Some people are basically "built" around working and getting laid off is devastating to them even if they have cash reserves to live like kings until the end of their lives.
Did you ever you the newest LLMs with a harness? Because I usually hear this kind of talk from people whose most recent interaction was with GPT-4o copy-pasting code into the chat window.
Maybe I'm biased but I don't buy someone truly thinking that "it's just a tool like a linter" after using it on non-trivial stuff.
I'm using Claude Code (and Codex) (with the expensive subscriptions) on an app I'm building right now. I'm trying to be maximalist with them (to learn the most I can about them .. and also that subscription isn't cheap!). My impression, and yes, this is using the latest models and harness and all that would agree with the GP. They're a very handy tool. They make me faster. They also do a lot of things that, as a professional software developer, I have to frequently correct. They duplicate code like nobodies business. They decide on weird boundaries for functions and parameters. They undo bug fixes they just made. I think they're useful, but the hype is out of control. I would not trust software made with these tools by someone that couldn't write that software by hand. It might work superficially, but I'm definitely not giving any personal data to a vibe coded app with all the security implications.
I use it pretty extensively. The reason why it's a tool is because it cannot work without an SWE running it. You have to prompt it and re-prompt it. We are doing a lot of the heavy lifting with code agents that people hyping it are ignoring. Sure, as a non-swe, you can vibe a project from zero-to-proto, but that's not going to happen in an enterprise environment, certainly not without extensive QA/Code review.
Just take a look at the openclaw codebase and tell me you want to maintain that 500k loc project in the long-term. I predict that project will be dead within 6 months.
That monopoly is worth less as time goes by and people more and more use LLMs or similar systems to search for info. In my case I've cut down a lot of Googling since more competent LLMs appeared.
I wonder how do they hold up when there's a big enough benefit of using AI over human work.
Like how are politicians to explain these moats to the masses when your AI doctor costs 10x less and according to a multitude of studies is much better at diagnosis?
Or in law? I've read China is pushing AI judges because people weren't happy with the impartiality of the human ones. I think in general people overestimate how much these legal moats are worth in the long run.
One might ask how they explain the moats already. A nurse can do plenty of what a doctor does. One questions if a law partner is really producing 10x the work of a new law grad to justify that hourly difference. Same is true for banking; all that money spent on salary, bonus, stock options, converted to luxury homes, products, and services, is surely a waste compared to the "efficiency" one might get out of a math post doctoral researcher clearing only $54k a year in academia. All examples of a field carving out a safe and luxurious harbor for themselves, protected by various degrees of regulation and cartel behavior, that has been practiced long enough now so as to be an unremarkable and widely accepted part of the field.
I would say that MS here is undervalued. They do not offer some small software package for a given business problem but the whole shebang - the OS, mail, calendar, office suite, IAM, cloud, etc. + support for each and the whole integration.
You can't realistically replace that with some LLM solution (in the near-term at least) and they can use the AIs to reduce their costs which is mostly people.
Microsoft has consistently proven over the last five years that they have zero ability to execute. It's an astounding failure after failure to do anything right.
It was so ridiculously shortsighted of them to decide as a strategy to underpay all their employees compared to the industry standard, especially considering their ambitions are still fairly unbounded (meaning it's not like they said everything we do will be easier than Google or Meta so we don't need to compete for the same pool of talent).
But maybe such a decision was inevitable in their culture. And now it's very difficult to correct.
Well it is like Thiel said in a recent interview - European companies and investors are very risk-averse and will never be a vanguard like the ones in the US.
You'll never get here that kind of cash for any risky project, it usually is low risk + low margin.
Feels like people write that like it somehow is failure on investors side.
If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high, burning cash to have a chance hitting jackpot are much much higher than in EU.
In EU you are starting in a single country so like 60M people and your payoff is capped from start at most likely scenario you go big in a single country and then you basically have clean start in next country.
That is the reality of game theory, not some failure of imagination or being scared to take risks - payoff is just not there, in US you have a shot at insane payoff in relatively short term.
> If you are investor on US market having 300M people speaking roughly the same language and then high possibility to easily spill over the world upsides on the bet are really high
The topic is cloud providers. Do you think it would be critical for a EU-based cloud provider to translate their admin GUI to Elfdalian, Basque and Romansh in order to succeed? Or perhaps there are some deeper underlying causes for European failure in modern computer tech that you can think of?
Thiel recently called Greta Thunberg the anti - christ. Thiel is maybe crazy as Musk. at least he is not an authorative source.
Besides the soure what does he mean with all of Europe: Berlin? London? Paris? Estonia? Sweden?
The start up eco system is fragmented / decentralised. I doubt Thiel is a good overview and he argues probably not in good faith anyway.
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