That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, though bounded, amount of tokens), frontier models are a no-brainer, most folks and companies will use them. But, at token rates, 10x or 100x the cost of open models or what I was spending on the frontier models a month ago? That is a harder question to answer "yes" to. I certainly wouldn't spend $1000 a month for the best model, much less $10,000; my employer might pay $1000/month, but definitely not $10,000. The frontier labs need everyone to answer "yes" to spending 100x what they currently spend to justify the valuations, and it's just not going to happen as long as everyone knows how to make these models.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to figure that out now. Anthropic, in particular, has their finger on the trigger...they want to push people to usage-based billing for Fable. But, OpenAI released 5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!), and there's no moat keeping someone from switching. If Anthropic really does end Fable access on the subscription plans in a few days, I predict a large market move back toward OpenAI.

The market isn't going to bear the cost of making the frontiers investment make sense.

It's running, privately, in my homelab.

I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy.

This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.

You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.

LLMs can absolutely code and I can have a javascript app without ever seeing a line of javascipt code. What a blessing.

The perpetual underclass memes are just funny. How is it not chuckle worthy to see people mocking Anthropic's silly Fable marketing with relief that they have five more days to escape the perpetual underclass. Mom, how did we get so rich? Your dad took advantage of the Fable week.

And finally, lolbertarians had a couple of really hard years so it's great to see actual market competition where some of the largest companies in existence dance for my $20.

…but consider: the Q-tip. “Don’t use it to clean your ears”, but for most people that’s all they want to do with it, and empirical observation indicates that this dynamic results in either “using Q-tips irresponsibly” or “not using Q-tips”, with “uses Q-tips properly” being a small-to-vanishing proportion of the whole.

I wonder what he thinks was too harsh, still seems pretty bang on, I think it’s going to age well.

It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.

This is what he wrote before.

> I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t.

Now he's writng

> I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents.

SMH now he writes about the hype. My brother in absolute Deity, *you* should have believed the hype.

> AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing.

But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?

It's bullshit in the sense that they don't know for sure, but the author doesn't either. Why might or might not it be true?

> And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed.

Haha, OP has a way with words.

In a way, both these emotional extremes (FOMO & the singularity) are just tools being used to continue driving the massive CapEx behind LLM improvement. Hate to love it? Love to hate it?

In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence.

Now I can just ask AI about fleeting ideas and always have a starting point for some area of some project to work on.

A lot/some of the concerns about the AI Age could be alleviated if people got UBI and a 4-day workweek.

like if AI's supposed to be so great why do we still have to work so much??

and if we don't have to work, how do we pay for food and bed?

The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

Wait, does this mean I'm better at something than geohot? All that time spent learning regexps wasn't a waste!

So far, all we have is more software running on computers. It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic.

Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.

It’s why con artists, scammers always flood every hype cycle. Greed ruins everything.

There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN.

TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties.

EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco.

> This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.