Back in the dotcom boom years, Internet adoption growth was real - with a lot of people and businesses paying real money to get online. And yet, the dotcom bust happened. The existence of paying customers adopting a technology does not assure the sustainability of the industry at any point in time.

i dont see dotcom technologies replacing droves of workers and creating panics in /r/screenwriters, /r/3dmodelers etc. The displacement is real and we are not going back. Dotcom tech created fake problems so their 'advance technology solution' can be presented as solution. With AI wave, it's the opposite - business heads are actually thinking 'what other real problems can i solve with AI'. OpenAi and Claude don't even have to do any preaching. That's real value.

Two things could simultaneously be true: (a) trillions of dollars in value will be created/replaced/subsumed by AI solutions, and (b) even with near-universal adoption among knowledge workers, the value captured by the vendors of advanced AI solutions may never rise high enough to justify the valuations we're seeing now.

OpenAI's bet is that its frontier models will be so far ahead of the current status quo that, if they are the only ones providing those frontier models, they will be able to name their price (to end users and advertisers alike) while increasing their share of spend in the space.

But even today, last-generation and open-source models form a meaningful portion of adopted solutions. Not every application in 2028 will need the AGI-approaching GPT-10 - especially if those applications can leverage a relatively small amount of code, perhaps even written by that GPT-10, that can in turn orchestrate (say) DeepSeek V5 running on compute that can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.

OpenAI could become a victim of its own success, and cause a house of cards to take down the global economy in the process. I personally hope this doesn't happen, but there is real risk here.

You missed my point entirely. There was real value created during the dotcom boom too: Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Google, etc did not 'create fake problems'. Amidst the pearls of real value, were dozens/hundreds of overvalued, dogshit companies which never get a ROI for their investors, and the even marginally useful companies went under when the market correction hit.

There will be the WebVans of the AI boom era, we just don't know their names yet. There also will be Ciscos and Suns that will never reach their high-water mark ever again, or become obsolete in a few years, and sold for less that what people expect.

I was told that - with the full complement of good tools for a scrum team- the cost approaches a 6th member of the team. The crap from MS/GH plus a decent agent like Claude/Bedrock. You can squeeze decent behavior from vscode agent if you know what you are doing, but anyone who knows what they are doing wishes they had something better.

That isn't true for our team. It's more like the cost of coffee/tea/energy drinks for our team.

One of the following is true:

I really don’t know what a full complement of good tools mean! your team is very large your team is very cheap You spend an awful lot on Ai tooling!

We spend about £50 - £200 a head per month on AI tooling.

Assuming everyone was at the top of of that scale (most aren’t) it’s like ai for 50 employees = cost of 1 employee.

...I kinda like GH Copilot. Only does something when I ask, and leaves me in my traditional IDE.

...i just wish the code it generated was decent.

> Corporate America seems ready to spend real money on AI, at least for now. This money being spent today doesn’t come close to recouping the investment OpenAI et al have made, but the trickle’s begun. The money’s not all imaginary.

It's still pretty funny money. Companies are buying those subscriptions to show their shareholders how trendy they are, not because they're useful to them. And the subscription price points are widely speculated to not even have positive gross margin, yet alone starting to recoup any investment. It's far from clear that there's any kind of viable business here.

I am personally paying $200/month for the ChatGPT pro version. It’s the best investment I’ve made in my career in a long time. It’s like having 2-3 direct reports. The alternatives provided by my companies are too slow and aren’t anywhere as good. If people start using it anywhere near how I’m using it, there will be profound changes to the workplace in the coming 3 years.

I have a senior that talks like this. Does everything through AI now. Barely writes anything himself. Has 5x'd his productivity. Like having his own team. Thing is his work is awful. The people who review his PRs have to spend 5x the time looking at his work. He's been pushed off to another team thank god. Not saying there aren't advantages and uses for AI. but if what you are saying were true (like having 2-3 reports) and it was a great benefit, there would be way more examples out there I could look at.

I run a team. So for me this is like having 2-3 extra people to just do some exploratory work and prototyping. Having actual people to do this is a luxury I don’t have and can’t justify currently.

I can’t just copy-paste what comes out. But I have to say I’m able to get substantially more done as it saves me a lot of grunt work. You do have to learn how to use it like any other tool. I have found that it’s helped me sharpen a lot of my own skills in multiple areas and improved my understanding of systems I’m working on. I am able to learn new things much faster because it has a real-time feedback mechanism.

I can’t speak to your direct report but I’d be concerned about falling behind as a leader if you aren’t using it in the course of your regular work.

And then people turn around and hand-wave that away by saying: But youre assuming that the development of LLMs stop and they wont be able to address that problem.

Like Okay, it sounds like a valid point. The issue is the hand waving and the fact it is not grounded in reality.

The assumption that it will just keep getting better is a big one. Maybe they will. Maybe they wont. If they get better I'll stop complaining. Right now I just don't think they are at the level people claim.

I took GP's comment to say that, even if LLMs get massively better in the next six months (which they will), the colleagues still have to wade through the slop during the review this week.

So while one person is getting a 5x increase in productivity, one or two get a corresponding 5x decrease.

Why would we expect LLMs to get “massively better” in the next 6 months instead of the incremental improvement we have seen to date?

LLMs didn't get massively better in the last 6 months, and most probably won't get this better in the next 6 months either.

I disagree. Couldn’t do what I’m doing with GPT-4 but I can with 5.

What are you doing with it?