> A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

> AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing.

But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?

It's running, privately, in my homelab.

I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy.

This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.

Remember: code is free as in "free puppy". FOSS communities were never valuable because of the code. It was the shared written and oral traditions that make the software useful, usable, and updated.

> that make the software useful, usable, and updated

There is a lot of OSS software out there (e.g. in scientific communities) that I would say would barely qualify for each of those three attributes. The main reason it's valuable for the respective communities, is because it's the only thing that's available.

You will likely end up in maintenance hell soon. This will likely not be much easier with AI because coding is not the hard/annoying part, it's the fact that you need to dust off every little project every time a tiny fix is needed, and that's a lot of toil in the long run.

Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.

There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.

"This new tool allows for writing all this code ..... but every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy, all decided to only write private software with it that they aren't releasing to the public in any way"

Seems reasonable

You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.

I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...

I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

> They are all still very subsidised.

I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs.

We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs.

> Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

I would bet good money on prices going down significantly, not up.

If we get to the point where you can run an Opus 4.8 model on your local computer, it's going to be even cheaper for a datacenter to serve it on their hardware. That means prices crash, not that they're going to rise.

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but paying the API cost (which larger companies need to do) are where the money is made. And the reason why some companies have estimated how much using AI will actually cost them, and ran out of budget quick.

Basically, using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

Interestingly enough, geohot also has an article covering this: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/18/pric...

That's commentary on company valuations.

Token prices are going down. Competition is global. A company could choose to keep their API prices high, but if another company comes in at 1/10th the price for 95% of the performance then they won't have many customers.

You’re right, my bad, I read that too quickly

Guarantee is too strong a thing to seek, but healthy competition makes it highly likely that the supply/demand curve will meet at a healthy place.

You're always guaranteed that you can stash away the open models!

Currently, because of the subsidies from the frontier models, demand is mostly for higher intelligence.

If subsidies do end, demand for price efficiency per unit of intelligence will go way up.And because there's many players in the market, this demand should be met by at least some of them.

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases.

You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.

He says he might have been too harsh in his “eternal sloptember” post from may: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-e...

I wonder what he thinks was too harsh, still seems pretty bang on, I think it’s going to age well.

I get it, I want to agree, I really do like the “this is a new tool in the toolkit of the professional software craftsperson” argument…

…but consider: the Q-tip. “Don’t use it to clean your ears”, but for most people that’s all they want to do with it, and empirical observation indicates that this dynamic results in either “using Q-tips irresponsibly” or “not using Q-tips”, with “uses Q-tips properly” being a small-to-vanishing proportion of the whole.

I felt the same way in 2024-2025. Then Sonnet 4 was released, and things started feeling different. Opus 4.5 was another step change for me. Everything feels like it's accelerating, and timelines are getting crunched. I guess in some ways I envy OP, who would "bet everything" against ASI - the truth is I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows, where this ends.

He didn't say he bets everything against ASI, he said he bets everything against ASI being a flash of light in the sky which destroys our chance of getting access to the wealth it creates.

This guy is sooooo annoying with his stale takes.

This is what he wrote before.

> I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t.

Now he's writng

> I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents.

SMH now he writes about the hype. My brother in absolute Deity, *you* should have believed the hype.

Both can be true and I have both opinions also in me. Love the progress, worry about the consequences of not being careful with it.

He does say in this post:

> I’m getting better at using them and get some boost from the models. It is a new skill, and it’s not like I haven’t constantly been trying them. You have to be really careful, they can increase cognitive fatigue, and all the vibe coded stuff is still slop (where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?).

There's good reason to hate the merchants and their marketing. But builders are not merchants. They build with whatever tool is available.

Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

The secret sauce is training data. They’re not just taking advantage of more compute (which obviously is necessary but as mentions basically a commodity). They are paying billions to data labelers and making judgements about the nature of the training data they best need to make the product they want. This seems to get pushed aside as a minor point but it’s the primary differentiator of the big labs.

As a I said, compute and data. But LLMs can be distilled, so even their data is not much of a secret sauce.

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.

Those people are not just on Twitter. They’re here on HN, they’re at work, they’re at your next social gathering.

I’ve found them to be unavoidable to some degree.

Agreed. There's sort of this spiteful anti-hype here that I find very offputting, and ultimately I think it's because a lot of folks are going out and encountering opinions I never see. I hear wild conspiracy theories about data centers and the financials of involved companies that make their way to me from bluesky or instagram, often through here, but never the unstoppable tide of hype that people are allegedly[1] railing against. I do read Scott Alexander, but he's a lot more reserved than people make him out to be on this.

[1] Allegedly because I have no firsthand experience, not to imply doubt.

"Permanent underclass" is the notion that people who get involved at the ground floor will essentially get infinite wealth relative to the ones who don't. It's a little goofy, but more of the capitalism you'd expect from today's X than the communism you're imagining in yesterday's Twitter.

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

Agreed, but I do think this is a wholly different kind of hype. With crypto currencies it was the promise of modernizing value exchange, with some zealots promising the end of traditional currency.

With this, I’m hearing (from supposedly reputable publications, in addition to random people) that this is going to end knowledge work in general and take out a large percentage of the world’s labor force. I’m being told to pick up a trade, and that the career I have and the knowledge I’ve gained is now worthless.

The worst part seems to be that it’s pretty much impossible to quantify any kind of impact these tools will have until after the impact is actually felt. We’ve been in limbo while the tech sector is just rotting.

C-suites. Marketers. People with stock portfolios. Banks. Politicians.

So all people that don’t understand the thing being hyped.

Basically all people with monetary investment in the thing being hyped

> But models are useful just like... all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will!

Wait, does this mean I'm better at something than geohot? All that time spent learning regexps wasn't a waste!

I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on.

In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence.

Now I can just ask AI about fleeting ideas and always have a starting point for some area of some project to work on.

A lot/some of the concerns about the AI Age could be alleviated if people got UBI and a 4-day workweek.

like if AI's supposed to be so great why do we still have to work so much??

and if we don't have to work, how do we pay for food and bed?

Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore.

I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was stuck for too long, I’d discard it. Now I feel like I have an obligation to build everything.

Maybe it never mattered and the quantity of solutions is truly the most valuable thing.

> Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past?

You have to be careful and "remain yourself":

Like I've been trying to think of a generic save/load system for my game framework, but the ideas given by Codex so far don't suit my desired design/interface, BUT it makes me certain of how I DON'T want to do it heh

If I got lazy and just blindly did what the AI says, I'd end up in deeper tech dept.

You have to take advantage of and "exploit" the way LLMs work, which seems ideal for shaping vague ideas, by using the AI's fuzziness to help you decide what you do and don't want.

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind.

The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

the author does not believe in the technological singularity.

That's what I gathered from the blog post - which made the title of the blog seem odd.

I hate LLM. I hate people who push any digital artifact with LLM. Fuck you all.

Yeah but it was only like 2 years ago that artists were arguing this on the basis that AI-gen images would consistently mangle hands

Now we're at a point where that never happens, and where lipsync is almost a completely solved problem

If the issue here is simply that the quality is bad, one has to contend with the fact that it is undoubtedly exponentially improving and there's no reason we should expect that improvement to stop

I also don't have any interest in consuming AI generated art, but the same criticisms were levied at computer graphics and if we're comparing to CGI we'd be at the late 1970s in terms of nascency

I've made ai generated art using family photos as the starting point, and it was wonderful. :)

I'm sure most engineering is LLM-assisted already and nothing is wrong with it. It's just the one-shot vibe-coded low quality slop that spoils sentiment of this tools. Also many people are interested in what agents can build unsupervised as a test of "superintelligence".

I think calling it AI has been very negative.

One of the lesser, but still underdiscussed ramifications is that I think it has limited the public's ability to comprehend the Yann LeCunn argument, that genuine AI is likely possible but that LLMs and transformers are a dead end and we need to explore different modalities

"It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic"

But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good).

I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engines and alike were called AI long ago. So it is not general strong AI and has no consciousness and no mind and is pretty dumb too often - but the general concept - getting from a some vague text to a working program has some connection to intelligence to me.

Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1]

But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

> Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.

I’m not sure it’s net negative or not. I’ve found that it’s reductive though. We have this really broad field of artificial intelligence reduced down to at worst a “slop machine” and at best a single tool.

Imagine being a CS professor that studied AI in the 90s and how you have to over explain you don’t mean LLM chatbots to a layman.

> shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond

The SF metro is possibly the worst in the entire world in terms of CoL vs QoL.

It has a higher proportion of unsheltered population living on the streets than almost any city outside of Africa except Manila and possibly Dhaka

the vast majority of the target audience of this blog post would only consider moving to SF because of the tech scene. This isn't a mountain biking or asian food blog.

False equivalency

ooh I like your site: https://webb.page

false equating that author's AI hate is hating SF tech-bros? Oh I think I am being misunderstood, that makes me feel better about the insta-downvotes. Author states it plainly:

> This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

damn, you all hate SF that much?

I don't hate SF it's just overpriced.

Whenever I visit SFO it's really funny seeing all the advertisements from startups above a population struggling to find housing.

Won't it be better to pay someone 100k in Reno than 180k in SF? Most collaboration happens online these days anyways.

Honestly 60k in Barcelona is like 200k in SF when you look at housing and public services.

We need to punish bad city governance for being bad.