Comment by matthewaveryusa
Comment by matthewaveryusa 7 hours ago
I'll offer two counter-points. Weak but worth mentioning. wrt China there's no value to extract by on-shoring manufacturing -- many verticals are simply uninvestable in the US because of labor costs and the gap of cost to manufacture is so large it's not even worth considering. I think there's a level of introspection the US needs to contend with, but that ship has sailed. We should be forward looking in what we can do outside of manufacturing.
For AI, the pivot to profitability was indeed quick, but I don't think it's as bad as you may think. We're building the software infrastructure to accomodate LLMs into our work streams which makes everyone more efficient and productive. As foundational models progress, the infrastructure will reap the benefits a-la moore's law.
I acknowledge that this is a bullish thesis but I'll tell you why I'm bullish: I'm basically a high-tech ludite -- the last piece of technology I adopted was google in 1996. I converted from vim to vscode + copilot (and now cursor.) because of LLMs -- that's how transformative this technology is.
I think an interesting way to measure the value is to argue "what would we do without it?"
If we removed "modern search" (Google) and had to go back to say 1995-era AltaVista search performance, we'd probably see major productivity drops across huge parts of the economy, and significant business failures.
If we removed the LLMs, developers would go back to Less Spicy Autocomplete and it might take a few hours longer to deliver some projects. Trolls might have to hand-photoshop Joe Biden's face onto an opossum's body like their forefathers did. But the world would keep spinning.
It's not just that we've had 20 years more to grow accustomed to Google than LLMs, it's that having a low-confidence answer or an excessively florid summary of a document are not really that useful.