There will be a split of two major outcomes from LLM coding near-term.
The larger often half-baked projects will flail like they always have. People will get tired of bothering to attempt these. Oh look you created a big bloated pile of garbage that nobody will ever use. And of course there will be rare exceptions, some group of N people will work together to vibe code a clone of a billion dollar business and it'll actually start taking off and that'll garner a lot of attention. It'll remain forever extremely difficult to get users to a service. And if app & website creation scales up in volume due to simplicity of creation, the attention economy problem will only get more intense (neutralizing most of the benefits of the LLMs as an advantage).
The smaller, quasi micro projects used to more immediately solve narrow problems will thrive in a huge way, resulting in tangible productivity gains, and there will be a zillion of these, both at home and within businesses of all sizes.
The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what.
Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.
How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.
The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.
A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place.
I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.
At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":
he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.
In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.
And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.
Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.
Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
Dropbox is actually a great example of why this isn't likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload workflows (including directly into software with massive install base) exists, and showed an active interest in competing with them. Still doing OK
Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the platform their financial models and all their clients rely on to a new upstart software suite
Grok is losing pretty spectacularly on the user / subscriber side of things.
They have no path to paying for their existence unless they drastically increase usage. There aren't going to be very many big winners in this segment and xAI's expenses are really really big.
I really wonder what will happen when the AI companies can no longer set fire to piles of investor money, and have to transition to profitability or at least revenue neutrality - as that would entail dramatically increasing prices.
Is the plan to have everyone so hopelessly dependent on their product that they grit their teeth and keep on paying?
Think about the stock return over a period - its composed of capital gains and dividends.
Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher.
What does this mean? Less retained earnings / cashflows that can be re-invested.
Apple is the only one that will come out of this OK. The others will be destroyed for if they dont return cash, the cash balance will be discounted leading to a further reduction in the value of equity. The same thing that happened to Zuckerberg and Meta with the Metaverse fiasco.
Firms in the private sphere will go bust/acquired.
> Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher
This is not how corporate finance works. Capital gains and losses apply to assets. And only the most disciplined companies boost dividends in the face of decline—most double down and try to spend their way back to greatness.
It'll be a combination of advertising and subscription fees, and there will only be a few big winners.
Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here.
Microsoft is toast, short of a miracle. I'd bet against Office and Windows here. As Office goes down, it's going to take Windows down with it. The great Office moat is about to end. The company struggles, the stock struggles, Azure gets spun off (unlock value, institutional pressure), Office + Windows get spun off - the company splits into pieces. The LLMs are an inflection point for Office and Microsoft is super at risk, backwards regarding AI and they're slow. The OpenAI pursuit as it was done, was a gigantic mistake for Microsoft - one of the dumbest strategies in the history of tech, it left them with their pants down. Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be complacent.
Grok is very unlikely to make it (as is). The merger with SpaceX guarantees its death as a competitor to GPT/Gemini/Claude, it's over. Maybe they'll turn Grok into something useful to SpaceX. More likely they'll slip behind and it'll die rapidly like Llama. The merger is because they see the writing on the wall, this is a bailout to the investors (not named Elon) of xAI, as the forced Twitter rollup was a bailout for the investors of Twitter.
Claude is in a weird spot. What they have is not worth $300-$500 billion. Can they figure out how to build a lot more value out of what they have today (and get their finances sustainable), before the clock runs out? Or do they get purchased by Meta, Microsoft, etc.
OpenAI has to rapidly roll out the advertising model and get the burn rate down to meaningless levels, so they're no longer dependent on capital markets for financing (that party is going to end suddenly).
Meta is permanently on the outside looking in. They will never field an in-house competitor to GPT or Gemini that can persistently keep up. Meta doesn't know what it is or why it should be trying to compete with GPT/Gemini/Claude. Their failure (at this) is already guaranteed. They should just acquire GPT 4o and let their aging userbase on FB endlessly talk itself into the grave for the next 30 years while clicking ads.
If Amazon knew what they were doing (they don't right now), they would: immediately split retail + ads and AWS. The ad business ensures that the retail business will continue to thrive and would be highly lucrative. Then have AWS purchase Anthropic when valuations drop, bolt it on to AWS everything. Far less of an anti-trust issue than if what is presently known as Amazon attempted it here and now. Anthropic needs to build a lot on to itself to sustain itself and justify its valuation, AWS already has the answer to that.
If valuations plunge, and OpenAI is not yet sustainable, Microsoft should split itself into pieces and have the Windows-Office division purchase OpenAI as their AI option. It'd be their only path to avoiding anti-trust blocking that acquisition. As is Microsoft would not be allowed to buy OpenAI. Alternatively Microsoft can take a shot at acquiring Anthropic at some point - this seems likely given the internal usage going on at Redmond, the primary question is anti-trust (but in this case, Anthropic is viewed as the #3, so Microsoft would argue it bolsters competition with GPT & Gemini).
"Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here"
Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make products for the sake of it, else the technology is not accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core thing, along side superior marketing.
One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user tremendously for switching.
Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out where they can take advantage of the investments others have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.
*Altman may have killed a king by getting him to be complacent.*
I still think a lot about the failed OpenAI coup, and how different things would be now if Microsoft hadn't backed Altman. Would this hype cycle and bubble grown so ridiculous if there were more conscientious people in charge at the front-runner? We will unfortunately never know. I really wish that board had planned out their coup better.
Why do you say Amazon doesn't know what they are doing? I think among those mentioned, they are the best positioned alongside Apple in the grander schema of things.
Also you say meta will never field a competitor to GPT - but they did llama; not as a commercial product, but probably an attempt at it (and failed). Otherwise agreed.
Merging with SpaceX means they don't have to pay for their existence. Anyway they're probably positioned better than any other AI player except maybe Gemini.
I don’t follow why merging with SpaceX means they don’t have to pay for their existence. Someone does. Presumably now that is SpaceX. What is SpaceX’s revenue?
Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively unlimited money through the US Government, either via ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.
Bingo! Elon's main life mission now is to roll back social progress via the anti-woke combination of xAI and Twitter. That's why he's tying them to the now rather-essential SpaceX, despite possibly hurting its IPO. He can now keep pumping money into them without a worry.
There's a question as to whether China's surplus capability is enough to overflow the deprivation that a space program might suffer in a chaos Taiwan scenario.
Their resources and capabilities are obviously substantial and sustained (not going anywhere). The USSR had only a few patches of sustained serious economic output, the rest of the time was rolling from one disaster to another, one deprivation after another.
It seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan, and go to the Moon during the Vietnam War (plus cultural chaos).
That said, China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining. China will ultimately regret not moving on the island sooner when they see how easy it's going to be to take it and how weak the US response will be (the US can't sustain a stand-off with China in that region for more than a few weeks before folding, unless it's willing to go to full war mode economically (which it's not)).
> seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan
We probably lost basing on the Moon because Bush went into Iraq.
China getting bogged down in Taiwan means more political repression, more restiveness in Xinjiang and—if New Delhi isn’t totally stupid—needing to prop up Pakistan and its strategic fronts in the Himalayas. It also almost certainly means demand destruction in Europe, the EU and ASEAN.
> China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining
The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.
China invading Taiwan demilitarized Japan and India. It fundamentally changes its doorstep in ways that incur costs. To the Soviets, Afghanistan. To America, Iraq and possibly Greenland. To China, Taiwan.
(And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.)
> And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.
From what I've been hearing from my buddies still in the NatSec space what matters at this point is the 2028 Taiwanese Election and maybe the 2028 Philippines Election. If neither see a definitive victory for either side in 2028, it gives a face saving off-ramp for the Xi admin to argue they brought the "Taiwan Problem" back on track to the pre-2014 status quo. Of course they could be closeted KMT/TPP supporters but most delivery roadmap's I've been hearing align with a 2028 date.
>The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.
Please note that Kiev not falling after a week in '22 (assuming you misspelled) was pure luck. Russians had extreme advantage in man and firepower. They made a big mistake by using their army against their doctrine - not bombing/shelling targets before attacking (what Russian army was designed for).
But them losing the war (at least the first week) is due to a few lucky dice rolls for us. Us both Europe, but also for me as a Polish expat, knowing my brothers and friends are not dying right now fighting Russian army with all the Ukrainians conscripted into it.
These lucky dice rolls that I can come up from memory:
1. Shooting down one of two military passenger planes with russian Seals that were to take Kiev's Hostomel airport and open an air bridge. The group from the plane that survived did take the airfields, but they couldn't decide on their own to move and take the airports buildings - no distributed command in Russia at that point. Thanks to that, local territorial defence managed to easily kill these elite forces.
2. Fast and generous support from England in form of Javelins that limited Russian heavy equipment advantage. Sorry if I don't credit the countries involved correctly.
3. Fast and generous aid with post soviet equipment from old Warsaw pact countries. These tanks could be used right away as they required no re-training.
4. General incompetence and duty negligence that was systemic in Soviets and is still systemic in Russia. To that we owe cars running out of fuel, or having their tires pop, because, against orders to regularly move them, they all sat with sun damaging one side of the tire so many years, while the responsible for maintenance were drinking vodka and eating pierogi with kielbasa.
Putin ignored his army and tasked the FSB with the project. He fundamentally got fucked by putting loyalty ahead of merit. It’s what Hegseth is doing in America and now Xi, again, in China.
It's fun to think about what Minitel might have become if it had been born when today's Leopards Eating People's Faces Party had been in power, rather than the early 80's when Silicon Valley was dunking on everybody. It was way ahead of its time.
There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.
I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.
I think there's a scenario where that's true: one where the head of your company is collaborative and deferential to expertise.
There's another scenario, though: one where the head of your company is a bull in a China shop, whose successes have come almost exclusively through a Barnum-esque scheme of cascading bravado and marketing genius without much expertise, but a marvelous ability to sell any idea purely via unearned gravitas.
The former is less sexy: I've compiled loads of talented people, and we're going to solve very hard problems, even some that seem impossible.
The latter is very sexy: I'm a genius and we're going to accomplish the impossible in one year via sheer force of my grand will. And even if it doesn't actually happen, I'll sell you on the next vision.
It seems like you’re ascribing to Elon some kind of magic, where you feel he’s breaking the rules of what should be allowed in order to achieve success. Is it impossible you simply don’t understand how what he does works?
So your hypothesis is Elon's domineering personality creates a culture of terrified silence where everybody wants to revolt but Elon is simply too powerful and they have no choice - and this extends to customers, sales and even technology - reality itself bends to the will of mighty Elon? And that's ... unfair?
Ok, I'm sorry, I'll try again. Seems I've missed your point a few times now, may be projecting my own perspecitve there.
So...it's not that you don't understand how what Elon does works, you do understand it, and your descrpition of him is accurate, you just seem to think it's unfair that it does work? "unearned gravitas" "w/o much expertise" "sheer force of grand will"
So you're saying Elon isn't a deferential technically-talented leader, he's wilful and a marketer, who you feel constantly changes course, and so maybe the people who work for him are not as aligned as I believe with what he's doing?
Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space. Abundant energy, low concerns about most forms of pollution. We'll need to dramatically improve our ability to transit mass to and from cheaply first of course (we're obviously talking many decades into the future).
> Bezos has been pushing manufacturing-in-space for a long time, as a ideal candidate for what to do in space that you might prefer to not do on Earth. Robotics, AI automation, manufacturing - combo it in space, let the robots manufacture for us in space.
LOL, this seems so far off from the reality of what manufacturing looks like in reality.
- sending raw materials up there
- service technicians are necessary ALL THE TIME, in fully automated production lines
- sending stuff back down
Maybe I lack vision, but data centers in space is a 1000x times better idea and that is already a terrible idea.
Space manufacturing is a real thing, there are already companies trialling it. The factory is small, satellite sized, and it deorbits when the manufacturing run is done. The results are protected enough for them to be picked up from Earth.
The justification (today) is that you can do very exotic things in zero-G that aren't possible on Earth. Growing ultra-pure crystals and fibre optics and similar.
Ok, that I might buy. If there is a product one can build in zero-G that one cannot build on earth. Especially something like growing crystalls. Sure. But trying to compete with something that can just as well be build on earth on the premise that it will be cheaper to do the same thing just in space is insane.
It's the same issue that I have with data centers in space. I don't think there is any big technical hurdle to send a GPU rack into space and run it there. The problem is that I have a hard time to believe it is cheaper to run a datacenter in space. When you have to compete solely on cost, it will super hard.
I don't think it's insane. It might not work or be competitive but it's not obviously insane.
In a frictionless economy governed by spherical cows it'd be insane. But back here on Earth, AI is heavily bottlenecked by the refusal or inability of the supply chain to scale up. They think AI firms are in a bubble and will collapse, so don't want to be bag holders. A very sane concern indeed. But it does mean that inferencing (the bit that makes money) is constantly saturated even with the industry straining every sinew to build out capacity.
One bottleneck is TSMC. Not much that can be done about that. The other is the grid. Grid equipment manufacturers and CCGT makers like Siemens aren't spinning up extra manufacturing capacity, again because they fear being bag holders when Altman runs out of cash. Then you have massive interconnection backlogs, environmentalists attacking you and other practical problems.
Is it easier to get access to stable electricity supplies in space? It's not inconceivable. At the very least, in space Elon controls the full stack with nearly no regulations getting in the way after launch - it's a pure engineering problem of the sort SpaceX are good at. If he needs more power he can just build it, he doesn't have to try and convince some local government utility to scale up or give him air permits to run generators. In space, nobody can hear you(r GPUs) scream.
> "At the very least, in space Elon controls the full stack with nearly no regulations getting in the way after launch - it's a pure engineering problem of the sort SpaceX are good at. If he needs more power he can just build it, he doesn't have to try and convince some local government utility to scale up or give him air permits to run generators. In space, nobody can hear you(r GPUs) scream."
Wouldn't he be able to float solar panels and GPUs out into international waters and run them on cargo ships powered by bunker fuel much (much much) cheaper than launching them into space?
Building nuclear-powered and solar powered datacenters in places with low population density will still be cheaper. Do you think Mongolian government won't allow China to build datacenters if the price is right?
It might be easier in China but that doesn't help Elon or Americans.
Solar powered datacenters on Earth don't make sense to me. The GPUs are so expensive you want to run them 24/7 and power cycling them stresses the components a lot so increases failure rate. Once it boots up you need to keep the datacenter powered, you can't shut it down at night. Maybe for CPU datacenters solar power can make sense sometimes, but not for AI at the moment.
Nuclear is super hard and expensive to build. It probably really is easier to put servers in space than build nuclear.
It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down. Metric tonnes of stuff. It’s not physically impossible, but it is wildly expensive (in pure energy terms, not even talking about money) and completely impractical with current technology. We just don’t have engines capable of doing this outside the atmosphere.
> It’s not necessarily cheaper energetically to get stuff from an asteroid than from Earth. You’d have to accelerate stuff from a wildly different orbit, and then steer it and slow it down.
Delta V from just about anywhere in the solar system is lower than launching from the surface of Earth. You could launch stuff from Mars and bring it back to Earth orbit with less energy than launching it from Earth. The rocket equation is really punishing.
Right. The alternative is not to send materials from Earth for processing in space, that would be stupid. We send finished stuff, which were manufactured on the ground. But you don’t mine finished widgets from asteroids. You mine ore that needs refining and processing before being used to manufacture things. This ore is orders of magnitude heavier than the finished products, never mind all that’s required to do anything useful with it.
I think you might have no sense of what it takes to go from a raw mined material to something that can be used in a factory. I am not saying it cannot be done. I am just saying it cannot be done in a way that is cheaper than on earth.
The show For All Mankind kind-of hinted at how the labor problem would be solved: recruit like the military and promise huge bonuses that will probably not be realized because space is risky business
I think it makes more sense if you invert the manufacturing cycle.
Automated asteroid mining, and asteroid harvesting, are potential areas where we have strong tech, a reasonable pure automation story, and huge financial upsides. Trillion dollar asteroids... If we’re sourcing metals out there, and producing for orbital operations or interplanetary shenanigans, the need for computing and automation up there emerges.
And I imagine for the billionaire investor class now is the window to make those kinds of plays. A whole set of galactic robber barons is gonna be crowned, and orbital automation is critical to deciding who that is.
When Bezos first mentioned drone delivery, many intelligent, serious people laughed at it and accused of Bezos running out of ideas as Amazon was stagnant
That is a fun thought experiment, as we wouldn't want to manufacture too far away from earth we may still be within the earth's atmosphere. I wonder what effect dumping greenhouse gases into the very upper levels of the atmosphere would have in comparison to doing it lower down. My assumption is it would eventually sink to a lower density layer, having more or less the same impact.
SpaceX saves its biggest customer money by being the superior, cheaper launch option. The alternative was ULA, which was an extraordinarily expensive monster.
Please highlight the problems you have with how it pertains to this context, how the biggest customer is harmed.
What do you care if its private owners are willing to absorb the mess that is xAI?
The larger often half-baked projects will flail like they always have. People will get tired of bothering to attempt these. Oh look you created a big bloated pile of garbage that nobody will ever use. And of course there will be rare exceptions, some group of N people will work together to vibe code a clone of a billion dollar business and it'll actually start taking off and that'll garner a lot of attention. It'll remain forever extremely difficult to get users to a service. And if app & website creation scales up in volume due to simplicity of creation, the attention economy problem will only get more intense (neutralizing most of the benefits of the LLMs as an advantage).
The smaller, quasi micro projects used to more immediately solve narrow problems will thrive in a huge way, resulting in tangible productivity gains, and there will be a zillion of these, both at home and within businesses of all sizes.
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