[lukev]

So AI is in this interesting place because while it seems obvious that it's an amazing, powerful, transformative technology... that actually hasn't materialized at an economic level, yet. Arguably the only place where it has a proven positive impact on productivity is in software development, and even there it's pretty obvious it's not a silver bullet.

I'm not interested so much if or when it will materialize economic value (that gets discussed here ad nauseum) but... how long a runway do you think we have where investors are going to continue to invest based on the promise, before the funding environment does shift? Because it will, eventually. And the LLM industry better have something to show that justifies current valuations or things are going to get very messy.

My fear is that we've entered "too big to fail" territory in which too much of the tech sector has too much to lose to be the first ones to start backing out. But that only means the bubble is going to get that much bigger before it detonates (and takes down half the economy with it.)

[belter]

> Arguably the only place where it has a proven positive impact on productivity is in software development

There are no studies demonstrating this. Having to double check this randomly hallucinating pair programmer AI colleague, is not helping with productivity.

[lukev]

That's why I said "arguably", cause you're about to get argued with.

I won't, though. I tend to agree (under current idioms, I DO think it holds promise for software development when used properly.)

[jpadkins]

Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence. Software developer productivity is very hard to measure, so we may never get a "good" study of this. Might be like IDEs, where at first no one was using them and people would complain that they don't actually help developer productivity. Fast forward 10 years and almost everyone is using them.

[jacobr1]

There is probably a difference here in a few different market segments. You have the AI tooling companies (foundation models, tooling frameworks, vector dbs, etcs...), AI product companies (Agents for Foo), Companies with existing business investing in AI projects, and also existing tooling/compute companies, especially the hyperscalers.

The AI tooling companies could loose a lot of hype and valuation, why the hyperscalers and companies just building incremental automation using llms/agents continue, albeit with less internal investment. How much would that take down the industry? How many existing tech players have fully bet on AI? Even a company like salesforce that has pivoted their marketing to all AI probably only has a small fraction of their revenue tied to it.

[lukev]

I think it's not clear that AI is driving significant revenue _anywhere_ outside its own ecosystem. The only companies with real AI-driven revenue are selling to people investing in the hype, not their own realized revenue.