you're VERY justified in feeling skeptical, I'm seeing it first hand, you're correct.

I'm a consultant/freelancer and I'm booked for the rest of the year and well into the new year with jobs that pretty much consist of me reviewing and cleaning up AI slop.

Most of my clients are startups and small companies that went full in on AI and vibe coding. Now they're discovering that their attempts to save a few bucks by leveraging AI, cutting devs, etc is costing them more that what they envisioned on saving. The stuff they've built with AI doesn't scale, is full of exploits, and breaks quickly. With the recent Tea App thing many of my clients are now in a panic because they essentially did the exact same thing. They don't want their startup to be next in the news because some rando came across their house with the front door left open by AI.

the tech debt is massive, It's costing many of these places more to fix their vibe coders/AI mistakes than what it would have originally cost if they just used a solid dev team. Make no mistake, I'm charging them a good amount also.

All if it could have been avoided though. They could have continued to use their LLM's if they had all just kept a leash on it. if they dismissed the concept of vibe coding. A good chunk of it could have been avoided if the person feeding the prompts simply REVIEWED the code before hitting enter. I'm not kidding, IF they just LOOKED at what was being spat out things would be different. none of them did. they just trusted the AI to be smarter because they were lead to believe it was.

Without social media, you can still be in a bubble, e.g. the bubble of your friends, family, coworkers, just because they don't talk about AI doesnt mean it's not widely used, I work for a large corporation with over 10k employees and the AI adoption is definitely happening, won't go into details

A lot of startups whose entire business model relies on OpenAI's small model API calls costing under $1/Mtok, are going to go bust when OpenAI finally runs out of money and ramps the cost up tenfold.

they have no idea if what they're paying is what it actually costs though, so good luck building tools for the future when the resources are artificially priced.

I'm skeptical of AI coding as it exists today, and while I'm bullish on long-term prospects for AI writing software, am very dubious that simply using LLMs is going to be the answer.

However.

Startups typically do lose money. They'll burn money as they acquire a userbase --- their growth phase --- and transition to profitability later. I don't think "startups in area X tend to be losing money" is terribly surprising.

Selling grain for coal, coal for iron and iron for paper is capitalism, but not a bubble.

Whether it becomes a normal thing depends on the cost.

It would be just cheaper to self-host something for the whole company then?
Open-source AIs are there and they are very much competitive with proprietary solutions.

I didn't say they couldn't be resold, they simply won't have as wide a potential user market like an generic GPU would. But think about it for a sec, you've got thousands of AI dedicated gpu's going stale whenever a datacenter gets overhauled or a datacenter goes bust.

that's gonna put a lot more product on the market that other datacenters aren't going to touch - no one puts used hardware in their racks - so who's gonna gobble up all this stuff?

not the gamers. who else needs this kind of stuff?

I can't name anyone in the company I work for thats had llms revolutionize their job

I’m jealous, my director at a software company has a second laptop just for AI so he doesn’t have to deal with IT and is insistent on using it for every project. One of his annual goals is 100% of his division using AI at least once per day. For every person against AI, there is another who can’t get enough.

The 'cloud' was a pretty big thing though... everyone used to self host, now only some self host.

AWS, GCP, Azure make a lot of money

Now I'm suddenly tempted to start using it. or at least coming up with a bot to keep it busy.

Yes, this is part of the business model. The goal is to get everyone addicted to their service, then jack the price up to profitable margins. It's the same model Netflix and Amazon used. Bothe services lost money for over 10 years before becoming profitable.

Current gen models got less accurate and hallucinated at a higher rate compared to the last ones, from experience and from openai. I think it's either because they're trying to see how far they can squeeze the models, or because it's starting to eat its own slop found while crawling.

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f3722c1/o3-and-o4-mini-system-card.pdf

Holy crap, has anyone ever attempted to create an "AI fork bomb"? Go to one of these agent bots, and tell it to create accounts with the other agent code bots. These new accounts will all be told to create accounts on all the other code bots services. And do this recursively forever. So the flow would be 1 bot makes lets say 5 bots. Each of those 5 bots make 5 more bots. And each of those 5 bots make 5 more. So the total number of running bots becomes like 1 * 5 * 5 * 5 * 5...

Obligatory, this is purely hypothetical, and you should never do this for legal reasons.

how do you book software work so far out? for some reason my software clients seem to all want their stuff yesterday