One thing I can't square: if the cost to build an application goes to zero, we should see a proliferation of apps, especially from the AI labs.
The fact that we aren't seeing an app explosion (I think) is evidence that building applications people will pay for is significantly more complex than just prompting claude/codex/etc
That messaging is for investors. To a dev's ears, it's a meaningless thing to say.
It reminds me when Elon took over twitter and made a comment to the effect of "we need to rethink the entire tech stack from the ground up". Someone asked Elon what was wrong with the tech stack, and he called them a jackass.
The TAM figure they arrive at is ~$36 billion by 2030. And for 2026 they claim a TAM of $10.6B
OpenAI alone is rumored to be on track for $30B of revenue in 2026. Add in Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Chinese providers, and the revenue being generated from LLM's in 2026 is plausibly in the range of $50-100B already.
Whatever your thoughts are on the cash burn to get there are irrelevant. There's at least $50B of LLM usage being paid for in 2026. 5x higher than the figure these research report companies are providing.
I'm convinced that even if/when ASI is achieved we will still have mediocre engineers writing blog posts about how they have uncovered the secrets to using these tools "effectively".
> An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.
I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough".
One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).
With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.
Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.
Regardless, what they say here is genuinely true and it's worth knowing things like "police are allowed to lie to you". Some people find that sort of thing surprising.
> And so you're able to pay people extremely generously to help maintain the thing.
This is optional, and requires the owner to be generous. It is more common for people to not be paid generously. And that matters because these businesses literally cannot achieve their valuations without the employees. Going back to the 1-person, 1-billion startup valuation - there are 0 examples that I can find. What does that tell you? That the maximum amount of wealth an individual can create, in today's dollars, is somewhere less than 1-billion.
I'll try to rephrase my stance: It's not that being a billionaire is bad - it's that all of the billionaires we have believe that they did it themselves. PG basically confirms this in his post. The ownership class thinks they are deserving because no matter how many employees they have, they view all the wealth as something they created by themselves. That disconnect is in my opinion, extremely bad for society.
It's also typical to see delusions of grandeur that lead a lot of these ultra wealthy people into thinking they are working 1000x as hard as everyone else. Elon Musk regularly claims to work 16 hour days, 7 days a week. But somehow he also has enough time to play diablo and path of exile 20-40 hours a week, spend multiple hours a week with each of his ~20 kids, tweet constantly, etc. These aren't people that view the world for what it really is, because the level of wealth they've obtained leads them to believe they have super powers. As a society we can't have rational conversations with people that think this way.
> Surely for these companies, if the founders get to several million or tens of million in revenue without hiring any more people, those people have successfully become millionaires and we can credit them as such, right? Or do you simply think this is impossible?
It seems disingenuous to imply that this is what I meant.
If you can scale a startup to a billion dollar valuation on your own, that's a unique example - and I'd be surprised if anyone is against that. I actually am not sure there are any real examples of this happening, though.
The point is that there's a ceiling to how much wealth a person can create on their own. Corporate ownership structures are the only thing that allow for a person to reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
I know one of the common follow up questions is "well what is the exact number that someone should be allowed to make?" And plainly: there isn't one. That's not what these discussions are ever about. The discussion is really about attribution of credit - and that the ownership class disproportionately benefits for things that they could not have built on their own.
1) PG honestly believes that his audience is unfamiliar with compound growth - i.e., an insult to the audience's intelligence.
Or
2) PG honestly believes that the founder of a successful startup is directly and wholly responsible for the level of magnificent growth a company achieves.
The 2nd one is some Ayn-Rand-like school of thought. That there are great people who have 1000x the work output of those around them. PG more or less alludes to this when he says stuff like
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built.
Notice how the credit for the startup's growth is credited to the founder?
> The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends
Again, crediting founders for the entirety of the company's growth. This is obviously flawed thinking in any company that has employees beyond the founder. Those employees are doing a significant amount of the work. And in any company with more than say, 5 people, they are doing the majority of the work.
PG and people who think like him believe ownership==credit. That's the whole problem.
For most companies that I've worked for, pushback is normal and expected as long as you've built some trust/rapport with your management chain.
However with AI, it feels different. I have seen both technical and non-technical managers tell engineers something to the effect of "you aren't prompting correctly" if they aren't able to get the task done within some preferred time frame.
We are seeing the industry revive metrics like lines of code, number of tickets closed, bug's found (looking at you Mythos), and now even "tokenmaxxing". It's exhausting to push back on. These are all things that we know will be gamed. But the individual that brings this up might be viewed as "anti-ai" or something.
If you're an IC, I do think the best thing to do is just go along with it. Sooner or later we will see more shocked-pikachu-faced executives when they realize that engineers are spending tokens just for the sake of it.
I am just not completely sure that we won't gain something new on the other side of this, in the same way the calculator outsourced the need for doing arithmetic in our heads.
My argument is more that, the speed and scale is so unlike anything that we've seen before, that this time _feels_ like more of an attack on something to core to what humanity is. But maybe it's just that: a feeling.
LLMs/AI could very well be the worst case scenario we are imagining/discussing here. I just don't think we know enough to say that's how it will definitely play out.
If you watch old videos of tradesmen using basic hand tools like hammers, you'll find examples of skill/dexterity with the tool that I think don't exist today at all except maybe in communities like the Amish.
I think it's true that we collectively lose something akin to beauty every time technology advances. But usually some new set of skills that have beauty emerge.
If LLMs end up being the pneumatic nail gun for the human mind, I personally think that's a fine thing for us to accept.
If they end up being more like some dark factory that autonomously does everything - then I think ultimately the thing that makes us human (our minds) will slowly decay and be lost, and that seems very sad. That's a version of the future we should try to prevent, I think.
People always answer this question with money. But if we think of it as a version of the prisoner dilemma (Meta is one prisoner, the employee is the other), the right move is probably to work somewhere else for a lower salary. By working for Meta, they are defecting against you (openly screen recording you to train your AI replacement). Choosing to work somewhere else would be like you defecting against Meta.
Extremely simplified example. Ignore inflation, raises, etc.
Which choice is better?
- $400k/yr for 5 years followed by a layoff, with the possibility that the thing you've helped Meta build rolls out everywhere, and there are next to no job opportunities
- $200k/yr for the rest of your career, and employment opportunities don't dry up because you didn't help build the thing meant to replace you