In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.

I think it's going to remake our relationship with software because it completely alters the economics of creating one-off utilities, whereas software up until this point is generally regarded reuse as one of the highest virtues.

We're not going to see that impact for a while though. It'll take years. App stores will eventually become on-demand software and we'll view the marketplace analogy (where human developers offer their wares) as antiquated. I'm not totally confident in this prediction because requirements gathering is still a challenge, but for anything vaguely common, I think it'll be a workable model.

Mostly just focusing on positives in my life, not particularly bullish on the industry generating 6T/y.

But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.

The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.

The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...

Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.

This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.

However, customers coming up with the money is the easy half of the problem. The hard part is having them pay you.

Wikipedia's valuation is on the small side of {number of people on the internet worldwide} * {peak price of Encyclopaedia Britannica} † despite containing a lot more content.

LLMs can only chase high margins while they're ahead of their competitors; the moment the investment stalls, open weighs catch up, they loose their edge. Cloud compute providers still win on supplying inference, but there too competition will likely lower margins, not justify huge valuations.

NVIDIA may remain as valuable as today, but their P/E ratio will likely shrink a lot even while keeping up the price.

Model makers still have a problem here even if the tech is so useful it rapidly grows the economy: "free" is right behind them almost immediately after they stop.

* under the assumption the tech is real; there's plenty of people here on Hacker News who still dismiss it as a "scam"

† that would be about 13 trillion USD, from what I read

If they keep replacing employees with AI, that is indeed the direction.

So, I have the following thoughts:

How much more productive can AI for knowledge work realistically make the global economy? 5%, 10%, 20%?

What if it also does robotics soon and can be deployed in manufacturing and construction? Can we get 50% more productive, or 200%?

Then there's science, medicine, and so on. Who is to say what happens if AI solves also that?

While I do not know if AI will be capable for these use cases, I see no reason to believe it unlikely that AI could be applicable to eg. robotics and speed up production by factor 3x.

> Bain forecasts that annual spending on AI infrastructure might hit $1.5 trillion by 2031.

So maybe in 5yrs it will need enough revenue to cover $1.5T in capex spend globally in a year, investments which as the article mentions is also being supported by governments in "the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the EU, South Korea and the US". ... Or spending growth could lower over the next couple years to be more realistic.

I think there's a kind of arrogance involved here in how they value what "knowledge workers" do. On the the outside they see some documents written, spreadhsheets filled out, forms submitted, emails sent and conclude AI could do all of that.

It's true AI can do a lot of the mechanics of it, but the assumption that there is nothing beyond the pure mechanics of it to me is highly untested and history would bet against it. Some significant part of it sits genuinely within the human relationship component that is almost definitionally not doable by a computer.

sure there's $30T of opportunity here, but how much of that will be lost from people being unable to consume like they do now from being out of work or the same companies participating in this market losing the desire to pay white collar workers what they pay them now?

someone's gotta buy those $2-5M SFHs in the Bay and the ~$6/gal gas and the $15-20 burgers and...

COVID sure as hell proved that we are a long ways away from people being fine with contributing to UBI, so...

There are so many people who have never used Claude Code or Codex who think that Google's AI results are representative of what AI can do.

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Yeah, this is exactly right. The numbers look impossible because they _are_ impossible. The _vast majority_ of AI spend is wasted and the vast majority of AI companies are going to go bankrupt. There are _still_ going to be unimaginable amounts of wealth earned by the survivors.