If all of the AI providers just went bankrupt it would be a fairly solid 1 step back, 2 steps forward for humanity.
We weren’t ready for it. And degrading world conditions and crazy leadership make it scary to be a civilian in a world with highly capable AI. One that will soon contain AI-powered terrestrial robots akin to something out of Terminator (<2 years).
Besides, without AI we’d probably invest in net positive short term objectives that redistribute wealth, like clean tech.
(Extremely unpopular opinion because at least half or more of HN are probably working in AI)
Working in "AI" was much more fun before the current hype cycle...
It's definitely turned into another Eternal September of everyone and their brother pretending they've worked in AI for all of human history. I would welcome another long winter
I upvoted you, and mostly agree with you, but: as much as I love using strong small local models sometimes a commercial 'frontier' model is very useful (for me).
I deleted my free OpenAI account (I paid for it until a year ago) and just started a $20/month Anthropic account. My one-year prepaid Gemini account will expire in two months and I will decide then to keep one of Anthropic or Gemini.
Once again: I agree that super-spending on super scaler data centers is a net negative for humanity. For me it is not a matter of price: I am happy paying $20/month and only using energy guzzling models occasionally when I really need them. Sort of like recycling to lesson our burden on the environment: try to minimize AI energy and resource use, but still get work done.
EDIT: we can also use LLMs more efficiently: build software composed of small well tested libraries. It is more energy efficient to write and debug little 200 line libraries than soaking up large projects in your context. Also, working on small composable libraries works better with smaller open models like qwen3.5:35b.
It's not that we are all fans of AI, it's that it's career suicide to ignore AI. If AI were gone for everybody that might be a net positive, but if it exists, it needs to get into the hands of as many as possible else wealth and power will concentrate even greater than it is now.
We weren’t ready for it. And degrading world conditions and crazy leadership make it scary to be a civilian in a world with highly capable AI. One that will soon contain AI-powered terrestrial robots akin to something out of Terminator (<2 years).
Besides, without AI we’d probably invest in net positive short term objectives that redistribute wealth, like clean tech.
(Extremely unpopular opinion because at least half or more of HN are probably working in AI)