"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different.
Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves.
The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.
> The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative.
No, the debate is very much whether AI is transformative. You don't get to smuggle your viewpoint as an assumption as if there was consensus on this point. There isn't consensus at all.
Stuff that's going into production now (actual production, not startup MVP production) would have been being written just before Claude Code came out, so pretty much by definition no. There's some copilot-style assisted stuff in the wild, I guess? But not really more of it than pre-copilot so the productivity argument kind of falls through there.
Right but this agentic stuff was supposed to be the wave where we would finally actually see increased output, so we should probably be seeing it soon if it's real. Like, my dev team should definitely have the actual code they keep talking about their agents making, ready for me to put into production. As should my vendors. Any day now.
You said that none of this was in production and then when people pointed out that it was obviously in production, you shifted the goal post to some other measure that you just imagined in your head.
Well, if it's in production, it's not at my company, any of my vendors, or for that matter any of the software I use in my private life; the pace of all of that is exactly what it was 2 years ago. When it shows up I'll form an opinion.
Let me amend that: one of my vendors has a new diffusion-based noise-reduction plugin that's pretty good though the resource usage is still too high. I imagine that will come down as they improve it. And that's pretty cool. But it didn't come out any faster it's just that it uses diffusion in the plugin itself. But docker was a much bigger impact on the software we use at work than AI has been so far.
I was even trying to come up with a list of software I use in my personal life to see if any of that has started coming out faster, and I came up with:
KDE
Supercollider
Puredata
Mixxx
Renoise
CUDA and ROCM
none of which have had any kind of release acceleration that I know of (though obviously the hardware to use the last two has gotten mind-blowingly expensive, alas). I use maybe three apps on my phone and they aren't updating any more frequently than they used to.
I get that for whatever reason this bugs people, but I'm in a very tech job and have a very tech personal life (just not webdev in either case) and literally have not seen anything I deal with change other than needing to learn to scroll past the AI summary at the top of search results.
What do you expect that it’s gonna announce itself in a modal dialogue when you run the software?
This isn’t like AI image generation where you’re going to convince yourself that you can tell the difference based on how you think it looks. Do you really think no one in the production chain of any of the software that you use picked up copilot in the last two years?
What signal are you hoping to receive that this is happening?
Well like I said in the sibling post to this one I'd expect really any of the software vendors in my professional or personal life to release either more rapidly or with a wider array of features than they were a few years ago, and that hasn't been my experience, at all.
I'm certainly sympathetic to that argument, but if you scroll way back this thread started with the question of whether or not AI is transformative, and if it is neither faster nor better that would suggest "no".
I feel like you might only be convinced when an AI powered robot rolls up to you and asks, "Bandrami, are you convinced that AI is transformative yet?"
I put AI assisted code in production every day, what are you talking about? At this point I don't even doubt I'm going to lose the job eventually, the question is only whether or not I will be able to pay my mortgage off first.
The problem is in the middle of such a change it's hard to recognize if this is a real change or if this is another Wankel motor.
Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
The other issue is nobody knows what the future will actually look like and they'll often be wrong with their predictions. For example, with the rise of robotics, plenty of 1950s scifi thought it was just logical that androids and smart mechanic arms would be developed next year. I mean, you can find cartoons where people envisioned smart hands giving people a clean shave. (Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D Sweeney Todd scifi redux)
I think AI is here to stay. At very least it seems to have practical value in software development. That won't be erased anytime soon. Claims beyond that, though, need a lot more evidence to support them. Right now it feels like people just shoving AI into 1000 places hoping that they can find an new industry like software dev.
> Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
But how many of your non-nerdy friends were talking about them, let alone using them daily?
Yeah that's another rub. The current price is basically there in the hopes that in the future they can find revenue streams to maintain their current pace.
But even if the big companies ultimately go belly up, I think the open models are good enough that we'll likely see pretty cheap AI available for a while, even if it's not as good as the STOA when the bankruptcies roll through.
The four technologies I look at are 3D televisions, VR, tablets, and the electric car. 3D televisions and VR have yet to find their moment. Judging tablets by the Apple Newton and electric cars by the EV1, this time is different turns out to be the correct model looking at the iPad and Tesla, but not for 3d televisions or VR (yet). So, it could be, but my time machine is as good as yours (mine goes 1 minute per minute, and only forwards, reverse is broken right now.), so unless you've got money on it, we'll just have to wait and see where it goes.
> Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12)
You're comparing a service that mostly costs a free account registration and is harder to avoid than to use, with devices that cost thousands of dollars in the early days.
There's another perspective you can see in the comparison with the dot com boom. The web is here to stay, but a lot of ideas from the beginning didn't work out and a lot of companies turned bankrupt.
The original concept of the web, hyperlinked documents originating from high-quality institutions, is pretty much dead. Now we have an application platform that happens to have adopted some similar protocols and is 99% slop
In 1995 how many people used the internet in their daily work, of those that did how many was it a curiosity that maybe supplemented their existing business practice (sending a memo via email rather than post for example). Large companies were using large computer mainframes but the majority of employers - the SMEs - weren’t.
By 2005 it massively shifted, and AI seems to be coming faster than the internet and computers in general.
By 2015 non intenet companies were going the way of the dodo. How many travel agents were there per 100k in 1995 compared to 2015?
Also add in that these adoption rates are being enforced via threats of firing by bosses of workers. It's hardly something organic, there's a reason why the LLM companies are chasing lucrative corporate welfare contracts because consumers have soundly rejected this nonsense.
They probably already can for a lot of things, but "Safety" is really about accountability when things go wrong. As a society, I hope we don't end up at "AI isn't perfect, but it's better than people on average, sorry if it failed you, good luck with that."
It will only get better at generating random slop and other crap. Maybe helping morons who are unable to eat and breathe without consulting the "helpful assistant".
I think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas.
I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative.
A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost.
These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications.
I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.
No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.
What about when someone who can barely type (like stephen hawking used to, 3 minutes per sentence using his cheek) uses autocomplete to reduce the unbelievable effort required to type out sentences? That person could pick the auto completed sentence that is closest to what they’re trying to communicate, and such a thing can be a life saver.
Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?
Read the article again. Rob Pike got a letter from a machine saying it is "deeply grateful". There's no human there expressing anything, worse, it's a machine gaslighting the recipient.
If a family member used LLM to write a letter to another, then at least the recipient can believe the sender feels the gratefulness in his/her human soul. If they used LLM to write a message in their own language, they would've proofread it to see if they agree with the sentiment, and "take ownership" of the message. If they used LLM to write a message in a foreign language, there's a sender there with a feeling, and a trust of the technology to translate the message to a language they don't know in the hopes that the technology does it correctly.
If it turns out the sender just told a machine to send their friends each a copy-pasted message, the sender is a lazy shallow asshole, but there's still in their heart an attempt of brightening someone's day, however lazily executed...
I think you created it the same way christian von koenigsegg makes supercars. You didn’t hand make each panel, or hand design the exact aerodynamics of the wing, an engineer with a computer algorithm did that. But you made it happen, and that’s still cool
It is not about being proud, it is about being sincere.
If you send me a photo of the moon supposedly taken with your smartphone but enhanced by the photo app to show all the details of the moon, I know you aren't sincere and sending me random slop. Same if you are sending me words you cannot articulate.
> These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas
The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.
There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.
As the saying goes, "If I'd had more time, I would have written a shorter letter". Of course AI can be used to lazily stretch a short prompt into a long output, but I don't see any implication of that in the parent comment.
If someone isn't a good writer, or isn't a native speaker, using AI to compress a poorly written wall of text may well produce a better result while remaining substantially the prompter's own ideas. For those with certain disabilities or conditions, having AI distill a verbal stream of consciousness into a textual output could even be the only practical way for them to "write" at all.
We should all be more understanding, and not assume that only people with certain cognitive and/or physical capabilities can have something valuable to say. If AI can help someone articulate a fresh perspective or disseminate knowledge that would otherwise have been lost and forgotten, I'm all for it.
> For those with certain disabilities or conditions, having AI distill a verbal stream of consciousness into a textual output could even be the only practical way for them to "write" at all.
These are the exact kinds of cases I think are ok, but let's not pretend even 10% of the AI writing out there fits this category
This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.
You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.
Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.
If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.
While this seem like it might be the case, those hours you (or we) spent banging our collective heads against the wall were developing skills in determination and mental toughness, while priming your mind for more learning.
Modern research all shows that the difficulty of a task directly correlates to how well you retain information about that task. Spaced repetition learning shows, that we can't just blast our brains with information, and there needs to be
While LLMs do clearly increase our learning velocity (if using it right), there is a hidden cost to removing that friction. The struggle and the challenge of the process built your mind and character in ways that you cant quantify, but after years of maintaining this approach has essentially made you who you are. You have become implicitly OK with grinding out a simple task without a quick solution, the building of that grit is irreplaceable.
I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.
> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?
> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time
But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.
(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)
I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.
My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.
Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.
I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:
> When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
> I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty
Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?
I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice.
So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.
I agree about the abuse, and the OP is probably a good example of that. Do you have any ideas on how to curtail abuse?
Ideas I often hear usually assume it is easy to discern AI content from human, which is wrong, especially at scale. Either that, or they involve some form of extreme censorship.
Microtransactions might work by making it expensive run bots while costing human users very little. I'm not sure this is practical either though, and has plenty of downsides as well.
I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans.
Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.
> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.
Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.
> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.
This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.
I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.
I guess your point is that a camera, a paintbrush, and an LLM are all tools, and as long as the user is involved in the making, then it is still their art? If so, then I think there are two useful distinctions to make:
1. The extent to which the user is involved in the final product differs greatly with these three tools. To me there is a spectrum with "painting" and e.g. "hand-written note" at one extreme, and "Hallmark card with preprinted text" on the other. LLM-written email is much closer to "Hallmark card."
2. Perhaps more importantly, when I see a photograph, I know what aspects were created by the camera, so I won't feel mislead (unless they edit it to look like a painting and then let me believe that they painted it). When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.
I think you are right that it is a spectrum, and maybe that's enough to settle the debate. It is more about how you use it than the tool itself.
Maybe one more useful consideration for LLMs. If a friend writes to me with an LLM and discovers a new writing pattern, or learns a new concept and incorporates that into their writing, I see this as a positive development, not negative.
I would be very surprised if no interesting art could be made with LLMs. But, like a camera, it produces a distinct kind of art to other tools. We do not say that a camera produces a painting. Instead photography is its own medium with its own forms and techniques and strengths and weaknesses.
Using photography to claim that obviously all good writing will be LLM replacements for current writing is... odd.
A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.
LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.
I think that the fact that people don't understand why there are so many negative positions is equally frustrating. To me it seems blatantly obvious that the majority of LLM usage by people today is coming from models that are trained on stolen data without following any of the requirements or licenses of the authors.
With Rob Pike being such a prolific figure in software development, it's likely that a sizable portion of what makes the LLM function and be able to send him that email was possible only because they didn't uphold their end of the bargain. I don't see why anyone has trouble comprehending why this would make him furious?
I know for me personally, I'm happy to share things I've made but make no mistake, I would never share it if other users of it did not credit me, specifically by following the terms in the license I've published. The fact that LLMs have ingested and used so much software yet I can't find the licenses text provided by the training data authors is at minimum deeply distributing and at most actively harmful. For works licensed under something like the GPL where someone is only ok for their software to be used under strict terms, I don't even know where to start with how upset I imagine they would be.
Why is this weird? If anything I feel it would be the default response from someone on here.
The things that we enjoy in life are mostly driven by habit. Best to drive your habits to things that are good for you.
Also, the world has changed so much in the last 5 years. It's not clear to me that radical life extension won't happen in the next 50 years. Best to get on the right side of the escape velocity.
+1 - you can propagate the loss for a workflow across prompts + tools, which would make it much better to do resilient workflows. or "agents" as everyone calls them now ;)
I wish I had realized this when I was younger. People overestimate raw intelligence and underestimate sheer persistence. Just staying with a problem longer—pushing past the point where most would quit—feels almost like magic. Time + focus can take you incredibly far.
Stubbornness might just be the most valuable trait a scientist can have.
No, stubbornness plus being right are the most valuable trait a scientist can have. A whole lot of scientists were stubbornly wrong and are justifiably forgotten.
Stephen J. Gould wrote many of his Natural History magazine essays on these sorts of scientists. The most notable example would probably be Louis Agassiz, who was enormously famous in their own time, but held out stubbornly against evolution, and most of these stubborn scientists today are mere footnotes if they are remembered at all. (Agassiz also was a huge player in scientific racism- his special flavor of the idea was that Black and White people- as Americans defined them- were separate species created separately by God. Again he held onto this idea long after it had gone out of vogue with the rest of the scientific community.) He was the head of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, was hugely prominent in his time, and his stubbornness in defense of wrong ideas is why he had his name removed from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and elsewhere.
The stubborn correct few may become famous, but they also had to be stubborn first.
And those who defied something we know to be true now may have also done great work elsewhere before they made that mistake, and that stubbornness served them.
I dislike looking at those who win the fame lottery and trying to say they were never wrong and their opponents were never right. They just got one really big thing really right and stuck with it.
Oh believe me, that's Gould's main point, and the reason that he kept writing these monthly essays for three decades.
Looking at, say, Linnaeus attempt to categorize rocks in exactly the same hierarchical way that he was able to successfully categorize animals (1) reminds us that we are making the same sorts of mistakes, and that a century from now they will look back at our quaint beliefs about X, Y, and Z and say what fools that we are. But this is why stubbornness is a double-edged sword. Sometimes being stubborn means that you can see the truth when no one around you can, and sometimes it means that you are the person whose funeral causes science to advance one Planck unit forward. (2) The only difference is whether you are correct!
1: He didn't realize that Darwinian common descent and evolution were the reasons that his scheme worked for life- those ideas became commonly accepted almost a century after his death- and that rocks, not having any sort of common descent, couldn't be mapped into that sort of hierarchy. He himself didn't spend that much time on the subject, he mostly just asserted that they would fit into the same scheme because he was revealing God's True Law, and it would therefore have to be in rocks just like in living things, but several of his followers spent their lives trying to fit rocks into that same sort of scheme and it just fell apart every time.
2: Stubbornness is not necessarily related to age- there seems to have been no correlation between age and acceptance of either evolution or plate tectonics- so Planck's Principle is a little loose.
Raw intelligence is just another tool in the toolbox. Sure, it gives advantage if used right, or massive disadvantage (often paired with ocd-ish behavior, general unhappiness since one sees more what a clown show real world often is and who often gets success).
Not ashamed to say - I am not anyhow special re intelligence compared to my most of my uni peers, I struggled with memory too, a lot of endless rota. I was lets say above average on high school and thats it, facing same memory & non-stellar intelligence issues. So I learned to work longer on stuff, learning, everything, not giving up quickly, simply more patience. Saw this already on uni - bright folks were so unused to putting in effort from high school (which they coursed through effortlessly), they hit literal wall on uni.
At the end, I left most of those peers behind professionally, financially and life fulfillment wise, some non-easy choices with long term consequences. A lot of folks jump to their comfort zones way too early and eagerly. I've had some luck too but luck is just wasted chances if not prepared to seize them and take some risks.
When one hits those few crucial moments in life when big-consequence choices are done (which uni, which job, who to marry, where to settle etc), stamina can mean choosing more intense path with rewards in future, instead of going for the easy and a bit safer path from step #1.
Completely agree. Though I think this statement could benefit from pointing out that cars also help people go much faster, and do things they otherwise couldn't.
Relatedly, people who rely too much on GPS for navigation (i.e. online automated route planning), especially real-time, turn-by-turn instruction, seem to have poor spatial awareness, at least at the local geographic level. I doubt the loss of that skill is a meaningful impediment in modern life[1], but I personally would not want to lose it. Tools like Google Maps are extremely useful, but I use them to augment my own navigation and driving skills. I'll briefly study the route before departing, choose major thoroughfares to minimize complexity, and try to memorize the last few turns (signage and a practiced understanding of how highways and roads are laid out is sufficient for getting close enough).
[1] No impediment for them. It's an impediment for me when the car in front of me is clearly being driven by somebody blithely following the computer's instructions, with little if any anticipation of successive turns, and so driving slowly and even erratically.
Yes. You can see a difference between the person who learned to do a process "by hand" and then uses technology to make it faster or easier, versus the person who never learned to do it without the tech at all.
The ICE and more generally the automobile has been a great technology and has lots of benefits. But we did all huff alarming amounts of lead for a generation and built our cities around them to our detriment.
> But we did all huff alarming amounts of lead for a generation and built our cities around them to our detriment.
And yet, this has nothing to do with the ICE itself, and everything to do with the greed of the Ethyl Corporation and the generation of corrupted minions that knowingly enabled their disastrous scheme.
Cars allow people to travel longer distances more conveniently, access remote areas, transport goods efficiently, and have greater independence in their daily lives. They also enable emergency services to respond quickly, support economic growth by facilitating trade, and provide opportunities for leisure travel that were previously impractical.
They let us do things efficiently. Sure, you could have moved a truckload of goods up the coast using 20 wagons, 40 mules, 20 drivers, 10 security, and a week's time. Today, one dude can move a truckload of goods up the coast same day.
(Numbers have been entirely fabricated, feel free to send adjustments.)
Travel [long distance], relatively safely, in [short time].
LA to NY is a long roadtrip, but you can do it in 2-3 days with a few friends to rotate drivers. Walking that is a months long journey with a very real risk of death if you don't have a support vehicle.
I got yelled at once at the bank in my office's parking lot for going to the drive up ATM instead of going inside to a teller. So they definitely agree with that. Not allowed to walk through a drive through.
I think "carrying something heavy without slavery being involved" is a new capability compared to "enslaving people and making them carry something heavy".
I think it ends up being a sort of an evolved trait. Somebody in a full remote company doesn't show up for work one day, they notice that the next day nobody says anything, nobody noticed, or nobody cared. Over time, this leads to disconnection from work.
I run a bootstrapped cheminformatics company that’s been gaining traction, and I currently own it outright. I’m genuinely interested in a model like you’re describing—something that aligns everyone’s incentives and keeps them at the top of their game, not just waiting to vest or check out once they do.
In my experience, equity alone can become more of a distraction than a motivator. It sometimes encourages people to mark time rather than consistently push the envelope. I’m wondering if a profit-sharing model, possibly combined with some consulting-group best practices, might be more effective at sustaining high performance over the long haul.
If you know of a proven employee-owned approach that doesn’t dilute accountability—and actually ensures teams stay fully engaged—I’d love to explore it. My goal is to bring in the best talent, focus everyone on building the best product, and reward them in a way that keeps us all hungry for continued success.
I don’t have a model specifically but companies like “Bob’s Red Mill” and “King Arthur” are employee owned and rather succesful. Though those are not tech companies I can’t imagine the base model being drastically different when adapted.
Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves.
The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.