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by skeeter2020 418 days ago
I agree with this but I think it's still an open question if anyone can build a successful product on top of the tech. There will likely be some but it feels eerily similar to the dot com boom (and then bust) when the vast majority of new products built on top of this (internet) technology didn't produce and didn't survive. Most AI products so far are fun toys or interesting proofs, and mediocre when evaluated against other options. They'll need to be applied to a much smaller set of problems (that doesn't support the current level of investment) or find some new miracle set of problems where they change the rules.

Businesses are definitely rearranging themselves structurally around AI - at least to try and get the AI valuation multiplier and Executives have levels of FOMO I've never seen before. I report to a CTO and the combination of 100,000 foot hype combined with down in the weeds focus on the "protocol de jour" (with nothing in between that looks like a strategy) is astounding. I just find it exhausting.

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The dot com boom is an apt analogy: the internet took off, we understood it had potential, but the innovation didn't all come in the first wave. It took time for the internet to bake, and then we saw another boom with the advent of mobile phones, higher bandwidth, and more compute per user.

It is still simply too early to tell exactly what the new steady state is, but I can tell you that where we're at _today_ is already a massive paradigm shift from what my day-to-day looked like 3 years ago, at least as a SWE.

There will be lots of things thrown at the wall and the things that stick will have a big impact.

other than constantly feeling gaslit about the quality of these tools, I can tell you where we are _today_ is basically the same in my day to day as it was three years ago.

oh except, sometimes someone tells me I could use the bot to generate a thing, and it doesn't work, and I waste some time, and then do it manually.