I ran across this video the other day that I thought did a great job of summing up all the reasons why I intend never to touch GenAI bullshit.
And it’s from a former “vibe coder”. I’ll definitely be keeping this in my back pocket to share with people who ask me why I eschew GenAI.
I think people shouldn’t worry too much about it because this is tied to a real financial crisis that is more concerning.
OpenAI and Anthropic are losing fuck tons of money and, even though they have hyped the fuck out of some desperate losers, they will run out of investor funds.
Purely from a financial perspective, this is a disaster that can’t continue forever. Maybe not even another year.
That doesn’t mean LLM tools will disappear… But they will be priced accordingly. You want to slop some app up? Great, but you’ll pay for it, and likely still need engineers to read and understand that code and not rely on slop tooling to do so.
The other side to this is a generation of parents all told their kids “just get a STEM degree, preferably learn to code” because they saw programmers living well, and then a ton of people who don’t care all that much about code flooded the tech industry and are learning maybe they don’t want to be software engineers.
Compound that with slop tooling that is priced below cost right now and a looming financial crisis, and you have a financial disaster that will hit hard and change the industry forever regardless of whether you choose to use LLM Tools or not.
I think there will be a future for those who use LLM tools and those that don’t, and it will look like a different job, and be preferable for different industries in different ways, and LLM will be a lot more carefully used due to cost being normalized. No more, “implement mergesort”. People will eventually get looked down on for using it for basic shit. It will be expensive.
Maybe some corporation wants an iPhone app but doesn’t want to build a whole team to make it, and it’s skills none of them have. They will consider outsourcing, or slopping it. Slopping will mean quick and dirty code that can put an app together well, as long as you give it a good schema and design up front. It will cost money, but you’ll have v1 in a day. And then you won’t need that iPhone app team.
That’s where I see LLM ending up, some prototyping tool that helps you pump out a dumb app out quickly if provided good instructions up front, and priced accordingly.
I thought the same about blockchain. And to an extent, I was right. Nobody’s talking about Bitcoin or Etherium (let alone NFTs) any more except the major weirdos who are still stuck in their own weird echo chamber. But the price of Bitcoin is still alarmingly high for something with literally no value. Largely because it’s being propped up by despots.
But more than that, I think the AI bubble is basically just a continuation of the blockchain bubble. Several companies with warehouses full of graphics cards eventually found it unprofitable to mine cryptocurrencies. Needing a way to salvage their profits, they took stock of their assets (lots of graphics cards) and considered how to salvage their situation. A stupid scammy bubble worked the first time. Why not a second time? And thus the AI bubble was born. A bubble which made use of… lots of graphics cards.
You’re right that the AI bubble can’t exist forever in its current form. But who knows what’s next? Quantum computers? (That’s already kindof happening.) Human brain cells in a jar used for computing? (Wired just had an article about that.) Dark factories? Some bullshit yet to be pulled from someone’s ass? (Not that all of these things are entirely bullshit. Some of them probably have more potential to be genuinely profitable than GenAI. But they also definitely have the potential to be sold in half-baked (or less-than-half-baked) forms atop a mountain of unjustified hype. And to be made the new cornerstone of an even more precarious economy.)
Blockchain was a bubble. And it’s… less influential than it was. (Not dead, but fizzling out.) But it didn’t really “pop” the way you’d expect a bubble to pop. It turned into another bubble. My worry is that the AI bubble won’t pop. It’ll pivot. And it won’t be the same. (I don’t really fear that I’m going to be forced by my employer to start supporting Bitcoin payments on our e-commerce site.) But it probably won’t be better in any real sense.
I fear we may be living in a “bubble bubble”. As in, the commodity that is being greatly overvalued and propped up by despotic governments is no longer a specific niche industry, but rather the production of bubbles themselves. It’s gone meta. (And I don’t mean Zuck. Well, yes I do. But you know what I mean.)
(Sometimes when I comment in this thread, folks ask me “is this just you speaking or is it the official opinion of /c/fuck_ai?” Just to head that question off, this is just me talking on my own behalf. Not on behalf of the community.)
I think there’s a very real threat this “bubble” could lead to mass surveillance after it pops. As for the bubbleception, yeah, I think it has to be either late stage capitalism, or the start of a general resource crisis.