I have spent time in China and Korea where attitudes towards artificial intelligence are much more positive than the west. I have interacted with robots in these countries.

You are making the fundamental mistake all nerds make. You’re thinking about what is possible and concluding that it is what will happen. Just as nerds believe that someday it will be possible for us to live on mars and therefore we are going to live on mars.

Humans are humans. Humans are interacting with artificial intelligence as if it is human because they crave human contact and are so desperate they settle for the best they can get.

The houses filled with robots future goes hand in hand with the robots will be doing all our work future. And if robots are doing all our work, what do humans have? Time. So much time. Humans become creatures of leisure. No longer is there a too little time to build relationships, there is only time, so much time. Human relationships become abundant, humans spend all their time being human.

The idea that people will have 50-100 artificial friends is so batshit crazy that I could totally believe your comment is parody.

The world will be filled with robots is not the inspired forward-thinking of a visionary it is the uninspired regurgitated science fiction of someone who doesn’t care to understand that the world is people, a society.

[1] not really but they did some innovative things and popularized a concept

Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.

There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.

As a customer, the big number is scary and causes panic but for the provider… customers constantly fail to pay bills, providers are constantly writing off bills because it just isn’t worth the cost to chase, if a customer says “hey that usage was a mistake” it’s usually worth it to write it off to save the relationship. If you write off a big bill that wouldn’t have been paid anyway, the customer will perceive you as wonderful and benevolent and be loyal for life when they are ready to spend their money.

With tokens though the actual cost being incurred is much, much higher. If your service is just a wrapper around tokens, and a customer incurs $10k of usage that you paid OpenAI $5k for, it becomes much more difficult to write off.

Google Cloud is one of the few services that actually pursues unpaid bills even on their high margin services.

Long before A.I., tiny 10 person startups have been able to revolutionize industries.

And on this, these are examples of tech companies filled with nerds who love novel new technology. Of course companies like Ramp and Stripe are spending huge amounts of time and money on taking this new technology to the extremes with “harnesses” and ”factories” because that’s what the nerds want to do. What the nerds want to do is not a sign of how the technology will be used in future, it’s a sign of what is most fun today.

Google isn’t successful because it has the best engineers, it has the best engineers because it is successful. Google is an extremely boring business: show adverts to make money. And they made so much money. The next Google is not going to be the company with the best “harness” it’ll be the company that has an obscenely profitable product.

Founder mode, what was considered a panacea just 12 months ago, is defined by a founder giving a shit about everything. You don’t succeed by handing everything off to an army of ~agents~ consultants.

This vision of the future is nonsense that will not pan out. You can add that to the HN AI predictions. At no point will real businesses be “harnesses” around AI models.

Relative to traditional software margins, the type of margins we are all used to, inference is obscene.

Inference will be too cheap long term to make money because it is being commoditized and customers will start to care about results and not just be wowed by impressive technology.

And of course this technology will continue to exist but that is irrelevant to the business. OpenAI investors don’t care if LLMs exist in 10 years, they care if their investment in OpenAI has made money.

I don’t think it is intentional but this is actually quite bad for the western labs.

The entire booster narrative has been “look at how their revenue is growing! $10bn to $100bn ARR in under a year! This’ll be a multi-trillion IPO!” and the extrapolated future growth from $100bn to $500bn and $500bn to $1tn justified future investment… but that revenue was just because inference was expensive.

The revenue growth story is all that matters pre-IPO. If revenue falls from $100bn to $50bn that’s very very bad optics for OpenAI and Anthropic even if they are now profitable, it completely destroys the growth narrative.

Infrastructure is readily available. Anthropic and OpenAI don’t own anything, they’re just paying for compute. You might not be able to buy 100k GPUs right now but you can rent it.

You only need to look at how Jev immediately became one of the highest volume models after launch on OpenRouter to see how this industry is moatless.

OpenAI and Anthropic employees frequently leave to start their own labs and raise hundreds of millions for it which they can use to immediately pay for infrastructure and training data. At most OpenAI and Anthropic have… brand and talent.

If anything, OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily disadvantaged because they have huge long term financial commitments that have backed them into a corner, likewise the regulatory pressure… startups have none of that.