiler or toolchain you need to use to build your code ? But now we have CEOs and management dictating how coding should be done.
In the article the author admits: "I started coding again last year. But I hadn't written production code since 2012" and then goes on to say: "While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping.".
Then I ask myself, what are they selling ? and lo and behold, it is AI/ML consulting.
In Sirens of Titan Vonnegut tells a story where governments decided to boost the space industry to drive aggregate demand.
This is exactly what is happening. When you realize that the whole thing is predicated on building and selling more $100,000 GPUs (and the solution to every problem therein is to use even more GPUs), everything really comes into focus.
Deleted Comment
Asking for a friend.
A rhetorical technique as old as dirt, but apparently still effective.
I suspect this hype cycle won't end until a new one forms, whether technology or some catastrophic event (disease, war) changes focus and allows the same delaying tactics.
Look at stock prices trajectory before and after COVID.
When this bubble bursts, the ensuing chaos will be used in a similar manner.
As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI, orchestrating containers and job, etc.
All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like Westworld, and not so boring...
Westworld robots are still a long way off, but think about how far we’ve come so quickly.
It’s pretty incredible that natural language computing is now seen as boring when it barely even existed 5 years ago.
It'll never be AGI or superintelligence, it won't create or cause the singularity, and it'll never be a substitute for learning, practicing, and honing skills into mastery. For the fields LLMs do displace in part or in whole, I still expect it'll largely displace the mediocre or the barely-passable, not the competent or experts. Those experts will, once the bubble pops and the hype train derails, find the novel and transformative uses for LLMs outside of building moats for big enterprises or vamping for investor capital.
I especially enjoy the on-prem/locally-run angle, as I think that is where much of the transformation will occur - in places like homes, small offices, or private datacenters where a GPU or two can accelerate novel tasks for the entity using it, without divulging data to corporate entities or outright competitors. Inference is cheap, and a modest gaming GPU or AI accelerator can easily support 99.9% of individual use cases offline, with the right supporting infrastructure (which is improving daily!).
All in all, an excellent post.
I often find people contest this with the non-sequitur of "No, it's not a bubble, there is real value there. We are building things with it". The fact there is real value in the technology does not contradict in any way that we are in a bubble. It may even be supporting evidence for it. Compare with the dot com bubble : nobody would tell you there was no value in the internet. But it was still a bubble. A massive hyper inflated bubble. And when it popped, it left large swathes of the industry devastated even while a residual set of companies were left to carry on and build the "real" eventual internet based reworking of the entire economy which took 10 - 15 years.
People would be well advised to have a look at this point in time at who survived the dot com bubble and why.
E.g. crypto displayed many, many characteristics of a bubble for a number of years, but the crypto bubble seems like it has just slowly stopped growing and slowly stopped getting larger, rather than popping in a fantastical way. (Not to say it still can’t, of course)
Then again, this bubble is different in that it has engulfed the entire US economy (including public companies, which is the scary part since the damage potential isn’t limited to private investors). If there’s even a 10% chance of it popping, that’s incredibly frightening.
I personally think a crash is more likely than not, but I think we should not assume that history will follow a particular pattern like the dot com bust. There are a variety of ways this can go and anyone who tells you they know how it’s all going to shake out is either guessing or trying to sell you something.
It is for sure an interesting time to be in the industry. We’ll be able to tell the next generation a lot of stories.
Bitcoin is now worth 2.3 trillion dollars. The price graph looks like a hockey stick. For tokens in a self contained ledger system.
You may be conflating hype and bubble.
But it had minor 15-20% corrections but kept rising for another year or two after that...
Bubbles are driving by irrational beliefs. And they won't be irrational if we could understand them.
AI is surely a bubble but it can go on for another 3-4 years when something possibly unrelated to AI pops it.
The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too.
What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall of worry.
I'm reminded of the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba.
That said, that job market is not as crazy as it was during .com, in fact right now most technologists are finding it more difficult to find work at the moment. Most of this AI hype started when the employment market started to slow down. Usually these bubbles pop after the employment market goes crazy. The employment starts to go nuts when crazy money enters the picture. So if, for example the fed really starts to cut rates and/or investment starts to really pick up and we have another boom period, the tail end of that seems to historically be when the bubbles pop.
Put another way, there is a good chance that the bubble will continue to inflate for a few years before it pops.
Meta has been offering 7 figure salaries for AI talent. This is a very different bubble from the .com bubble. The hiring frenzy in this limited to a very small group of people with unique skills/experience that few people posses. While at the same time thousands of other people are being let go in order to pay those big salaries to a few people (and in order to buy more GPUs). The C-suite has become obsessed with the idea that they're going to need much fewer engineers and they're hiring/firing like it.