Someone "actually working with it" checking in, if that matters at all to this conversation. I'm very bearish on the industry even if I think the tech is going to stick around.

If we separate the tech from the industry, it's clear one has some value (albeit very hard to say just how much) and the other is a lot of smoke and mirrors. This is not a healthy space.

> who are actually working with it only become more bullish

I have a feeling the word "actually" is doing a lot of work with this. I shipped AI facing user products a few years ago, then worked in more research focused AI work for awhile (spending a lot of time working with internals of these models). Then seeing where this was all headed (hype was more important than real work) decided to go back to good ol' statistical modeling.

Needless to say, while I think AI is absolutely useful, I'm bearish on the industry because current promises and expectations are completely out of touch with reality.

But I have a feeling because I'm not currently deploying a fleet of what people are calling "agents" (real agents are still quite cool imho), you would describe me as not "actually" using AI.

Well the problem is that even at $200 a month they're bleeding MONEY. FYI for every well intentioned skilled engineer using llms you have 100 lazy code monkeys shipping mountains of tech debt faster than ever before, 1000 people generating bullshit emails/tickets that could have been summed up in 5 bullet points, 1000 people role-playing with virtual friends/partners, &c.

You're in your own little bubble and completely oblivious to the thousands of man hour wasted every day to unfuck AI slop

And as it turns out 80% of users aren't willing to pay a cent and will abandon ship as soon as there is an alternative

would you bet $10,000 that the super majority (80% or greater) of current users of free APIs will be using a paid (20-200) one per month? if so let's set something up. we can set the time limit at January 1st, 2028.

Imagine throwing orders of magnitude more of compute at things - we may have things like a monte carlo tree search for LLM outputs using an LLMJudge that prunes the tree.

Can I ask what you do? I suspect there is a type of job that AI excels at, and it makes everyone in that job unreasonably bullish on AI.

This really doesn't make sense to me. I see no world where Ai is so useful that the common man is willing to pay 100+ a month for it, but it's also a world where the common man has a job. There's too many people for everyone to have some niche job the Ai can't do.