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by apatheticonion 38 days ago
Despite acknowledging that LLMs improve my productivity and am happy with how they have positively affected my life - I'm a bit cynical about the trajectory of this "AI bubble" and am looking forward to it popping sooner rather than later.

I just want to get it over with so we can abandon the hype, recover and move onto a less erratic/volatile investment/business landscape.

Sick of the "AI coding interviews" and having to virtue signal that I think AI will usher in economic nirvana.

Was a little bummed that Micron's earnings didn't send the Q's into a spiral after the insanity of the KOSPI the other day.

1 comments

I'm less and less convinced there's anything to pop. I had a backlog a year+ long for my engineering team in my last company, plus dreams that weren't even worth investing in. Now... that whole year backlog is maybe two months long. And everyone who competes with that has to keep up.
There are two important points to consider though:

On the bubble pop it's the feedback loop of investments to ROI materialising or not which will dictate if this stabilises in the current trajectory or if the bubble pops and massive investments will get written off (whoever is holding the bag can cry a river and won't be made whole).

But on that point for a team delivering value and demonstrating ROI I'm curious to see how many businesses fly through their roadmaps at whatever velocity and quality LLMs can deliver - and how does that translate to business growth. Are you achieving more in features and accelerating growth to the same 2 months instead of 12+? Or has the LLM spend just made 12+ months of "cost to build roadmap" into 2 months of staff + LLM costs anyway without profit to match??

Unless "other lines" go up as well, just compressing that increased cost without the benefits in revenue and growth, it'll still fail the ROI to keep paying the LLMs tax for these frontier labs to recoup their investment and then some...

Yes, we can now achieve in two months what we did in 12, all else being equal. If I was willing to experiment with lower quality, I would've said one month.

Do you remember how Uber was a bubble that was going to pop for years?

Why do you think that didn't happen? They're still barely profitable.

Any chance you could share how you achieved that?

I've been using LLMs a lot and they have been a force multiplier, but I am not sure I could knock out a year's worth of work in 2 months. I must be doing something wrong