Investors are obviously stupid fucking people spooked by any old horseshit and who buy into any old horseshit.

Unless there's AI magic going on behind the scenes we're not being told about, autonomous AI agents are nowhere near a reality and won't be because LLMs are a dead-end in regards to that.

Seriously our world is run by the people least fucking fit to do so. I'm just some random asshat who knows fuck-all. I'm not smart enough for the people who run the world to be this fucking stupid in comparison.

Like, here's a quote from beginning of this Substack post:

The sole intent of this piece is modeling a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored.

But has it though?? Can't anyone with a fucking brain extrapolate that if AI replaced all workers that we wouldn't have an economy, we would have the people who control the AI owning all that's left in the world and the huddled teeming starving masses ready to build gallows in the streets for the people who caused all this? How is this new and shocking to these people? How have none of them ever considered the endgame before?

Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses. Business for Uber and other ride-sharing apps also evaporates. Instead of using Visa and Mastercard, AI agents decide to do all business in cryptocurrency, because transaction costs are cheaper. This guts traditional payment providers.

To Citrini, this is a logical endpoint for tireless AI agents that have the time and capability to optimise everything. “Habitual app loyalty, the entire basis of the business model, simply didn’t exist for a machine,” it writes.

Seems plausible /s

The "feedback without any breaks" dynamic certainly is what the AI industry is capable of, but it isn't because of how powerful AI is, it is because the humans working in the AI industry have brainworms that inhibit the suppression of runaway feedback loops around their near spiritual beliefs about the capability of AI.

It isn't the runaway capability of AI that is terrifying, rather what is terrifying are the runaway rationalizations of AI cultists who can't admit they chose a shitty horse to get behind and it is never going to go anywhere faster than it is already failing to do.

AI fanboys will do ANYTHING to avoid facing that reality, they have given their ego no choice by building their entire identities and worldviews around it and that is what should terrify us.

The second thing here that should terrify us is how much of a Cargo Cult the financial industry is that these kinds of emotional fever dream panics actually dominate the price determination of major companies even though it isn't that hard to do the research yourself and come to the conclusion all of this AI stuff is 99.99% bullshit.

Stop investing in AI, it is unbelievably dumb, invest in the local landscaping company around you, invest in ANYTHING else at all so long as there is real value to it unlike AI, you will end up with far more in the end.

"Shook the US markets" is that last dip in the chart. Nothing happened and we're losing our minds over it. There's been 5 bigger drops over the last 3 months than what happened on monday.

How is this is just now dawning on people? How did anyone think for a moment that given the way our current global economic and political hegemony functions that "AI" would ever benefit the average person. This was always going to be what happened the moment OpenAI released the first model.

Its just a gussied up version of the trickle down lie, and so many people are still falling for it

Really reinforces my belief that the stockmarket is driven by idiots.

Reminds me of this old Kal cartoon:

Granted AI will probably doom us all but not how the substance post says it will.

The scenario begins with AI agents undergoing a “jump in capability”.

Might as well stop reading there. Another fluff piece about how useful and capable AI supposedly is, disguised as a doomsday scenario. I'm so sick of reading this bullshit. "Agentic AI" based on LLMs does not work reliably yet and very likely never will.

If you complain about bugs in traditional (deterministic) software, you ain't seen nothing yet. A probabilistic system such as an LLM might or might not book the correct flight for you. It might give you the information you have asked for or it might delete your inbox instead.

As a consequence of a system being probabilistic, anything you do with it works or fails based on probabilities. This really is the dumbest timeline.

My reaction to the article:

This was about fears AI will tank the economy? No shit it will.

Reads a little more

Wait, this is about fears AI will be so successful it tanks the economy? Complete bullshit but hey, whatever gets this bubble popped.

Instead of using DoorDash, developers – and civilians – code up their own food delivery apps, all of which compete, fragment the market, and destroy the margins of legacy businesses.

Complete fucking fantasy. Even if AI was so amazing it could code my own delivery app for me in seconds, the food still has to be delivered somehow. But yes, it AI was able to deliver on all of the promises we'd be fucked, when AI fails to deliver on all of the promises the bubble will burst and we'll be fucked. Either way stop investing in AI.

I just..

Am I wrong here? Like, look, shame me. I work in machine learning and have since 2012. I don't do any of the llm shit. I do things like predicting wildfire risk from satellite imagery or biomass in the amazon, soil carbon, shit like that.

I've tried all the code assistants. They're fucking crap. There's no building an economy around these things. You'll just get dogshit. There's no building institutions around these things.

Lol, they sort of seem to know it's all castles on clouds and any spark e.g. a substack post could trigger the loaded spring. Yet, nobody thinks they'll be the ones holding bags of shit.

My favourite take so far is the comparison to the introduction of the microwave. Some people really believed that they’d never have to cook again. So what we got was actually a way to make crap quality meals or reheat things when we don’t have time. This is roughly analogous to the output I get from the LLM.

It's almost funny how all those AI doomsday scenarios are actually meant to prop up investment in AI.

See how Amodei and Altman are usually the ones pushing these narratives on how worried they are by the incredible advancements of their respective companies' creatures. They are so, so worried about the demise of the human race and how fast it's coming.

And I sort of understand them because whatever disruption they are peddling needs to happen very fast or they will all run out of money. But what does it tell about the rest of the human race that we are actually buying into it and pouring money into creating a dystopian future?

From: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic which is what the guardian is writing about:

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

DoorDash (DASH US) was the poster child.

Coding agents had collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a delivery app. A competent developer could deploy a functional competitor in weeks, and dozens did, enticing drivers away from DoorDash and Uber Eats by passing 90-95% of the delivery fee through to the driver. Multi-app dashboards let gig workers track incoming jobs from twenty or thirty platforms at once, eliminating the lock-in that the incumbents depended on. The market fragmented overnight and margins compressed to nearly nothing.

Agents accelerated both sides of the destruction. They enabled the competitors and then they used them. The DoorDash moat was literally “you’re hungry, you’re lazy, this is the app on your home screen.” An agent doesn’t have a home screen. It checks DoorDash, Uber Eats, the restaurant’s own site, and twenty new vibe-coded alternatives so it can pick the lowest fee and fastest delivery every time.

Anyone who has used these agent can see this with a bit of futurism... With the caveat that it's never as simple as a single prompt should be. They are incredibly savant like at time, and then they make the dumbest contextual mistake that you have to chase down for hours. Which is to say the markets are idiots as usual. (Along side CEOs.) These agents aren't up to the hype, their investment, nor their ability to code without security flaws. Just let it keep singing: "If I only had a brain" and hanging scarecrows up in the windows.