Jeff AtwoodSep 28, 2025

bad news "AI bubble doomers". I've found the LLMs to be incredibly useful and reduce the workload (and/or make people much, MUCH more effective at their jobs with the "centaur" model).

Is it overhyped? FUCK Yes. Salespeople Gotta Always Be Closing. But this is NOTHING like the moronic Segway (I am still bitter about that crap), Cryptocurrency, which is all grifters and gamblers and criminals end-to-end, and the first dot-com bubble where not NEARLY enough people had broadband or even internet access, plus the logistics systems to support shipping products was nowhere REMOTELY where it is today.

If you are expecting this "AI bubble" to pop anytime soon, uh.. you might be waiting a bit longer than you think? Overhyped, yes, overbuilding, sure, but not remotely a true bubble any any of the same senses of the three examples I listed above 👆. There's something very real, very practical, very useful here, and it is getting better every day.

If you find this uncomfortable, I'm sorry, but I know what I know, and I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.

Show threadSeth RichardsSep 28, 2025

@codinghorror “I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.”

Please do, if you can. Because most time I’ve tried to use LLMs for work the error rate ends up costing me MORE time than I would have spent without, and most AI boosters are short on specifics. We just had a presentation at my job on how we all need to be using AI with no case studies of how it’s actually been useful so far.

Show threadJeff AtwoodSep 28, 2025

@sethrichards here's one: a friend confided he is unhoused, and it is difficult for him. I asked ChatGPT to summarize local resources to deal with this (how do you get ANY id without a valid address, etc, chicken/egg problem) and it did an outstanding, amazing job. I printed it out, marked it up, and gave it to him.

Here's two: GiveDirectly did two GMI studies, Chicago and Cook County and we were very unclear what the relationship was, or why they did it that way. ChatGPT also knocked this out park and saved Tia a lot of time finding that information out, so she was freed up to focus on other work.

I could go on and on and on. Email me if you want ~12 more specific examples. With citations.

But also realize this: I am elite at asking very good, well specified, very clear, well researched questions, because we built Stack Overflow.

You want to get good at LLMS? learn how to ask better questions of evil genies. I was raised on that. 🧞

Show threadBilly O'NealSep 29, 2025

@codinghorror The problem is not "LLMs are useless and when the bubble bursts they go away," they aren't going away any more than websites went away when the .com bubble burst.

The problems are
1. They are a 6/10 tool being advertised as an 11/10 tool with the folks selling this stuff consistently overstating what they're capable of doing.
2. The few hundred billion spent building them needs the 11/10 promises to come true in order to be justified.
3. They're really good at making up answers that appear *plausible* but are also completely wrong, and verifying the answers is becoming increasingly difficult as the top search results are increasingly flooded with output from the same LLMs.
4. 'AI' is being used to try to sell a bunch of completely unrelated stuff like 'copilot+ pcs' even though everything meaningful in the LLM space only runs in datacenters due to GPU memory limitations.

Show threadShafik Yaghmour

@malwareminigun @codinghorror

LLMs won't go away but a lot of the companies selling them will. This will be quite disruptive.

Prices have to rationalize, I am not quite sure how that will work if $200/mth is not profitable. I don't see any path to the models becoming 100 times cheaper to generate. This implies that some category of folks will have to accept much worse models for a reasonable price point.

Alternatively, all the start-ups disappear into existing big tech companies and they dramatically reduce spending and folks get model updates at a much much slower frequency.

Either way this will be a very different landscape then we have today.

Sep 29, 2025 at 7:06pmWeb
Show threadBilly O'NealSep 29, 2025
@shafik Sure, but that's exactly the .com bubble playbook.
Show threadShafik YaghmourSep 29, 2025

@malwareminigun

Yeah, people keep saying that and I don't agree.

The sheer concentration of money and small number of core ideas involved make this very weird. Out of the destruction of the dot com bubble came a lot of fields and verticals. I don't think this will happen here.

If we end up w/ the same big seven that we started out w/ before the bubble and all of them basically converge on LLMs w/ basically the same capabilities that will be a very sad result for all the money that went into it. Very pale shadow indeed of what the dot com bubble wrought.

Show threadBilly O'NealSep 29, 2025
@shafik The 'winners' of the .com bubble were the same telcos and hardware vendors that were incumbent before the bubble. I don't see why the LLM bubble would be any different.
Show threadShafik YaghmourSep 29, 2025

@malwareminigun

I don't believe we see equivalent creations such as Amazon, Ebay, Nvidia or Google etc out of this. I believe all of today's starts-up will ended up absorbed.

The telcos all ended up cannibalizing each other, overcapacity ended up being bad for business. Although it worked really nice for consumers.

Maybe we could see a cannibalization of hosted services. I am not sure we will really see all the capacity they are planning actually built.

Show threadJeff AtwoodSep 30, 2025
@shafik @malwareminigun "This implies that some category of folks will have to accept much worse models for a reasonable price point. " you are conveniently ignoring that fact that it IS possible to come up with far more efficient models in compute time, that are almost as good -- or perhaps even better!