That 'triggers a surge of dopamine and creates highly addictive habits' [thanks Gemini!]

LLM use for code generation does exactly that, sometimes it works amazingly, sometimes it fails inexplicably. Whether it is negative sum or not doesn't really matter. Indeed it may well prove to be negative sum, especially if we step back a bit and consider the business benefit of the code produced, not just lines of code or even features produced.

This right here. Any gambler would recognize that statement.

Just last week finally I had to buy a new phone, and so I went shopping again - this time no AI was mentioned anywhere. Not online, not on the stands in the shops, nowhere. The silence speaks volumes, as they say.

but snark aside, society needs to have a big conversation (meaning political) about what is good and what is bad about what should really be understood as the 'connectivity revolution' of the last 10-20 years.

In fact [fiat] money does appear out of thin air (well, created by banks when they originate loans) - and has to to support a growing economy. Unfortunately, for various reasons, rather too much has been appearing, and has been funneled to the already wealthy.

2. CFOs are seeing the token spend on the bottom line, and are not happy. CFOs don't care about 'the next big thing', they just count beans, and they are coming up short. CFOs tend to be the grown-ups in the C-suite, they will shut things down if they need to.

3. See 1. and 2.

An intermediate step would be to ban personally targeted advertising, at least then the playing field can be leveled somewhat.

Money is not a tangible thing, you can't eat or drink it. Instead it is a signalling protocol for resource allocation. If the very wealthy have many empty homes, when many people are homeless or inadequately housed, then that signalling protocol has failed (from a social justice point of view), and 'trickle down' is not working.

Maybe investors will realise that "the only winning move is not to play".

And so we are left with (as was) frontier models getting more and more out of date as whoever their post bankruptcy custodians are tries to eek pennies on the dollar for inference on their decaying property. Perhaps along with local and/or highly specialized models still feeding on the after-glow of the huge amount of training that was (and is no longer) done.

The next AI winter is going to be deep, savage, and long.

For those of us lucky enough to have the choice, the best bet is to sit it out for a year or so until it all comes crashing down, then re-engage with what's left of the software industry.