The article's US-China comparison quietly reveals the prediction that would follow from the thesis: if the Perez 'late deployment' framing is right, then the Chinese model—lean, industrial, healthcare and education application, grounded in near-term ROI—is betting correctly on where we are in the curve and should outperform over the next decade. That's a concrete, testable claim that would validate or falsify the argument independently of whether AI constitutes a 'new surge.'

There are some very interesting information network theories that present information growth as a continually evolving and expanding graph, something like a virus inherent to the universe’s structure, as a natural counterpoint to entropy. And in that view, atomic bonds and cells and towns and railroads and network connections and model weights are all the same sort of thing, the same phenomenon, manifesting in different substrates at different levels of the shared graph.

To me, that’s a much better and deeper explanation that connects the dots, and offers more predictive power about what’s next.

Highly recommend the book Why Information Grows to anyone whose interest is piqued by this.

1) as in the article it's a contraction of work- industrialization getting rid of hand-made work or the contraction of all things horse-related when the internal combustion engine came around

but- it will also be

2) new technologies and ideas enabled by a completely new set of capabilities

The real question is if the economic boost from the latter outpaces the losses of the former. History says these transitions aren't easy on society.

But also, the AI pessimism is hard to understand in this context- do people really believe no novel things will be unlocked with this tech? That it's all about cost-cutting?

AI so far has really only shown massive utility for programming. It has broad potential across almost all knowledge work, but it’s unclear how much of that can be fulfilled in practice. There are huge technical, UX and social hurdles. Integrating middle brow chatbots everywhere is not the end game.

I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.

I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software.

There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and signing up prodigious amounts of recurring revenue every month.

Show HN: RedSOC – adversarial evaluation framework for LLM-integrated SOCs

Honest question, I'm not trying to mock economists or anything like that.

Separately, I have a local camera repair shop and my friend told me its 2 months backlog to get your film based camera worked on.

Ultimately if the deal we get online is infinite tracking, infinite scrolling and infinite enshittification, real life start to sound a whole lot better.

> Then came AI, revealing new dynamics. ChatGPT’s breakthrough didn’t come from a garage startup but from OpenAI,

i thought the transformer and large language models came from google research.

> There’s also social pushback—in the UK the campaigns against big ringroad schemes started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And perhaps we’re seeing some of that about AI. The U.S. map of local pushback against data centres from Data Center Watch covers the whole of the country, in red states and blue. People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off.

the us had the highway revolts. in most cities where the revolts succeeded it is widely heralded today as a success.

the data center hate is interesting. i think many people are just learning what data centers are. but that said, they've come to represent something different in recent years. previously they were part of the infrastructure that made industry hum, now public messaging from tech leaders and academics is along the lines of "this is how your livelihood is going to be replaced" while the institutions that are supposed to provide any sort of backstop are being dismantled or slashed to pieces by crazypants trumpist politics. i think focusing the energy on the tangible like mundane buildings is interesting, but the hate makes a lot of sense.

addressing the core thesis, i'd argue that ai is not the next step in the 70s digital technological wave (especially considering the future of ai compute is probably hybrid digital-analog systems), but rather is something fundamentally new that also changes how technology interacts with society and how economics itself will function.

previous systems helped, these systems can do. that's a fundamental change and one that may not be compatible with our existing economic systems of social sorting and mobility. the big question in my mind is: if it succeeds, will we desperately try to hold onto the old system (which essentially would be a disaster that freezes everyone in place and creates a permanent underclass) or will we evolve to a new, yet to be defined, system? and if so, how will the transition look?

I have ZERO doubt that if you put people that haven't used a computer in front of one and you had copilot everywhere and I mean not the way it is now instead you're presented with a chatbox in the middle of the screen and you just ask the computer what you want I am 99.99% sure that everyone would prefer to use that chatbox rather than trying to figure out how to use a computer which is why I am not quick to discredit "microslop", they're most likely pivoting windows to how it will look like in the future.

Obviously, the strongest argument here is that it should have been an entirely different product such as "Windows AI" where the entire system is designed around it. But if you look at their current implementation it's more of a copilot which is just there, letting you know it exists. Obviously not all of these features were thought through such as recall, that should have been dead and burried since it doesn't offer that much real value a magical box that takes in english sentences and does roughly what you want.

At the end of the day it's a question if AI will/is doing more harm than good. AI has really only existed in this form for a little more than 3 years and really started shining since the advent of Opus 4.5. We went from having models producing more security vulnerabilities than one can count to fixing obscure human made ones and the capabilities will keep increasing (if anthropic is to be believed). We will enter an era where it will have 95%+ accuracy in doing what a typical computer user would want from AI and there's really nothing anyone can do to stop it.

So my opinion is that AI will be the next big thing and it might spread way beyond what we can even imagine.

I think that we will have things similar to non technical people that just talk on the phone with an AI agent to get a website done, register a domain and have a website done within a 1 hour phone call all for pennies while the AI has access to their financials, mail and other things. All of that is relatively possible today with the simple caviat of security and I do believe we have enough smart people in the world that can figure out how to make AI better at rejecting social engineering than 99% of humans.

it be the beginning of vast and infinite potentia spreading out beyond us

Introduction of new mass production techniques often has an initial wave of high profit when early adopters have an initial advantage... existing workers are more efficient... but this will followed by a long term decline in the rate of profit as margins aggressively fall ...

e.g. if every software company uses AI to double its coding speed, the price of software will eventually drop by half.

As "AI" becomes a required and common commodity input, competition will drive prices down until the productivity gains are entirely captured by customers, leading to margin compression across the sector.

Also... firms will be forced to invest in using AI just to stay in the same place. If you don't adopt it aggressively, you'll be priced out; if you do, your margins still shrink because everyone else did too.

So... yeah, I don't think this is the next part of a "digital wave" if that means giant increase in new startup investments and SaaS companies etc, it's actually probably the start of I think a margin collapse and consolidation in our industry.

If it's 2x easier to build e.g. a CRM, we’ll end up with 10x more CRMs, leading to a "race to the bottom" on pricing.

The last 15 years of investment by people like YC etc seems to have been in businesses that were "like Uber but for <X>". Service businesses on which a small layer of software automated things, and drove some sort of explosion of customers. I don't really see how VCs are going to separate wheat from chaff on this front anymore? If anybody can do it.... what's the value of any particular approach over the others? I'd think the result would be consolidation?

So I suppose if you're selling "the means of production" in the form of GPUs you're in a good spot, but even that is likely to be subject to aggressive downward pricing.

> People seem to hate Google’s inserting of AI tools into its search results, and hate even more that it is all but impossible to turn it off.

That could do with a solid citation tbh. The anti-AI people are really vocal on social media but personally I like having the AI results given how awful navigating the modern internet has become with all the cookie banners and anti-Ad Blocker popups etc.

Honestly, the LLMs seem like the most transformative technology we've had since the release of the iPhone.