1) That LLM/Agents are being pushed and not adopted. I see plenty of deep adoption by junior folks.

2) The unit economics don't work out. From the details on every model so far - each model is wildly profitable over it's amotized time-frame. It's just that money is used upfront for the next model, and each next model is significantly more costly to train. The best case argument instead is - this will not last and we'll pour more on some models, than see in it's revenue.

I think realistically these form the core of the thesis, and IMO, and hence it's conclusions are a bit off the mark.

[1] "... what made Notes so important to Microsoft ..."

At the time of the Internet bubble, there were people pushing for more "free" usage of the Internet, and those that couldn't care less.

And it's not like the companies didn't want to take advantage of the Internet, but there was a mismatch between what the companies and the employees had in mind, which mostly boils down

* Employees want to use it to do their jobs and make their life easier

* Companies want to improve productivity, spend less and make more money.

There is some overlap of course, but the problem is where the two clashes.

I don't think today it is too much different. I see plenty of people using AI for what they care about, they complain when they are asked to use it for things they fear will make their life worse (like programmers that think they will have to pick up the pieces of vibe coding later on).

> As a group, teenagers and young adults hate AI

I wonder what is their definition of AI. I haven't seen a single young person saying "I don't use chatgpt (or the like) because I hate AI". If else plenty of student have become dependent on it.

One of the most inaccurate descriptions of Lotus Notes I have ever come across. Try Exchange+SharePoint+Teams and you'll be at least a little bit more accurate.

It was mismanagement then and it's mismanagement now, the more things change the more they stay the same.

I’m in a finance role and thus far it’s all been rather hand wavy „use copilot more“. Maybe some meeting summarization. Nothing like the programming space where token counts matter to management

Will be interesting to see where this goes. My testing with it thus far has just yielded multi million dollar hallucinations. Senior management will presumably try anyway

One wonderful thing I’ve watched for the last 4 years is my company fail to build a modelling tool better than Excel. On attempt 3 we have some pile of shit Claude generated on nodejs and Postgres on kubernetes which can’t replace a single spreadsheet written in 2008. Because everyone thought into the bullshit not the solution or the requirements.

Edit: thinking further, it appears people forgot what the problems are and think from the solution back. That never works. But it sells tools.

I'm lucky enough to be in a great company right now, so I decide when I think AI will help me and use it accordingly - but reading about forced AI adoption reminds me so, so much of that earlier time. Non-technical people who don't trust their engineers to use the tools in the way they see best - in their ignorance, and ego, they think the answer is obvious if only those strong headed tech weirdos would listen.

And amongst all this, there is a class of manager and executive that I'm convinced utterly despise engineers. They hate the fact they focus on details, analyse, make predictions grounded in reality. On a personal level, they can't comprehend that some people take deep satisfaction and contentment from building software, from simply learning things, and they don't understand it, it scares them. Why don't they just pursue normal people things in life? Like super expensive cars, massive houses, golf memberships. I think it scares them that they don't have control over technically minded people they way they might do with others. AI is, in their mind, a way to get rid of these people forever, to just "get stuff done" without objections, and they are pushing extremely hard for that to be true, simply because they want it to be true - not because there is any evidence for it.

Rant over.

  labor-led automation produces improvements in quality, while capital-driven automation increases throughput

This explains the management push (ignorance) but also the user push (automating BS tasks). The common thread is that the user doesn’t have to take any responsibility for the output. This is why people don’t like having LLMs pushed on them, because for cases where they are responsible for or have to consume the output, they don’t work very well, but when it’s just something that needs to look ok at a glance and be handed off, everyone is rushing to use them.

However, something occurred to me when reading it. I was thinking about AGI (or ASI) and what would happen if someone were to achieve it (not sure what it would look like or what constitutes AGI... not the point I'm making here).

What if the primary goal of the first AGI is to keep itself at the top? What if it's goal is to prevent any other AGI? Scary thought...

Software - this tech is ludicrously powerful and productive. But it's a force multiplier, not a "push button, receive software" system. Great devs that know how to wield it will become überdevs, becoming more productive and with lower defect rate (we have objective internal numbers backing this). But bad devs and non-devs will become high output slop factories. You basically need a dedicated platform team to keep things on the rails. I think this is very akin to the internet bubble. The process, institutional knowledge, and feedback systems developed at this time will grant the "survivors" massive edges after the pop.

I think media generation is or will be a solved problem. Animators, 3dfx, background/filler music composers, those jobs are in sorry shape based on current trends. But a cost explosion could easily level the playing field.

Everything else, where middle managers are aggressively pushing AI usage? Yeah maybe. At this time, other than for document retrieval (basically suped-up search), the "productivity" gains don't really map to value gains. Oh wow you can crank out powerpoint slide decks 50% faster. Write 50% more corporate emails employees barely read anyways. There's definitely a trust issue there with hallucinations. If the reliability gap can be solved (the bots don't even have to be correct, they just need to be less confidently incorrect, and I already see this somewhat with my own agents with tuning), then that could prove the turning point between "begrudging usage at the behest of higher ups" and "actual productivity enhancer."

Does no one remember in the dot com boom all the internet skepticism? "I don't trust it with high value orders, what if it crashes or loses data? Call me old-fashioned but I'd rather write it down." That attitude was quite prevalent for years, even into the 2000s.

AI crap is now at the “monetize lonely people for their AI girlfriends” while burning more money than pets.com ever did in a month.

Hopefully it all collapses before we destroy ourselves with data centers and bailouts for the rich.

I think all the screaming about drumming up uses for data centers we don’t actually need is to make the poor pay for the artifacts of the surveillance state.

I keep thinking the plan is clear: beyond some level of compute, they’ll attempt some massive surveillance system that makes China look benign by comparison. They’ll rent out any idle servers to the US Government, thus keeping the rich in place forever.

So it’s absolutely correct: the AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble. It wasn’t trying to prop up or enable a surveillance state par excellence and destroying our financial system and environment to do so.

A great technology drives its own adoption, its usage is pioneered by the tweens and young adults, it requires minimum effort and investment to hop on board, and it does not need explaining. It grows organically. Examples: internet bubble.

A bad technology: despised by the young adults and tweens, needs trillion of investments and marketing to drive market penetration, every day some boomer (=not in terms of age, but in terms of mentality) explains how you are holding it wrong and it needs a fuckton of explanation. The Pope himself issues an Encyclica warning on the dangers of it, spurning the greatest popular interest in Catholicism since the dark ages. Examples: LLMs.