alt Hacker NewsAI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given
* The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace
* AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure
* there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced
There are strong headwinds to all three of these.
Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a lot of tech people simply overlaying the progress curve of previous tech booms which is reductive.
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AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.
Others have commented on the rate of AI improvement. It doesn't need to be current rate for it to be an even more serious problem in the very near future. That's irrespective of prior booms.
Regarding AI companies having capital to expand infrastructure; this is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag, and you can already make serious gains by finetuning to local problems on a desktop machine. There is enough hardware out there to run these things en masse; it's more a question of power. Regardless, this stuff will always keep progressing, regardless of who is doing it.
Regarding the economy, it may be largely irrelevant if we, the people, don't do something very soon. The wheel keeps spinning as long as there are productive workers; it's just that those workers are being replaced by machines. The last year has increasingly demonstrated that you don't need normal people to buy your stuff to remain afloat. You can just keep selling amongst your rich friends while the masses starve, as long as _something_ is still producing what the wealthy want, and enough systems are in place to protect them.
> The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace
I guess this is trivially true if you say "maximalism" (hell, the maximalists think it will speed up as the AI becomes a super-AI-researcher), but as long as the rate of change is positive and not miniscule, it's hard to predict what 2035 looks like in software development.
These things are very hard to quantify, but making the progress that happened from Jan 2025-December 2025 repeat twice in 10 years would be enough for me to say I couldn't predict the day-to-day of a software engineer in 2035.
This is probably one of the more level headed takes in the comment thread. There's been a concerted marketing push to frame AI maximalism as an inevitability. More or less a "it's going happen anyways so let's go all in".
It's hardly an inevitability though (nothing is... and analogues to the industrial revolution are iffy at best, we haven't ever had an attempted replacement for intelligence itself before).
Society is doing this at an unprecedented cost and it's clear a large portion of the population is uneasy with it. Whether society in the US, Europe, and Asia will continue to allow such investment at the expense of everything else remains to be seen.
> * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace
Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today.
The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months.
And likely again in the following 18-24 months.
At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same time speed will increase (also valuable since time is money).