One day a few million dollars in tokens will enable you to mint an entire AWS or iPhone.
That will not be something you can purchase. Only enormous capital holders will have access and be able to play that game.
We're going to be left with scraps. Thin clients, shitty gaming cards (for but a few), which also dovetails nicely with trusted computing and device attestation.
We've already lived through this:
- open web -> platforms
- protocols -> closed products
- firefox -> chrome sans ad block
- urls are cool -> 92% of URL bars sent to a single company to show ads
- the personal computer -> locked down iPhones and increasingly locked down Androids without APKs.
- free to use internet -> national ID laws
- free to use cell phones -> required KYC
It's getting worse and worse every year. Why would you think you'll get to have these models? You're a serf.
They'll take your career and your hobby and leave you with nothing. Enjoy renting and being monitored.
Not a religious person, but I'm shocked at all of the people watching Noah's proverbial ark being built right in front of us, the rain starting to pour, and everyone just laughing. The flood is coming. 90+% of you, maybe more, are going to lose your jobs.
Your careers are about to die all at once and you're standing around laughing it off. Absolutely wild to see.
This feeling of being defeated by and trapped inside the “machine” and seeing the “truth” is exactly what the “machine” would want you to do. The actual red pill is that there’s no “machine”, there’s only people and shared social constructions held together by our compliance and they’re contingent.
I fully agree with you, and I find bonkers to see devs screaming how they got x times more productive, observe rewrites from major FOSS products, and still they assume their employer is going to keep the whole team employed.
Also on the other subjects you mention, I got distracted with convenience during the last years, however apparently it is about time to save what is still possible to keep computing open.
Indeed. When are we going to wake up and stand up to this? "Freedom?" This is not freedom. Liberty? Nope. This really is techno-serfdom. Power and capability for me (govts / large corps) but not for thee (us, the serfs).
Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years.
There simply won't be jobs for them.
The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.
Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation.
I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..
If you do not pay for access to the latest models, your experience with AI is a 6-12 month lagging indicator as to current capabilities.
Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.
I pay for codex & claude. Both out-code me but I'm a novice. Fable is really good and shockingly capable. But they're still dumb as hell in various ways. They're faster than the best humans but they are not better problem solvers, especially for novel stuff like implementing SOTA 3D boolean algorithms in Blender.
The incredibly smart ones are able to use AI to multiply their productivity. The ones having a bad time with it from vibe coding and vague prompting aren't that.
You can one-shot a port of Linux to Rust and stop contributing to open source.
The value of software is going to tend towards zero. The value of the software developer the same.
Anthropic is now a kingmaker. It gets to decide which businesses get the expensive private model that can generate entire business functions at the drop of a hat. If you can't afford the price tag, then competition in the market is not for you.
Computing is no longer "personal". It's for big biz only.
GP is exaggerating but I am convinced this will happen sooner rather than later. The improvements in AI are truly exponential if you read the SOTA papers. It's hard to keep up week to week.
> I am astonished on a daily basis that my Linux computer is so close to the same experience as two operating systems put out by trillion dollar companies. It even does things that those commercial alternatives don’t do.
We live in a world where you can "port" open source software to a new language (Rust) and close it up.
Linux will be ported to Rust and closed. It'll probably also be put under MIT/BSD because nobody cares anymore, but the companies will have their own internal private variants. And these will be the ones that see corporate development.
The value in open source is that it was a lot of concentrated value that was hard to copy, clone, or rip off. Now you can one shot a replacement with a few hundred bucks in tokens.
The economic value of Linux used to be billions of dollars. Soon it'll probably be closer to $0.
It's over.
> Meta “gives away” React for similar reasons: it’s more beneficial for them to have it be a standard and be able to hire people who already know it.
Nah, now you just one shot your thing. And you do it fast enough and with distribution and you win. Eventually human devs can't afford to keep competing and launching startups slower than a hyperscaler's own massively funded efforts.
This is the end of open source and the end of solo developers.
And when the ruthlessly effective models that can one shot entire business functions cost $1,000,000 per invocation. Oracle can afford to press the button to create, say, a new smartphone. But you cannot.
Just wait until devices start requiring trusted computing attestation. The ladder is going to be pulled up.
There’s a lot of merit to what you’re saying, but I don’t share that high level of pessimism.
The scenario you describe is basically that software is free as in beer now. We as a corporation don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not deal with with giving back contributions to the open source community.
But that highway goes both directions. That means that the open source community can also one-shot their software, build more with fewer resources, or it might even just devalue proprietary software even further.
If software is so easy to make, what’s the point of keeping it proprietary? I can’t charge you $100/year for Microsoft Word if I can tell Claude Opus 9.0 to clone it with $100 worth of tokens.
>>We don’t really need to bother using GPL/Apache licensed software because we can one-shot something of our own and not bother with giving back contributions.
Thinking of a open weight/source AI as gcc/perl was in the 1990s is more helpful line of approach to take here.
> because AI has almost reached its most usable peak
It doesn't seem to be showing any signs of stopping. Have you used Fable 5? It's a fantastically capable model and trumps anything that came before it. Seedance 2.0 is categorically the best video model, and it's only a few months old.
> the entire business is run by a few old men
Startups tend to skew young, and in this case it's no different. Most of the leaders of AI companies are decades younger than the CEOs in other types of industries.
> who think AI is everything and invest huge sums of money to show other AI companies they need to improve to get more funding from old people.
They're spending capital to win market share and to try to build a moat. One of the most important things in business is building a durable way to keep competitors from taking your market. You spend enormous capital to win customers, and it would suck if other businesses could watch what you did, spend less money, and come in and take everything away. The money being spent is an attempt to have a durable lead.
It's working. Enterprise contracts are deep and sticky tendrils that work through governments and large companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have massive partnerships with Fortune 500s, the DoD, you name it - and these contracts will last and print enormous amounts of money. This makes it incredibly hard for other players to enter the market and build a cash flow with which to compete and thrive.
> find something new and innovative
This is easier said than done. It's an incredibly hard problem. It took decades to find the last big technological waves: the PC, the internet, broadband, smartphones. Now AI. These are generational step function increases. The groundwork can be decades old, but it takes time to proliferate before it can become a big business.
Other possibilities include fusion, green tech, quantum computing (useful for crypto breaking, etc.), AI drug discovery, etc. If you go into research one day, try to find an interesting field with potential for commercialization - that could make you very wealthy if you find something you enjoy working on, with lots of greenfield opportunity, that is ripe for turning into products.
Good luck with your game! You should post it here on HN when you finish. You'll get lots of great reviews, comments, and early players. :)
Pay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build.
Businesses will gladly pay it.
Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete.
Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete.
Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster.
They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us.
Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program.
Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
People have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.
> The copyright system is one of the major suspects for why US industry ended up crippled and replaced by Asian labour refusing to respect US IP laws to their significant advantage.
Expand on this.
Wasn't it instead our desire to be the world's reserve currency and rely on cheap imports? You can't be both a net exporter and the world's top reserve currency.
You have to run trade deficits if you want to export dollars.
It comes down to comparative advantages more than anything else and the US raising the cost (in some sense outright banning) people from deploying good ideas in an industrial way seems like it'd be a significant comparative disadvantage to attracting investment. And a much bigger deal than the practical reality that the US imports more than it exports.
Maintaining an import-dependent economy might be a factor, economies are complicated. But there isn't a fundamental reason that taking in more stuff than gets exported should mean that Asia has to be more successful. If anything, a country in a position to import more than it exports should be seeing big jumps in living standards, rather the gains going to a country notionally taking the bad end of the bargain. And there are some easy resolutions to being a net importer and while having a strong industrial economy - import raw materials, make stuff that isn't for export as an example.
dude, I don't want to be a hater, but this is a pretty crappy game that barely works. I honest to god could have made this in a week without AI. Is it cool that AI made it in 2 days? Sure, but it's not groundbreaking.
Also, I don't think we're at an inflection point when companies are starting to wisen up to just how much this shit costs.
I have never seen such a hive of negativity and pessimism in my life.
This thinking sand did your job 5x faster. And you could have used the opportunity cost to do other things.
The engineers and artists in this country that are dunking on AI are insane. Asia is openly embracing this tech. They're going to leapfrog us if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.
I mean many people have seen the same technology multiplier in many other industries too in their life time. And to them calling this an inflection point in humanity and expecting them to either panic or cheer seems crazy. So we automated software tasks and made it faster, welcome to declining wages and marginal improvements to consumers.
I'm not Googling much of anything anymore. 9/10 times the information is awful, it's hard to parse out of whatever other spam it's surrounded by. Meanwhile, Claude will just do the thing one-shot or with a tiny bit of refinement.
The gateway to knowledge and getting stuff done is the LLM.
Google Search is a dinosaur.
It feels like we're living a century into the future. Not even smartphones were this cool.
For what it's worth, even this reply reads like LLM output. It's not "quote describing the scenario", it's "some other linked-in-coded plot twist". If you're the average of the people you spend the most time around, and you spend the most time around a chatbot, do you start to absorb its speech patterns and logic structures?
As one famous agent said: “I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about.”
An argument can be as old as the search engine and hold real value. There are ways in which unreflective search engine use has misled and mistrained people.
There’s always been argument to be had about how we manage and offload attention, what we gain and what we lose when resistance is reduced. It’s part of reflection that’s been necessary in order to make progress solid ground, and is more necessary with non-deterministic tech.
The phrase “Tactical tornados” may be older than web search and describes people who also got a lot done.
Models can be incredibly helpful boosters and situationally effective subordinates… and also patchy as a real engineering IC or org.
The argument was correct then (Google/social did make us more stupid) and correct now regarding AI. So not sure why pointing out it was said before is relevant. Except as an example of its prescience.
>"Claude, be my subordinate and get this done for me"
Since "this" is thinking, then the two formulations are equivalent.
>Instead of complaining on the sidelines, I'm getting a shit ton of work done.
Until you no longer have a job and are drowned in slop.
That will not be something you can purchase. Only enormous capital holders will have access and be able to play that game.
We're going to be left with scraps. Thin clients, shitty gaming cards (for but a few), which also dovetails nicely with trusted computing and device attestation.
We've already lived through this:
- open web -> platforms
- protocols -> closed products
- firefox -> chrome sans ad block
- urls are cool -> 92% of URL bars sent to a single company to show ads
- the personal computer -> locked down iPhones and increasingly locked down Androids without APKs.
- free to use internet -> national ID laws
- free to use cell phones -> required KYC
It's getting worse and worse every year. Why would you think you'll get to have these models? You're a serf.
They'll take your career and your hobby and leave you with nothing. Enjoy renting and being monitored.
Not a religious person, but I'm shocked at all of the people watching Noah's proverbial ark being built right in front of us, the rain starting to pour, and everyone just laughing. The flood is coming. 90+% of you, maybe more, are going to lose your jobs.
Your careers are about to die all at once and you're standing around laughing it off. Absolutely wild to see.
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