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Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too.

If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

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It's crazy dude, whenever we put up a job ad it's filled with thousands of LLM generated fake candidates in a few days.

Looking at the examples they show here it is making more sense. Also where all the "content" on LinkedIn comes from.

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Only way I was able to get a job recently was via one of a few recruitment firms I was working with. Presumably this will become more common. Basically vendors "selling" actual real humans they vetted.
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Would you be comfortable sharing some of the recruitment firms that you worked with? I'm a Real Live Human gearing up to reenter the job market, and I've been getting pitches for these via email and LinkedIn but my difficulty has been in knowing which of THOSE are Real Live Humans and not just vivecoded bots spamming employers with my resume on my behalf (which feels ineffective, but also more importantly, like an unprofessional faux pas that I'd rather not be associated with)
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A job faire might serve you well!
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Will we have any way to know if a submission was done by a human or a bot?
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We are doing AI screening. Candidate works with AI for 15 minutes and session is recorded. We review real output not AI generated resume. If candidate can get AI to apply and produce meaningful output then maybe we should hire that candidate. Currently outputs are manually reviewed but easy enought to have AI screen outputs.
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The inundation of AI applications is shitty, but I think this side of the coin—AI interviewer—is even worse. This is degrading for a human applicant, and after the very immediate term it’s probably not going to be very useful. Instead of grinding leetcode, people are going to be grinding the AI interview, which is depressing to even consider. Not only that, but there’s also going to be an arms race of AI tools that can ace the AI interview for you.
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Where do you work?

Mostly so that I can know to never apply, because that application process sounds awful and degrading.

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I use AI for practically everything but I never outsource judgement calls to it, wish you luck, I’d love to see the postmortem.
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I hope you're aware that you'll lose a lot of top talent that way who won't put up with that.
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This sucks man.
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Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.
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Your comment reminds me of the move to packet-switched and routed networks, which were much more complicated than connecting wires end to end. And yet…
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I think that's just the phase 1? Once we have all the use cases figured out, optimizations gradually follow?
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We're living the uranium glass moment. It's going to change, of course.
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And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
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I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
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Besides technological progress which has nothing to do with this effect and would have happened anyway, what's the value that we didn't have 30 years ago?
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It’s so incredible to me that now we have a chat interface we can ask about anything in any language and get really great answers, something literally considered science fiction a few years ago, and people still act like that is no big deal at all. No value in something like that! Don’t tell me it’s inaccurate, I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic , which of course you couldn’t and even if you did, you would most likely not want to since you would get a lot of “you don’t actually want that, you want this unrelated thing, trust me I am better than you”. Just remember StackOverflow (depending on how young you are perhaps you never even heard of that given how much AI has eclipsed it)!
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> I strongly believe it’s way more accurate than if you could ask an expert in each topic

You can believe anything you want. I can also believe that the only thing that has gone up in the last 30 years is billionaires' worth, and amount of idiots saying things they don't know anything about.

I strongly believe this. Don't tell me it's inaccurate.

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It gives wrong answers.
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I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
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Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
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This is no one's end goal. It's just the market being irrational longer than sane people can stay solvent.
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It's greed at the top pushing the market into insanity. "AI" vendors are dangling the carrot of "eliminate manpower" in front of the manpower-owning class and they are throwing everything they have at it. The wealth that's been thrown into this hole could have payed for a couple million work-years of developers.
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If AGI is the next evolutionary goal, its the difference between being stuck and not.

Wealth is also only relevant in a capitalistic system, which we invented. It could easily be that all other species never created capitalism and are therefore waiting for us somewere which we will not reach because we are stuck on 'wealth'.

And if we are stuck in a local minimum, it might seem that GPT-2 broke us out of there.

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There are, what, about 50 million developers worldwide?

So instead of AI that pretty much everyone can use, we could have had 3 or 4 weeks of business as usual?

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I don't disagree, but what a godawful prospect.
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Anti-DDoS Cloudflare for inbound emails and WhatsApp messages?
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You know you can already press charges against spammers right?
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In which jurisdiction? They're usually hard to trace in the first place, let alone get the attention of actual police.
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Most jurisdictions register every phone number to an ID.
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LLM is really an anti human technology. The incentives that creates are terrible for society
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Capitalism is, not LLMs.

The current istuation could be seen as just the next real frontier technology of the human race.

the problem is capitalism. Instead of leverigng it as a tool, we talk about job loss and restructuring etc. which affects real humans.

In a non capitalistic system, it might just not affect real humans negativly at all only positive

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Counter point:

Companies have made their pages as hard as possible to access with automated tools.

People move to agents, if your site is "invisible" to agentic users (no API, no MCP) people won't find it.

Companies start opening up APIs - which lets non-agent users like us create tooling on top of it _without_ agents.

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The reverse is happening in many places: since agents don't view ads or pay, and do steal content, there's a huge demand to block them. Cloudflare now offer this as a service.
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Not that useful when large swathes of the population are unemployed, which is where this is all aiming.
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Do you have even an example of this (one should ask for measurable data openness) or are you just making stuff up? Everything around has/is becoming more closed and I have one example: Reddit. It is not impossible to read without an account (account-walled).
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I have a friend who works in B2B eCommerce specifically with some projects in D2C and they're saying that SEO is mostly a dead end now. It's all about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

So if someone is looking for a 18V cordless drill for drilling into concrete, they'll most likely ask an agent. If your site has bad AEO/GEO, the product pages are either impossible to read by an agent or the data is badly formatted -> the agent won't recommend your product, resulting in a lost sale.

Like SEO gave us OpenGraph and similar common tools to provide data in a machine readable form, AEO/GEO will force data to be readable by agents.

Some sites like Consumer Reports block all crawlers, so we'll see how that goes for them.

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I hope some relative of yours gets saved and cured by a disease that LLMs cured and that will change your mind forever
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Let's start with LLMs curing diseases first, whatever that means.
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Here we have it, people: the Most Normal AI fan.
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Every company was already using AI filtering last year. They were using it last decade, too, but that was a Bayesian filter instead of an LLM.

I get a higher response rate when I include white text on my résumé.

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MCP servers everywhere rather. You automate your life with a bot, the bot interacts with the world through MCP servers (or their successor). The MCP servers themselves may have been implemented by bots but AI to AI is unnecessary wasteful.
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The problem: too much AI The solution: more AI!
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We will soon be in a world where human to human communication is the only one that has value. Mark my words
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Actual value yes. But everything with financial value will be LLM to LLM.
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I'd mark them face-to-face, but here? Maybe I'm talking to a bot. Or maybe you'll be, if you reply.
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That was always true. We'll just know the difference better.
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Like payment networks? I dunno, this just seems like commerce to me. If the inference doesn't return value it won't be used
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Have you heard why deer evolved such big antlers?
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Plenty of examples of useless things getting used.
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It's already a bot eats bot world.
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AI Loopidity in other words
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I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible.

The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.

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It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.
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This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.
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> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where

Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.

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Even in the best case, a potential customer is going to request quotes from several suppliers and only pick one.
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Those businesses are welcome to publish their prices if they want to avoid that
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Not really practical for custom work.
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Have you ever been in sales?

If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars).

If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that.

The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious.

Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.

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The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say.

A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed.

Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.

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A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that.

One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.

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I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
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Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying.

The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.

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That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so.

*Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.

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> The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task

One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise

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IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens.

If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.

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> the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia

Everyone upstream of the AI labs should be showing a positive result, that includes all the companies needed to actually build the chips and the datacenters around it. If they aren't too incompetent, they should end up with a pile of cash regardless of where their stock goes when the bubble pops.

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And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
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They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
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Normally you’d get 2-3 quotes, meaning suppliers would on average get a sale for every few RFQs they respond to.

Now guys like this twiddle one knob and generate 20x as much RFQ spam, costing suppliers 20x as much. It’s tantamount to a DoS attack.

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And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender.

I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.

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Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
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Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic.

I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.

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For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
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it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths.

for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.

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I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
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If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.
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What's the difference between this and how its been done till now?

When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth.

If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders

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I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.
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There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters.

Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.

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You need bots on th other side too. Simple
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