These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this — not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn’t outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.

ed reads techtakes? i wonder how far this analogy disseminated

Baldur’s given his thoughts on Bluesky - he suspects Zitron’s downplayed some of AI’s risks, chiefly in coding:

There’s even reason to believe that Ed’s downplaying some of the risks because they’re hard to quantify:

• The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?
• Coding isn’t the biggest “win” for LLMs but its biggest risk

Software dev has a bad habit of skipping research and design and just shipping poorly thought-out prototypes as products. These systems get increasingly harder to update over time and bugs proliferate. LLMs for coding magnify that risk.

We’re seeing companies ship software nobody in the company understands, with edge cases nobody is aware of, and a host of bugs. LLMs lead to code bases that are harder to understand, buggier, and much less secure.

LLMs for coding isn’t a productivity boon but the birth of a major Y2K-style crisis. Fixing Y2K cost the world’s economy over $500 billion USD (corrected for inflation), most of it borne by US institutions and companies.

And Y2K wasn’t promising magical growth on the order of trillions so the perceived loss of a failed AI Bubble in the eyes of the stock market would be much higher

On a related note, I suspect programming/software engineering’s public image is going to spectacularly tank in the coming years - between the impending Y2K-style crisis Baldur points out, Silicon Valley going all-in on sucking up to Trump, and the myriad ways the slop-nami has hurt artists and non-artists alike, the pieces are in place to paint an image of programmers as incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst.

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world’s biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the “Agentic coding benchmark” (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren’t pushing the frontier, then there’s no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren’t wasting money on the compute they can’t afford. The only winning move is to not play.