Those caught on because they’re basically addictive drugs. Furthermore, while it may be hard to remember at this late stage of the game, those services did have genuine value to some users at the beginning. Today’s versions of those products have gone through countless iterations since then, each one reducing value to the end-user and increasing value to the data buyers and advertisers, like the proverbial “slowly boiling the frog”.

I think it is that its not useful for the end customer. Every anecdote I’ve heard about LLMs helping someone with their work were heavily qualified with special cases and circumstances and narrow use cases, resulting in a description of a process that was made more complex by adding the LLM, which then helped them eliminate nearly as much complication and effort as it added. These are the stories from the believers.

Now add in the fact that almost nobody is on a paid service tier outside of work, and all the paid tiers are currently heavily subsidized. If it has questionable utility at today’s prices, the value will only decline from there as prices rise to cover the real costs to run these things.

If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.

People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.

But there’s almost always a small seed of truth they build the crazy off of. Like how every pearl starts as a tiny piece of sand.

This reminds me a lot of chiropractic medicine; there is a core of validity too it, but many modern practitioners have hidden it deep inside a boulder of manure.

I think that Microsoft will continue in some form regardless of what happens with this bubble because they have huge amounts of physical assets and cash on hand.

That said, their market position in any given sector they’re in might not be as invincible as it seems. There are corporations that were titans of their industries, including technology, that either don’t exist or are ghosts of their former selves all in far less than a lifetime.

Kodak, Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, and Yahoo all looked like unstoppable juggernauts when I was a kid, and my own kids haven’t even heard of some of them.

One of the initial promises of capitalism included the alignment of altruism and profit, like providing a good or service to the community that they need and did not otherwise have, and they all pay you enough to live, meanwhile they all do the same with other goods and services, creating a big virtuous cycle.

I know that has largely broken down and been perverted as more and more market segments collapse into monopolies like black holes, but I think you can still see some of that “making money doing something good” spirit out there, even on YouTube. The first YouTuber that came to mind was “Dad, How Do I?” for example. I am pretty sure that guy’s getting monetized and he’s wholesome as hell.

If they’re still using the computer then they’re still paying with their data, just like if you subscribe to Netflix, you’re still a customer. The fact the you already conceded to paying doesn’t negate your ongoing payments.

I can’t speak for a company of 30,000, but I know tons of companies with a couple thousand employees or less that could, without a doubt, write their own tools in house to do the bits and pieces of SalesForce they actually are using for far less than they are spending on SalesForce. As they grow, their SalesForce costs grow linearly or worse, while an in-house tool’s grow at a decreasing rate.

Any company that size or larger already has some kind of technology division that can be grown to accommodate the development.

For those really big companies, I imagine their SalesForce bill is so high they might have potential alternative options I can’t even imagine at those prices.

At first I was concerned about these huge tech companies stealing all of human knowledge and using it to make a fortune and drive everyone that created the knowledge into poverty.

Now I see that they are stealing all of human knowledge to make LLMs, giant digital babbling talkers. It can’t work how they want the way they’re doing it, so it doesn’t matter what data they consume. They seem to lose money on every LLM query, even if you’re paying for the highest tier.

When they stop subsidizing the cost to cash in, the already lukewarm interest in LLMs will cool further as costs rise.

Shower response: I don’t like that they’re gobbling my data, but at least they’re choking on it.

Nothing more.

You are buying it with your personal data and granting them access to your computer. Even if you don’t think that’s not worth much, it is still not free. You’re just paying with something other than money.

There are billions of us. We can do many things at once.

This may not matter as much as nuclear disarmament, but it matters to everyone that owns one of these cars.

What I personally would do is:

• implement a progressive income tax that scales to 100% at the highest tier.
• include all income from all sources, including inheritance and capital gains (especially those in fact) in income such that it counts toward the progressive taxation model in the previous step.
• implement a public fund for the retired and disabled paid into from the income tax base from all taxpayers (my country already has this called Social Security, but it is undermined by corrupt tax policy).

That isn’t the hard part, though. Like i said, there are a ton of solutions to THAT problem that can work, including yours. The really hard problem is that I am not sure how to protect a government from allowing officials elected under false pretenses from dismantling the solution for disingenuous reasons, like is happening throughout the entire developed world in real time right now, despite their varied social, economic, and governmental structures.

ETA: I would also include people with debilitating mental health as among the disabled for purposes of eligibility for the social fund aid.

I’m sure that’s true, but again, the positive outcomes you’re describing are the result of the poor peoples’ increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don’t believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.

And you are again correct: there is no way to “dry run” new social programs fully. You can only create small “labs” to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we’ve seen really used in the real world.

The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn’t necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).

I mean at the scale at which it would be used. A small pilot program that has millions of eyes on it is not going to get undermined by bad actors because everyone is watching. It is good to create tests and pilot programs to try new economic and governance systems, but it is also important to remember that those are idealized lab conditions.

Also, consider the context of the discussion. Literally any system where money is put in the hands of those in poverty is going to immediately result in improved conditions for those people and increased local taxable economic activity. I could give them a UBI stipend, big tax rebates, increased wages, or even drop cash from planes. The point is that it is not necessarily the method that made the difference but the result. In this case the result is “get buying power to poor people”, and any system that achieves that is going to be an economic and social good.

I’m just not convinced UBI is the safe way to do that. Its an inescapable fact that any government is going to have internal forces trying to undermine its protections to enrich themselves, so it is wise to remember that any government systems we come up with that are not made highly resistant to capture are only going to serve their intended purpose temporarily.

UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.

And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don’t do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I’m sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.

I am pretty sure there’s a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.

I would personally consider it very shaky ground to found a family on if my ability to support them came in the form of a government stipend I have no direct control over.

Can’t we instead restore the economy to functionality rather than slapping a big “UBI” patch on the big crack in the dam?

Restoring earning power to the middle class such that a single income can support a household will give families the stability they need to start families with out handing over all the mechanisms of the economy to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity the way UBI does.

The upshot of this and a lot of the other replies I see here and elsewhere seem to suggest that one big difference between this bubble and other past ones is that with this most recent one, there is so much of the global economy now tied to the fate of this bubble that the entire financial world is colluding to delay the inevitable due to the expected severity of the consequences.

I work adjacent to software developers, and I have been hearing a lot of the same sentiments. What I don’t understand, though, is the magnitude of this bubble then.

Typically, bubbles seem to form around some new market phenomenon or technology that threatens to upset the old paradigm and usher in a new boom. Those market phenomena then eventually take their place in the world based on their real value, which is nowhere near the level of the hype, but still substantial.

In this case, I am struggling to find examples of the real benefits of a lot of these AI assistant technologies. I know that there are a lot of successes in the AI realm, but not a single one I know of involves an LLM.

So, I guess my question is, “What specific LLM tools are generating profits or productivity at a substantial level well exceeding their operating costs?” If there really are none, or if the gains are only incremental, then my question becomes an incredulous, “Is this biggest in history tech bubble really composed entirely of unfounded hype?”

The people that were societally oppressed in the USA during the middle class boom were in their bad situation due to other societal ills, not the taxation structure.

I’m not saying that the entirety of US policy was good then. Clearly there were many societal ills, including widespread gender and racial discrimination in housing and hiring, terrible literacy rates and targeted violence against ethnic minorities in the rural south that persist to this day, and religious bigotry was widely accepted. The economic structure, though, successfully allowed for personal wealth while limiting it, and created an undeniably huge middle class. The fact that many citizens didn’t get to participate in it was due to those other non-economic social problems freezing them out.

Also, mid-20th century USA is a single example of a system that was brought up to illustrate the point that there were more than the false dichotomy of choices presented. Surely there are way more ideas out there than status quo or status quo + UBI.

UBI has no precedent for working, and I, some rando online, have already identified a potentially disastrous problem that undermines it that I’ve never heard any convincing solutions for.

I love gaming out problems and solutions, but it is important not to fall in love with our ideas. Getting upset when holes are poked in them or ignoring these weaknesses aren’t going to prevent our opponents from exploiting them. If a plan has intractable problems, there is no shame in making new plans that may avoid those problems.