Unless you destroy their wealth now.
You’re implying that the deep lizard state planned the LLM craze?
Sama might be a lizard..
You can't invoke market mechanisms to defend a post-scarcity scenario.
Why would the ai owners make things cheaper or even available at all once their abundance machines give them everything they want?
What would they get out of if it?
You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously and that is the core oversight behind AI boosters.
Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.
You can be smart and chase the money, but it's crazy hubris to assume that only your peer set of money-chasers are smart.
It's a small leap from there to "since we're the only smart people, we should get to have the most influence."
Kinda seems true. And the worst people in history often don’t seem super dumb, despite their various other defects.
People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.
"Convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell" is thus nearly isomorphic to making the masses hate politicians who create such laws, which at least very likely implies that by convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell, a different mindset emerges in the masses.
I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.
Strangely, they never discuss the possibility that Multivac might seize all their wealth and cast them down into average-ness. What if it actually comes about, but then it tells us to do the things we already refuse to do?
Just a crazy amount of doom and gloom all around this thread.
I don't understand why these big labs aren't doing more to improve the electricity situation. Dump a billion dollars worth of tokens into fusion analysis, research, and simulations and try to force a breakthrough. You could buy a lot of good will with unlimited cheap energy that liberates us from fossil fuel dependencies.
Wait until you have clean energy sources and shut it down
Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.
Look at all the roadblocks for data centre buildouts which the industry certainly has a financial incentive to complete as fast as possible.
I'm noticing this even in industry. Yea, we can build and iterate on ideas 100x faster but has this turned into anything meaningful? Not really... Hell, look at the big companies spending billions on inference... nothing shipped and things are still buggy as ever. Where is everything?
Not only from the big companies. Where is the explosion of disruption ?
* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production
* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages
* Culture of uncertainty and fear
* Computers are really expensive now
* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health
I find 2026 much more repulsive compared to 2016.
So basically you get personal digital assistant - very useful - but not changing my life.
What would I need for real transformation though? Food, house cleaning, commute - "every day chores". Even if we had ASI tomorrow, what could it do to change my life, besides taking away my job? Design good house robot to help me with food preparation I guess... Maybe finally self driving cars launched in my area? Or it will take control, "optimize humanity survival chance" and realize we don't need as many people on this planet.
When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.
The bigger the pile of stuff you have the tool create unsupervised, the more incomplete/inaccurate the overall picture of it is gonna be. That doesn't matter for most hobbyist/helper-tool/game-port/etc type of tasks.
I get a ton of value out of the tools and yet part of that value has come from being hyper-aware of the shape of the limitations, which changes much less and more slowly than the specific of the limitations.
"How'd you notice that one!?" - well, it helps to be the only person on the team who took the time to interrogate the e2e interaction of all the code...
The median piece of OSS software was already pretty rough once you had to depend on it in production at scale to make money. The median piece of the new AI-generated wave of software, also pretty rough.
The bet that OpenAI/Anthropic is making is that they can automate the interactions generally/globally enough to work around this and eliminate the need for humans in the loop. But it's a tricky problem because it's precisely where the permutations and special cases get nasty and much harder to deal with than more broadly-applicable cases of codegen/test-gen/mash-it-until-the-tests-pass-and-the-code-review-angent-is-happy.
If you talk to free chatgpt, sure.
But if you launch Opus 5.5 in claude code - for some reason Opus is the smartest for me, even for "general" type of questions, when launched from Claude Code. It has harness/prompts optimized for correctness, while more "customer-grade" products, even when used with top model tend to optimize for latency. And I tend to give "context" - e.g. I have "personal wiki" + skills for lots of those things.
I don't recall i last few weeks where Opus 5.5 in CC made an obvious lie, made an unreasonable assumption, or made a mistake that smart human couldn't make. E.g. if it "failed" it failed in a way that non-genius human could fail in similar way.
I tried to have it write a synopsis website for the different types of dance patterns in Dance Dance Revolution, with guides on their execution, explanations, and provided song sources. I provided all of the source articles and search websites needed for it to be able to do that, and gave it a sample set I wanted it to utilize and build off of.
It has bits and pieces of information wrong in 90% of the sections it created. Poor song choices, missing song choices, incorrect explanations, incorrect step-patterns, the list goes on.
If you're not an expert in a given field for which you're using it, it's going to look like a genius. If you are, it's untrustworthy and borderline useless.
Maybe it wouldn't be if there were ample training data on my topic, but there isn't.
It utilized the research from millions of papers many very close to the destination answer to make those proofs. What would it do on something that isn't supported like that? Be confidently wrong while sounding right. That's what we've seen repeatedly.
For someone highly literate, llms aren't going to help you write better. If you're borderline functionally illiterate (this is > 50% of the population according to some studies), I'm sure the llms are awesome.
I've long thought the same about all the hype around coding (plenty of examples from years ago now), but will continue to test the new models. They are improving.
Do people need permission from mathematicians to solve math problems? Is one of the Millennium problems not worth applying a new system to work on it?
I understand the despair people are feeling at AI automating their work, but we have to be serious about the fact that the frontier labs are just responding to natural incentives. Mathematics, coding, all are just applications of logic, and it makes sense that a system trained on inferring patterns from data would work well in that domain.
Mathematicians are not gate keepers but I understand the frustration. If someone claims they spent 30 million dollars to solve one of the most difficult problems yet there’s no new knowledge, understanding, nor certainty. Then what’s the point besides marketing?
> AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Strange viewpoint. In mathematics any novel result is useful as it expands the scope of other results. Who are these mathematicians who didn't want AI to solve the problems it did? I see trepidation about the future of the field but that is not equivalent to not wanting them to be solved.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/ahm-statement-on-o...
A long time ago, another student of mathematics described it to me as climbing a mountain. No single step is hard, but you must make many steps to get to the point that no one else has made a step.
This has been studied somewhat extensively (https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315?login=... is one example), and it’s been shown over and over that this does in fact not work and leads to larger wealth disparity, across many countries where it has been attempted.
It’s possible you’re working off some other definition of the term based on your comment but that’s the generally accepted usage.
> [Your train] never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.
None of this has to do with AI.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Plain wrong on both counts.
> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do Apparently...nothing.
Nonsequitor, probably based on a personal beef. Datacenters, at best, are understood to be for hosting more AI - not for people to somehow live in as an arcology of discovery.
It reminds me of the Ezra Klein quote that “OpenAl would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses."
It might take a decade to take what we learned from AI and turn it into something that will benefit the masses.
Most of it can't be broken down into something as simplistic as a dishwasher.
Most people won't notice cancers being found faster due to AI being better at pattern recognition than a doctor, but it's still a great benefit.
there was never a need to rush other than for capitals self interest to control
if frontier labs wanna pace the frontier, they should be honest and return the compute back to the people
[1] https://sumsec.me/2026/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-transc...
By comparison, we're in the early years of AI. We're all still figuring out what this thing even means.
Because they didn't just break laws, they built an entire system to mislead law enforcement.
(How do tech people not know about Greyball??)
We are in that condition because people keep voting for these idiots, or not voting at all.
Everything isn't getting worse constantly. The data is quite clearly the opposite. How old are you?
Your pessimistic view doesn't hold up against the data. For a lot of the problems you mentioned, we're in a better place today than almost any other time in history. Of course, things can always be improved and we should never grow complacent or accept injustice. But by most objective metrics, there's never been a better time to be alive.
We've just locked out a large part of modernity because the shitty American auto industry is in swing states and also gender.
Same could be said about the slow rollout of Waymo.
Lots of America is just very anti technological change, and this means any technology no matter how "magical" hits a wall.
This reply summarizes the problem from a different angle.
Nevertheless, my counterpoint to
> If they actually had access to systems that could do "years of top professional work" across software, cyber, science, and math, they would not mostly be leaving to start more chatbot companies, agent frameworks, eval tools, and "AI for workflow" startups.
> They would be starting normal companies to disrupt the global economies of the world.
> Insurance companies. CAD companies. Compliance companies. Security auditing firms. Logistics software. Tax automation. ERP replacements. Drug discovery tooling. Industrial design. Legal ops. Accounting systems. Boring vertical SaaS with insane output per employee.
is:
Many people who work in such industries already know an insane amount of inefficiencies. Unluckily, they are not in positions and have no political power (with respect to organizational policy) in the company that they are capable of changing the situation.
Additionally, many of these sectors are heavily regulated, so it is very hard to make a difference in this sector as a startup founder, and even if there is an entrpreneur who founds a company to change the status quo, an insane amount of work in the company will be handling the big amount of red tape.
Not for Tesla owners in select countries, where their car now drives them around 99% of the time, or the people of Austin Texas, that can now hail a fully driverless Cybercab for cheaper than an Uber!
>Food quality is worse.
Food quality is higher than ever if you want high-quality food!
Unfortunately, the people crave slop.
That's not fair. To first approximation, most of the progress in human condition of the last, like, forever is implementing solutions that people didn't see value in at the time of creation. Woz built a toy that could barely run software at all. The human genome project was panned as a boondoggle. Penicillin was a mistake.
The first fire pit probably looked like a dangerous stunt to the tribe faced with it, even.
Does that mean everything will come up roses? No. But LLMs only started talking to us for real like three years ago. Let's not just that fast.
Videos are shittier. Most songs are even shittier than the autotuned pieces of shit already were. Ads are worse (even though nobody thought that was even possible). Customer support is worse.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using)
That nobody is using and that are worse than what we used to have. And because nobody's using them, the countless issues plaguing them aren't even reported by users anymore (there are no users anymore). Full of bugs, usability issues and gigantic security holes (but which doesn't really matter because nobody's using them).
It's not even clear that it's making long-standing software (like say Linux or Emacs or Blender or QEMU) better at all.
Now I'd say though: most of the issues you mentioned have nothing to do with LLMs / AI. But it's very clear that AI ain't solving much of the world's problems and that the promises we got years ago didn't materialize.
Even if a certain small group of people are also using the hype surrounding this tech to attempt to destroy the home PC market and reverse the personal computer revolution. They will not succeed. There is more of us than them. Even with "thousands of frontier LLMs". A human+llm is going to be more powerful for a long time rather than a bunch of LLMs.
Things worked better before we started putting bad software in everything. As a software engineer, I know what good software looks like. The fact that almost all software is now bad -- including the software that drives AI and the software that AI generates -- makes me want to flip the table. We know how to write better software and the general public should hang us if we continue to refuse to deliver it.
The problem are the power-relationships and laws which allow someone to abuse you and your stuff, block competition, and even put you in jail for trying to remove the software or helping others to remove it.
Never, ever connect appliances to the Internet. I thought this was common knowledge on HN. Also pull the telematics (cell modem) fuse to prevent your car from snooping on you and selling your location and driving habits to data brokers and insurance companies.
Has any technology made an impact on physical world faster?
Imagine being in charge of a physical factory, sure you might have a 200 USD Claude subscription but you also have a floor full of physical machines that have, if you're lucky, an undocumented debug interface and a paper manual. Not to mention safety inspections, insurance, etc.
You can't vibe code a factory floor. Not yet, perhaps in 5 - 10 years but there are some very hard, non technical, problems that need to be fixed before we'll see meaningful improvement there.
This is far from being proven as a net gain and there are massive lawsuits incoming related to AI recommending suicide to kids and others.
Safety systems are not optimal but improving everyday and although I doubt we'll ever get a perfect safety system, it seems that we're not very far from a "good" safety system. The days of Google recommending glue on pizza and generating diverse Nazis seem behind us.
Not to mention all the untold good that LLMs have done. Personally I've seen that LLMs are incredibly good at pointing conspiracy nuts and extremists into the right (moderate) direction.
In a polarised world, we definitely need that.
Now it’s comments like this lamenting that the amazing LLMs we’ve had since early 2026 haven’t entirely revolutionized the whole physical world and even global geopolitics yet.
> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using),
I guarantee a lot of software you use today has substantial AI development in recent releases.
Even the Linux kernel is getting a heavy input from AI and Linus is advocating for it. Unless you’ve frozen your entire software stack in 2024, you are using software with AI generated code.
> and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)
Saying nobody wants those problems solved is flat dishonest. The complaints from some mathematicians are that they and their peers didn’t get to put their names on the papers, not complaints that the problems were solved.
When companies make profit, it doesn't mean we get screwed, nor even that they have a high profit margin. The grocery chain stores are a prime example. They typically make 2-3% net margins on revenue, and provide fresh, clean, reasonably well-tested groceries close to our home for that margin. Imagine trying to get equivalent quality fresh groceries ourselves from the producers, and I'm guessing it would cost at least three times as much.
Africa is going to look like wakanda in less than 5 years if WW3 gets canceled