The hype is the product

The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001.

(And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.)

I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.

Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs.

What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.

Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.

A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright.

> in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience.

Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.

If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.

My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.

Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.

[1] (https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/)

Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.

Is there any research out there suggesting LLMs help programmers get stuff done? I can't say I follow the research closely but I have not seen any.

Googling for [ai llm productivity research] and looking at the first page of results I can't find much interesting evidence. One report says users asked to create a basic web server in JS complete the task 55% faster using an LLM. One report measures "perceived productivity". Students given text writing tasks are faster. One report measures productivity as lines of code written. The rest seem to just be projecting theoretical productivity gains.

Has anyone measured any improved productivity?

I can see this report from METR that is actually measuring something: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

> Core Result > > When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

But surely someone must have also found results showing productivity gains. I assume I was just not looking hard enough.

I am a happy Copilot Pro user since 2021, still.

we live in the age of lies. you can either keep debunking them to deaf ears, or join the bandwagon and maybe make some money by fooling someone else. the whole stock market feels like a ponzi scheme now.

> please explain the Tesla stock, 100% hype driven, there is zero correlation between the stock price and how the company is actually doing.

They do still have the best electric cars on the market.

People have been talking about the failures of capitalism long before the word was coined, going back to at least Abraham buying land with silver coins in 1675 BC and Jesus throwing out the money changers.

Although it's a mess, people are generally better off than a while ago or under non capitalist systems.

Ageism is never a good look. There are smart and stupid people in every age group.

In the liberal worldview, private property has prior existence. The common good is understood as a concession, a derivative good composed of that which is ceded from private property. Human beings are viewed as atomized units, and society is consequently viewed as a fluctuating miasma of transactional relationships.

In the classical view, the common good has prior existence, and private property exists for the sake of the common good (we avoid a whole lot of grief and social strife by having private property; properly disposed, it is a successful means of distribution). Capital and labor are not construed as necessarily opposed. Rather, in a society in which cooperative relationships for mutual benefit are the rule (in place of a market driven by exploitation), capital and labor are friends. Both have skin in the game by assuming risk. In the classical view, workers are owed at least a family wage as a matter of justice. If we have a billionaire who fails to pay his employees adequately, then we have someone who quite literally has robbed his employees. Human relationships are not confined to merely the transactional, and we have duties toward society that precede our consent.

According to a liberal view, if a famine strikes ą region and some guy has a warehouse full of food, it would be theft for to take the food in that warehouse to survive, and theft, of course, is not morally permissible (it is absurd to claim otherwise; it's theft!). Meanwhile, according to a classical view, private property is not fixed absolutely. As you recall, it exists for the sake of the common good. So, in such a case, the food in that warehouse is not absolutely determined as private property. Private property is derived and ordered toward the common good. It would not be theft for the starving to take food from that warehouse, as the food quite literally belongs to them! (This is an extreme example, but I include it to demonstrate how the consequences of each stance play out.)