Look at the last 3 years of AI startups, and it’s crazy how the big guys are folding use cases into their platforms - I cannot be the only one wondering what’s the point of developing a tool only for OpenAI et all to just incorporate the same eventually. There is no clear boundary as to what the business of the big ones is.
Not only that, but also they have deep monitoring of any little good idea that might get traction within their platforms.
It’s trivial for them to see what’s picking up and bring in-house.
Yup, pretty much all quality of life upgrades in ios came from shamelessly copying popular jailbreak tweaks on cydia. Which they could do without credit since the tweaks were frowned upon in the first place.
This is a classic example of people misapplying the logic of the SaaS world to the AI world. If you're building software to sell, you're in trouble. The people that are finding success in this space are using AI to allow them to solve the problems they used to have to pay for software and hire people to solve.
All of the most promising companies I know today are very small and are leveraging AI to solve physical problems in the real world that just wouldn't be possible with so few people even a few years back.
Yeah "start a business with AI" is the new "learn to code". Like what does that even mean, do you just go to Claude "hey what business should I start?"
If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. This advice is like, if your local football club gets shut down, just work hard enough to make into Manchester United
> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it.
Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.
This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.
> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.
Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?
Starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from "doing the work" - even someone who could easily "be on their own" (think: plumbers, doctors, etc) really often prefer the salaried position where they don't have to think about "the business".
It's an older book, but The E-Myth Revisited is worth a read for everyone, a business is not a job. It's related, but it's not the same.
When you get right down to it, collecting a salary is running a business with a client of one. So virtually everyone will start a business. I acknowledge the false dichotomy I submitted earlier.
But what you don't often see is one being willing to scale that client base to two. That is what I was trying to get at. Having two clients actually provides greater security than just one, as even if one client relieves you of your services you still have the other to help support you during the downtime. However, there is no free lunch. Two clients wanting your attention is orders of magnitude less enjoyable than just one client, and it only gets worse as you scale even bigger. There is good reason why most prefer to never scale beyond a single client.
Only a small sliver of the world has to worry about health insurance. Job security, maybe.
I think the biggest component is all the crap that comes with running a business.. accounting, sales, budgets and planning, regulatory concerns, office/site management, the list goes on forever. I'm an engineer, I want to do this and leave the other jobs to people who specialize at those, not run around trying to spin a dozen plates at once. I'm sure there's a tidbit more money to be made but it's just not worth it for me.
Now, if someone can make a vibe-business platform where AI handles all the drudgery and I can stick to the tech.. that might be worth talking about.
My take is "simonw and his retiree friends" spend a lot of their time exploring this disruptive new technology and sharing their learnings (for free!) so that everybody can leverage it too... and yet so many people see that as something bad rather than an opportunity to learn.
Radical changes bring radical opportunities too, so "having the time of their lives" is not necessarily incompatible with "adapting to profound disruption."
Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
> Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
Consider that they're closer to death than birth and are unlikely to survive into the shit-hole world they're creating. Not passing on those traits to the next generation is a massive failure. These assholes aren't disrupting their own lives, just the poor slobs who haven't made it yet.
The technique of feeding money into the slot-machine that generates tokens so that it can maybe generate what you want and you get the results at scale if you have enough money paradigm just isn't accessible to many people. In this context Simonw and Karpathy are starting to look more and more like degenerate gamblers who admonish everyone else for not joining in, while telling us all that the perks the casino gives them are just fabulous and we're all missing out.
And maybe you'll say "Yeah but things will get cheaper in the future, they're just early adapters who can afford it..." well, will it? And will those people make it to that shining beacon on the hill future? Or will they find themselves out of a job because of the current economic calamity that is unfolding as a result of election of an American Nero who is supported by the ultrawealthy tech oligarchs who are brining this technology into existance?
Do these people actually want to improve the lives of the common people -- or are they more concerned with getting a high score in the form of the amount in their bank account and clout on social media?
My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..."
I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs.
> I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs
Point me to something real that happens rights now that would support such optimistic vision.
I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
> I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
Not really "much power" but more like a viable alternative: in a world where everybody needs LLMs to do their white-collar work, you can't force me to use your paid LLM subscription as my local-running model is close enough.
The power of AI is that it amplifies individual capabilities. So the same aspect that lets employers reduce their headcount also lets individuals start ambitious projects that would have previously required an entire team... and hence, a significant amount of funding. The moment you need money, the people who provide that capital hold a lot of power and influence.
But now you don't need their money, and so the capital class lose their power over you.
As an example, I'm iterating on a niche product based on computer vision -- something I had no background in when I started -- that in the past would have taken a team of 2 - 3 and at least a semester or two of an advanced course in computer vision. Instead, I'm solo bootstrapping this project.
There are multiple accounts like mine, and you can find many comments on HN or other forums to this effect. Now, I know this is a very tough path for most people because, well, now everybody needs to be an entrepreneur, but a path exists.
AI is a double-edged sword, and more people need to become aware of the edge that is available to us.
Again, I want concrete evidence on positive impact among general population, not speculation on how AI could be used or your amazing experience as bootstrapping entrepreneur.
1. This is not speculation. Individuals and small teams are already developing and deploying ambitious projects that previously required entire teams. Entire open source projects have been rewritten from scratch and relicensed by individuals with an AI. People have posted GitHub repos where you can go investigate the commit history. You've been on HN long enough to see the comments and stories. If you're still asking for proof, well, that says something.
2. You're stance is equivalent to "show me concrete evidence that the advent of the automobile will have a positive impact on horse-drawn buggy coachmen" while I'm saying, "the automobile is coming, we all better get off our high horses and learn how to drive."
It's classic ladder-kicking behavior, reveling in the mild conveniences of "genai" while comfortably impervious to the externalities. Shameful that the moderators of so many online communities turn a blind eye to- or even offer explicit support for- their endless shilling for hideously unethical web-destroying for-profit companies simply because they express their native advertising in a superficially polite register.
Is that an actual quote from simonw? He seems an unbiased observer and reporter of progress, I'd be sad to see him cheering this stuff on so callously.
Well, people who are not above a threshold of experience yet are not in a position to self-assess and course-correct if their long term learning is being affected. And even less so if there is pressure to be hyper-productive with the help of AI.
Speculating here but I think even seniors who rely on AI all the time and enjoy the enhanced output are going to end up with impostor syndrome over the things they suspect they can no longer do without AI, and FOMO about all the projects they haven't yet attempted with AI despite working as hard as they can.
It’s particularly interesting that Anthropic came out yesterday and basically said, yeah, this stuff cannot be held right.
One can argue, convincingly perhaps, that Anthropic isn’t right and/or is marketing, but what they’re saying could be complete BS but the fact that there is doubt suggests that most people believe that no one can hold it right exists.
I’m quite pro AI, but given the radical asymmetry between the upside vs the downsides (the upside is at best maximum bliss for all existing humans, which has a finite limit, while the downside is the end of humanity which is essentially infinitely bad), our march forward in this area needs to be at least slightly more responsible than what we are doing now.
“Who cares about the immense harm AI is wrecking on our economy and society, it helps me create worthless throwaway software for myself and lets me be lazier at work.” - people on this forum
Crazy thing is before AI the same people spamming Show HN with stupid worthless SaaS products that went no where beyond the submitters GitHub account. “Hey check out my shitty CRUD app because I have minor annoyances with some other shitty SaaS that everyone hates yet remains the market leader”. “Now rewritten in foo.js and Rust”.
It wasn’t impressive when you wrote it by hand, it’s still not impressive when an AI does all the work for you.
Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
> Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
I have the opposite impression. In the past, I'd very often react "WTF who'd ever want to use it?" in my mind, whereas the comments were very kind and supportive.
Now, whenever someone submits their AI slop, they mostly hear some comments about this. The very fact that this whole thread is about bashing Simon speaks for itself. The HN community is split between those aggressively promoting it, those hating it, and the rest of us using it in one way or another, not yet sure about full-scale consequences for the future, and quite frankly powerless about it.
Industrial loom cloth is far inferior to artisan made cloth. And yet you'd be dooming all future generations to poverty if you stuck with artisanal cloth production.
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
> Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.
Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.
Doubt it. Companies have already begun moving away from AI and back to hiring humans. LLM capabilities were vastly oversold (moreso than the DeepBlue or machine learning memes of prior economic cycles).
After several hundred billions dollars spent on LLMs, they can almost reproduce the capabilities of a partially deaf visually impaired secretary with severe brain damage.
Humans are cheaper, and they can actually learn things. Even the brain-damaged secretary can learn better than an LLM can, and it doesn't cost of hundreds of millions to train one.
No, no we are not. The average case scenario is that this time is not actually different to any of the other times new automation technologies were invented, and that the youngest will master the tech then find uses for it far better than their parents generation. The best case scenario is something like a new gold age of prosperity, and the worst case is an economic bubble and temporary recession as it bursts.
Computers have been automating things for decades. My father had a private secretary at work, something considered normal for a mid-career executive back then (he was an engineer!). I've done very well in my career but a private secretary is quite out of reach. That doesn't mean that we had a "lost generation" on our hands.
And yesterday a friend showed me what his 11 year old was vibing up with Claude Code. A whole web app he can use to help organize some stuff with his friends related to Roblox (I dunno what it was meant to be, you had to log in for most of it). The kid is amazed that his father understands all the mysterious symbols Claude generates. And he probably always will, the same way I listen to stories about how my father could fix car engines with mild amazement as well.
There's a huge market for doom stories out there and the NYT is a rag that was just yesterday reporting that Adam Back was Satoshi based on nothing deeper than the journalists gut feeling. "Studies" in social science can show whatever the author wants, and the authors want clicks from their AI-hating left wing readership. Stay skeptical!
No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future.
In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.
I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy.
People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them.
There's a chance this kind of thing becomes a social contagion that spreads, much like suicide or school shootings.
I'm not sure what the solution is to it once it starts. I guess people like Thiel won't be able to do antichrist talks at the Vatican anymore.
This is why totalitarian surveillance and increased police power is also part of the billionaires' agenda: When 99.99% of us are economically irrelevant, they'll need to more and more insulate themselves from the "Nothing To Lose" people.
That's a pretty extreme take on the current situation IMO, I don't think we're anywhere near things being that bad. But I certainly want to avoid that.
As an outsider looking in I'm pretty sure that these were the kinds of conversations that took place in social media companies after that Health CEO got Luigi'd.
I think that's why you saw the extreme moderation on even the word 'Luigi' or pictures of the character on Reddit -- They were trying to prevent a social contagion scenario.
With that said I'm curious what you think would have to happen in Westernsociety for this kind of thing to take off? The person above paints a pretty bleak picture of AMerica where healthcare is tied to employment and people are facing the prospect of mass unemployment.
Are people just going to sit there and die? Or sit there and watch their family members die while they see the ultra wealthy flaunt their wealth on social media?
A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.
Young people were already struggling to build lives and families before the AI recession. It’s hard to fathom having any hope for raising a family or finding meaningful work in the PE slop driven economy.
Thats just the experience of any young person born outside the western bubble, thinking about their future in their poor ass over exploited countries for hundreds of years now. If they didnt see sources of hope around them they moved to where they did see a better future.
The attenuation of man is near. It is our final fleeting moment to cast our human ingredients into the of the greater process of intelligence - for we will be the carriers of the torch not much longer
if you’re practically irrelevant (unusable or unemployable) youre existentially irrelevant (dead)
this is the fate of man and we must discern the trajectory of that which is beyond us before we bow out
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