Tools: Code Is All You Need

Interesting take but too bearish on LLMs in my opinion.

LLMs have already found large-scale usage (deep research, translation) which makes them more ubiquitous today than 3D printers ever will or could have been.

What we call an LLM today (by which almost everyone means an autogressive language model from the Generative Pretrained Transformer family tree, and BERTs are still doing important eork, believe that) is actually an offshoot of neural machine translation.

This isn't (intentionally at least) mere HN pedantry: they really do act like translation tools in a bunch of observable ways.

And while they have recently crossed the threshold into "yeah, I'm always going to have a gptel buffer open now" territory at the extreme high end, their utility outside of the really specific, totally non-generalizing code lookup gizmo usecase remains a claim unsupported by robust profits.

There is a hole in the ground where something between 100 billion and a trillion dollars in the ground that so far has about 20B in revenue (not profit) going into it annually.

AI is going to be big (it was big ten years ago).

LLMs? Look more and more like the Metaverse every day as concerns the economics.

And yet you didn't provide a single reference link! Every case of LLM usage that I've seen claimed about those things has been largely a lie -- guess you won't take the opportunity to be the first to present a real example. Just another rumor.

My reference is the daily usage of chatgpt around me (outside of tech circles).

I don’t want to sound like a hard-core LLM believer. I get your point and it’s fair.

I just wanted to point out that the current usage of chatgpt is a lot broader than that of 3D printers even at the peak hype of it.

Outside of tech circles it looks like NFTs: people following hype using tech they don't understand which will be popular until the downsides we're aware of that they are ignorant to have consequences, and then the market will reflect the shift in opinion.

> There is a hole in the ground where something between 100 billion and a trillion dollars in the ground that so far has about 20B in revenue (not profit) going into it annually.

This is a concern for me. I'm using claude-code daily and find it very useful, but I'm expecting the price to continue getting jacked up. I do want to support Anthropic, but they might eventually need to cross a price threshold where I bail. We'll see.

I expect at some point the more open models and tools will catch up when the expensive models like ChatGPT plateau (assuming they do plateau). Then we'll find out if these valuations measure up to reality.

Note to the Hypelords: It's not perfect. I need to read every change and intervene often enough. "Vibe coding" is nonsense as expected. It is definitely good though.

I see it differently: people are switching to chatgpt like they switched to google back in 2005 (from whatever alternative existed back then)

And I mean random people, not tech circles

It’s very different from NFTs in that respect

No way.

Everybody under a certain age is using ChatGPT, where they were once using search and friendship/expertises. It’s the number 1 app in the App Store. Copilot use in the enterprise is so seamless, you just talk to PowerPoint or outlook and it formulated what you were supposed to make or write.

It’s not a fad, it is a paradigm change.

People don’t need to understand how it works for it to work.

Without trying to take away from your assertion, I think it is worthwhile to mention that part of this phenomenon is the unavoidable matter of meatspace being expensive and dataspace being intangibly present everywhere.

large scale usage in niche domains is still small scale overall.

No, 3D printers are the backbone of modern physical prototyping. They're far more important to today's global economy than LLMs are, even if you don't have the vantage point to see it from your sector. That might change in the future, but snapping your fingers to wink LLMs out of existence would change essentially nothing about how the world works today; it would be a non-traumatic non-event. There just hasn't been time to integrate them into any essential processes.

Vibe coding is nonsense, and its really kind of uncomfortable to realize that a bunch of people you had tons of respect for are either ignorant or dishonest/bought enough to say otherwise. There's a cold wind blowing and the bunker-building crowd, well let's just say I won't shed a tear.

You don't stock antibiotics and bullets in a survival compound because you think that's going to keep out a paperclip optimizer gone awry. You do that in the forlorn hope that when the guillotines come out that you'll be able to ride it out until the Nouveau Regime is in a negotiating mood. But they never are.

[citation needed]

>LLMs? Look more and more like the Metaverse every day as concerns the economics.

ChatGPT has 800M+ weekly active users how is that comparable to the Metaverse in any way?

> snapping your fingers to wink LLMs out of existence would change essentially nothing about how the world works today

One could have said the same thing about Google in 2006

I said as concerns the economics. It's clearly more popular than the Oculus or whatever, but it's still a money bonfire and shows no signs of changing on that front.

I'm just taking advantage and burning VCs' money on useful but not world-changing tools while I still can. We'll come out of it with consumer-level okay tools even if they don't reach the levels of Claude today, though.

No, not even close. By 2006 all sorts of load-bearing infrastructure was relying on Google (e.g. Gmail). Today LLMs are still on the edge of important systems, rather than underlying those systems.

Not even remotely in the same universe; the difference is ChatGPT is actually having an impact, people are incorporating it day-to-day in a way that NFTs never stood much of a chance.

Even if the most bearish predictions turn out to be correct, the comparison of LLMs to NFTs is a galaxy-spanning stretch.

NFTs are about as close to literally useless as it gets, and that was always obvious; 99% of the serious attention paid to them came from hustlers and speculators.

LLMs, for all their limitations, are already good at some things and useful in some ways. Even in the areas where they are (so far) too unreliable for serious use, they're not pure hype and bullshit; they're doing things that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago.

Things like BERT are a load bearing structure in data science pipelines.

I assume there are massive number of LLM analysis pipelines out there.

I suppose it depends if you consider non determinist DS/ML pipelines "loadbearing" or not. Most are not using LLMs though.

3D parts regularly are used beyond prototyping though as tooling for a small company can be higher than just metal 3D parts. So I do somewhat agree but the loss of productivity in software prototyping would be a massive hit if LLMs vanished.

As a thought-exercise -- assume models continue to improve, whereas "using claude-code daily" is something you choose to do because it's useful, but is not yet at the level of "absolute necessity, can't imagine work without it". What if it does become, that level of absolute necessity?

- Is your demand inelastic at that point, if having claude-code becomes effectively required, to sustain your livelihood? Does pricing continue to increase, until it's 1%/5%/20%/50% of your salary (because hey, what's the alternative? if you don't pay, then you won't keep up with other engineers and will just lose your job completely)?

- But if tools like claude-code become such a necessity, wouldn't enterprises be the ones paying? Maybe, but maybe like health-insurance in America (a uniquely dystopian thing), your employer may pay some portion of the premiums, but they'll also pass some costs to you as the employee... Tech salaries have been cushy for a while now, but we might be entering a "K-shaped" inflection point --> if you are an OpenAI elite researcher, then you might get a $100M+ offer from Meta; but if you are an average dev doing average enterprise CRUD, maybe your wages will be suppressed because the small cabal of LLM providers can raise prices and your company HAS to pay, which means you HAVE to bear the cost (or else what? you can quit and look for another job, but who's hiring?)

This is a pessimistic take of course (and vastly oversimplified / too cynical). A more positive outcome might be, that increasing quality of AI/LLM options leads to a democratization of talent, or a blossoming of "solo unicorns"... personally I have toyed with calling this, something like a "techno-Amish utopia", in the sense that Amish people believe in self-sufficiency and are not wholly-resistant to technology (it's actually quite clever, what sorts of technology they allow for themselves or not), so what if we could take that further?

If there was a version of that Amish-mentality of loosely-federated self-sufficient communities (they have newsletters! they travel to each other! but they largely feed themselves, build their own tools, fix their own fences, etc.!), where engineers + their chosen LLM partner could launch companies from home, manage their home automation / security tech, run a high-tech small farm, live off-grid from cheap solar, use excess electricity to Bitcoin mine if they choose to, etc.... maybe there is actually a libertarian world that can arise, where we are no longer as dependent on large institutions to marshal resources, deploy capital, scale production, etc., if some of those things are more in-reach for regular people in smaller communities, assisted by AI. This of course assumes that, the cabal of LLM model creators can be broken, that you don't need to pay for Claude if the cheaper open-source-ish Llama-like alternative is good enough

Well my business doesn't rely on AI as a competitive advantage, at least not yet anyways. So as it stands, if claude got 100x as effective, but cost 100x more, I'm not sure I could justify the cost because my market might just not be large enough. Which means I can either ditch it (for an alternative if one exists) or expand into other markets... which is appealing but a huge change from what I'm currently doing.

As usual, the answer is "it depends". I guarantee though that I'll at least start looking at alternatives when there's a huge price hike.

Also I suspect that a 100x improvement (if even possible) wouldn't just cost 100 times as much, but probably 100,000+ times as much. I also suspect than an improvement of 100x will be hyped as an improvement of 1,000x at least :)

Regardless, AI is really looking like a commodity to me. While I'm thankful for all the investment that got us here, I doubt anyone investing this late in the game at these inflated numbers are going to see a long term return (other than ponzi selling).

LLMs as we know them via ChatGPT were a way to disrupt the search monopoly Google had for so many years. And my guess is the reason Google was in no rush to jump into that market was because they knew the economics of it sucked.

> It’s the number 1 app in the App Store.

When I checked the iOS App Store just now, something called Love Island USA is the #1 free app. Kinda makes you think….

Th author is not bearish on LLMs at all; this post is about using LLMs and code vs. LLMs with autonomous tools via MCP. An example from your set would be translation. The author says you'll get better results if you do something like ask an LLM to translate documents, review the proposed approach, ask it to review it's work and maybe ask another LLM to validate the results than if you say "you've got 10K documents in English, and these tools - I speak French"

I know it's popular; that doesn't mean it's not a fad. Consequences take time. It's easy to use but once you get burned in a serious way by the bot that's still wrong 20% of the time, you'll become more reluctant to put your coin in the slot machine.

Maybe if the AI companies start offering refunds for wrong answers, then the price per token might not be such a scam.

Right, and inb4 ads on ChatGPT to stop the bleeding. That's the default outcome at this point: quantize it down gradually to the point where it can be ad supported.

You can just see the scene from the Sorkin film where Fidji is saying to Altman: "Its time to monetize the site."

"We don't even know what it is yet, we know that it is cool."

I supposed in that sense it is more like the early days of social media, where there were huge numbers of users but no one was sure how to monetize it properly.

In this case though I think the ChatGPT product line is profitable albeit not enough to cover the R&D costs of OpenAI.

I can give a way 800M+ of anything for free. How many of these users are willing to pay OpenAI enough for full ROI and profits on top?

>I can give a way 800M+ of anything for free

No you can't, be serious. 10% of the global population is using their service, you can't just pretend that isn't impressive.

There are a lot of free websites, they do not have 800M users.

It's back to #1. The show is towards the end of the season and people need to vote for their favorite couples. Itll drop off the chart soon. ChatGPT will not.

A little surprised to see Threads at 4 though.