alt Hacker News> I get that results in your mind is a vibecoded full feature photoshop as the goal post, which is fair enough. That's no less arbitrary than say me defining the goal post as can it make me a useful script & thus has already delivered results with receipts.
I think vibe coded photoshop is what’s being talked about from Anthropic, OpenAI as the end goal - Dario is on record saying that AI will replace engineers and Sam Altman has said “ we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so”. The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x what his other engineers ship. I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is, because there’s a lot of talk about where it’s not, and that’s gmoving the goalposts.
> The IPO & bubble financial shenanigans are only loosely linked to the technological advancement.
Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
> In my mind the base case assumption here has to be that the trend (that has been remarkably consistent)
Making wild promises, and insane promises about capability and then doing the same thing 3 months later when a new model releases? Isn’t it convenient that both OpenAI and Anthropic have models that are “too powerful” to release. How responsible of them.
At the same time; Anthropic, OpenAI and Copilot have all changed to usage based to billing recently for enterprises as they’ve been been undercharging by 10/100/1000x in many cases. Enterprises are limiting costs (uber limiting spend to $1500/mo this week).
If these tools were really game changing and integer productivity multipliers why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools and getting ahead of their competitors? Because they’re “not quite ready” just like they weren’t 6 months ago, and they still won’t be in 6 months.
>I want to know where people _genuinely_ think the cutoff is
I don't think there is/should be one at all. If you and I stand in front of a crazy fast growing plant the question on how tall it'll be tomorrow is initially interesting, but a couple measurements in when it's clear the answer is exponentially the relevant question stops being how high is it now / will be tomorrow and more holly shit how long can this keep going & where does this go.
>Except they’re not. Someone is paying for this compute power, and energy.
Certainly, and the questionable subsidizations may disappear but the tech won't. If APIs disappear tomorrow I'll be looking into building a LLM rig. And researchers at unis will continue to do research to advance the tech. And chinese labs will continue. Pace may be somewhat limited but IPOs blowing up stop this tech train
>The cursor founder has said that he ships 10x
CEOs say all kinds of crazy shit. I don't think their promises and marketing is a good reference point for how a technology is actually developing
>usage based to billing
I don't think it's relevant at all for general purpose technologies like this. It'll land where market forces dictate. Maybe some people go bankrupt. Do you know what the billing model on the first electricity grids were? I don't. And I don't care. If it's useful the market will figure out the economics.
>why aren’t major engineering organisations spending all their hiring grown on these tools
They are spending big. Just because they're not committing 100% of their budget right now doesn't mean it hasn't yielded results. It's an evolving situation not a mature technology.