I'm not so sure if it's entirely correct. I mean, there's always technology in every opportunity, but I think it's even worse. I believe we're heading into an era where all ideas are being stolen, even the greatest coding methods and principles. Even if people come up with insanely innovative ideas, all of this information is being stolen, categorized, detected, identified, bucketed, stored, and added back into a bigger machine. The companies with the most GPUs and the most capital to build infinite amounts of data centers will simply absorb all this information, while the rest of us are left with scraps and leftovers.
I guess that's kind of how it's always been, but it's also not the same. We've almost learned, in a way, that we can now mass-consume all the thoughts, information, and data from everything. But the only people who can truly parse through it and figure out things from it are those with infinite money, all the resources, and those at the top. I guess that's always been the way.
We're full speed ahead on validating the dead internet theory is my take. Increasingly things are just generated by LLMs, parsed and read by bots to improve SEO and then fed back into LLMs.
People are just going to retreat into smaller communities where they can guarantee they're interacting with a person and the era of widely sharing art or music or writing will be over.
At least assuming that the grift train doesn't derail and catch fire before them.
I mean normal people communicate with each other over text message. That has been the case and continues being the case. The people you see very actively participating in social media and blogs are complete outliers. No normal person can have a valid relationship with 1000 people at once.
I think it's the AI titanic era. Everyone spent ages telling us that the idea was unsinkable. The peonage in the bottom is currently bailing out water by the bucket (layoffs) while the rich are still telling everyone the ship isn't sinking by shouting "BUY TITANIC". It's going to sink. We will learn a few useful trivial but useful things from it. That's about it.
We've been here before and will be here again. But we will never learn.
Titanic had sister ships, one of which hit a mine and sank, the other lived out a full life.
The peril came from being led into dangerous waters. Maybe your analogy is more right than you know. The question is, who’s Titanic, Olympic, and Brittanic…
The worst part is the SP500 is completely held up by this last grift. Once we see the emperor has no clothes look out below. And I don’t know what will prop it up after that. We could be in for a very long decade reminiscent of the 2000s’ lost decade. The carnage from everyone blindly buying tech stocks and even the SP500 (mostly propped up by the Magnificent 7) is going to be unimaginable.
> The carnage from everyone blindly buying tech stocks and even the SP500 (mostly propped up by the Magnificent 7) is going to be unimaginable.
I share this concern, but would also like to point out that there are lots of well-run low cost index funds out there that do not track the S&P500 and/or exclude the Magnificent 7.
I'm not a pricing quant by a long way (though AQR at least historically employed more than a few extremely serious quants), so take my hot take with a cold grain of salt.
To my untrained eye it looks like most of the Magnificent Seven are priced as though they captured the entire pie at the expense of all the others, which more or less can't happen by definition.
The amount of the US equity market based on that pricing outlook would be a terrifying thing to see corrected abruptly.
The awkward factor is that we could have avoided this sort of bubble on a broader scale by sticking to more traditional pension rules.
When everyone gets a 401(k), and everyone gets the cookie-cutter advice that index funds are cheap and tend to outperform active management on the long term, it couples WAY more of the American public to the stock market than was conventional.
If the market fizzled in 1980, it would bankrupt some rich traders and a few over-margined firms, but the aspects of the economy that actually made and sold useful things would soldier on. People with guaranteed pensions and secured debts would make it out (relatively) whole.
Today, a proper reckoning would be political suicide. We're now forced to deal with the political consequences of "NVDA retreating to $10 per share means a bunch of grandpas (who vote) are evicted from their retirement homes."
I expect we'll see a lot of elaborate Rube Goldberg schemes to keep stock prices afloat. We'll insist there's an AI gap with China to unlock endless federal grift, much as the missile gap with the USSR made it of vital national interest that we showered Lockheed and Raytheon with trillions. I wonder if we'd eventually see the equivalent of 'capital controls'-- limiting the ability of institutional investors to sell their shares to prevent price deflation if there's a "market-spooking" event.
Of course, this bleeds actual productive assets, and when the bottom finally falls out-- when there's no amount of state intervention that will hold back the obvious-- it's going to burn far worse. Maybe the final endgame is that we end up nationalizing part of the market-- swallowing everyone's IRAs/401(k)s/ESAs and converting them to funny-money that can be marked at whatever price is necessary to keep Grandpa from losing his shirt.
Yeah that. The ETF (IVZ QQQ) I had a chunk of cash in is at risk as well as that tracks SP500 roughly due to the holdings distribution. I pulled it recently. I might lose a few % at the top but when it goes bang I don't want to be near it.
>Y Combinator has been revered as a highly selective startup accelerator
Y Combinator has not been discriminating for a while. This is a graph of the companies they have graduated in the last 40 batches.
It's gone from 8 companies per batch to 400 in the last few years. Granted the insanity has died down a bit since covid and we're now only looking at ~200 per batch.
450 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| + + + + + + + |
400 |-+ A A +-|
| A |
350 |-+ +-|
| A |
| |
300 |-+ +-|
| A |
250 |-+ AA-|
| A A A |
200 |-+ A A +-|
| A |
150 |-+ A +-|
| A A |
| A AA A A |
100 |-+ A A +-|
| AA A A |
50 |-+ A A A A +-|
| A A AA A A A+ + + + + + |
0 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
> Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation.
This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with our tech culture pushing forward and rewarding "innovation" for its own sake, with little regard for whether it's actually solving previously unsolved problems. I mean, if the organization is already driving the world forward, it probably doesn't really need FastCompany's award.
The dead giveaway is that all companies stuff AI into their earnings calls. If you say AI only to pander to investors then it's not sustainable. It's FOMO-driven.
So here’s my theory. Everyone will start generating content by the buckets so web site numbers are going to double or triple over the coming years because you’d need somewhere to put all that content. There will be short term benefits for a variety of occupations related to building and maintaining web sites. So before the bubble bursts the web will see a new renaissance era.
Search engine discoverability is already crap. And it is already filled with stolen or just low quality content. And now this will get even worse? And harder to separate something sane from everything else...
I don't think there is enough money, and only winners will be the good SEO people.
>So before the bubble bursts the web will see a new renaissance era.
A new renaissance of slop content? Great, another boom in hiring and pay for web developers, followed by, oh look at that, a massive bust when it turns out that GenAI slop won't make any money, not enough to justify the engineering time in making and hosting it at least.
Actually, on the face of it, how can any of this work? Why would people (investors) believe that the general public is going to leave facebook, instagram, twitter etc to go look at https://sloppify.io in very large numbers? No, they're going to do exactly what is happening right now: fill social media with the genslop. So no, no building and maintaining website renaissance.
More content yes but not websites. The ai spam ALREADY being generated is in the form of tiktoks or insta reels. Auto-generated stories with complete voice overs generated or crawled visuals etc.
SV has been training the art of the grift for decades and hucksters around the world are eager to emulate. This hype is the biggest they've managed to land as of yet and the awakening will be rude when the party's over.
Amazing how every year since 2014 or so, someone would call DL a bubble or a grift, and yet, here we are: AI keeps getting better, while journalism & editorial standards keep getting lower. I mean, it used to be that journalists had the self-respect to not make up a 'trend' or 'era' before they could cobble together at least 3 anecdotes, and OP can barely even manage 1!
It's the grift era. AI is the current thing that that taint will cause to be used against us more than for us. If flying cars were invented tomorrow, that would be the thing that younger me would be surprised that older me isn't excited about.
Older you has clearly been around the block a few times and is much wiser. I think older me is as well.
I confess that I am somewhat excited about AI. Most of us have tried coding with ChatGPT at our side and it is picking amazing that it works at all. But, because I've been around the block myself, it's more of a measured excitement.
To me, this appears to be the democratisation of information (or bullshit, depending how you look at it) dissemination. In the past, only a select few told stories to the masses. With each new invention (printing press, camera, internet, AI), more people gained the ability to share their ideas. Now we've reached a point where almost anyone can tell stories, even those who previously struggled to express themselves.
Each time, we observe the same pattern: the established storytellers predict doom, fearing the loss of their privileged role. Once again, we're eliminating the middleman. We're approaching a state where peer-to-peer communication is once more possible (something we lost when we grew from tribes into nations and "the world"). This development is deeply unsettling to existing gatekeepers who have derived money and power from controlling the flow of information.
And "information wants to be free" after all, so things like "licences" and "intellectual properties" are going to suffer too.
And a reminder that the full quote from the 1960s (!) is this:
"On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."
But we've used that control of information to form super-tribes and it sits at the base of our civilization. National identity, various large group identities. Fandoms.
What happens when everyone is in an n=1 bubble?
Do we revert to bloodlines? Do we let AI match us? Physical proximity?
This is silly. If there's a lot of investment in something, there's going to be a lot of fraud. That doesn't mean it's all fraud or it's mostly fraud, or that there's even a significant amount of fraud.
This is true. No one wrote "websites have entered the grift era" in the early 2000s when non tech savvy marketers figured out that 50 bucks for a csv database and "scripts" meant they could throw up seo spam on the web for page view revenue
I'm not so sure if it's entirely correct. I mean, there's always technology in every opportunity, but I think it's even worse. I believe we're heading into an era where all ideas are being stolen, even the greatest coding methods and principles. Even if people come up with insanely innovative ideas, all of this information is being stolen, categorized, detected, identified, bucketed, stored, and added back into a bigger machine. The companies with the most GPUs and the most capital to build infinite amounts of data centers will simply absorb all this information, while the rest of us are left with scraps and leftovers.
I guess that's kind of how it's always been, but it's also not the same. We've almost learned, in a way, that we can now mass-consume all the thoughts, information, and data from everything. But the only people who can truly parse through it and figure out things from it are those with infinite money, all the resources, and those at the top. I guess that's always been the way.
We're full speed ahead on validating the dead internet theory is my take. Increasingly things are just generated by LLMs, parsed and read by bots to improve SEO and then fed back into LLMs.
People are just going to retreat into smaller communities where they can guarantee they're interacting with a person and the era of widely sharing art or music or writing will be over.
At least assuming that the grift train doesn't derail and catch fire before them.
I mean normal people communicate with each other over text message. That has been the case and continues being the case. The people you see very actively participating in social media and blogs are complete outliers. No normal person can have a valid relationship with 1000 people at once.
I think it's the AI titanic era. Everyone spent ages telling us that the idea was unsinkable. The peonage in the bottom is currently bailing out water by the bucket (layoffs) while the rich are still telling everyone the ship isn't sinking by shouting "BUY TITANIC". It's going to sink. We will learn a few useful trivial but useful things from it. That's about it.
We've been here before and will be here again. But we will never learn.
Titanic had sister ships, one of which hit a mine and sank, the other lived out a full life.
The peril came from being led into dangerous waters. Maybe your analogy is more right than you know. The question is, who’s Titanic, Olympic, and Brittanic…
RMS Olympic, the longest survivor, was captained by a drunken moron and nearly got sunk as well...
Damn, the business analogies really are solid aren’t they?
The worst part is the SP500 is completely held up by this last grift. Once we see the emperor has no clothes look out below. And I don’t know what will prop it up after that. We could be in for a very long decade reminiscent of the 2000s’ lost decade. The carnage from everyone blindly buying tech stocks and even the SP500 (mostly propped up by the Magnificent 7) is going to be unimaginable.
https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Value-Spreads-Back...
> The carnage from everyone blindly buying tech stocks and even the SP500 (mostly propped up by the Magnificent 7) is going to be unimaginable.
I share this concern, but would also like to point out that there are lots of well-run low cost index funds out there that do not track the S&P500 and/or exclude the Magnificent 7.
I'm not a pricing quant by a long way (though AQR at least historically employed more than a few extremely serious quants), so take my hot take with a cold grain of salt.
To my untrained eye it looks like most of the Magnificent Seven are priced as though they captured the entire pie at the expense of all the others, which more or less can't happen by definition.
The amount of the US equity market based on that pricing outlook would be a terrifying thing to see corrected abruptly.
The awkward factor is that we could have avoided this sort of bubble on a broader scale by sticking to more traditional pension rules.
When everyone gets a 401(k), and everyone gets the cookie-cutter advice that index funds are cheap and tend to outperform active management on the long term, it couples WAY more of the American public to the stock market than was conventional.
If the market fizzled in 1980, it would bankrupt some rich traders and a few over-margined firms, but the aspects of the economy that actually made and sold useful things would soldier on. People with guaranteed pensions and secured debts would make it out (relatively) whole.
Today, a proper reckoning would be political suicide. We're now forced to deal with the political consequences of "NVDA retreating to $10 per share means a bunch of grandpas (who vote) are evicted from their retirement homes."
I expect we'll see a lot of elaborate Rube Goldberg schemes to keep stock prices afloat. We'll insist there's an AI gap with China to unlock endless federal grift, much as the missile gap with the USSR made it of vital national interest that we showered Lockheed and Raytheon with trillions. I wonder if we'd eventually see the equivalent of 'capital controls'-- limiting the ability of institutional investors to sell their shares to prevent price deflation if there's a "market-spooking" event.
Of course, this bleeds actual productive assets, and when the bottom finally falls out-- when there's no amount of state intervention that will hold back the obvious-- it's going to burn far worse. Maybe the final endgame is that we end up nationalizing part of the market-- swallowing everyone's IRAs/401(k)s/ESAs and converting them to funny-money that can be marked at whatever price is necessary to keep Grandpa from losing his shirt.
Yeah that. The ETF (IVZ QQQ) I had a chunk of cash in is at risk as well as that tracks SP500 roughly due to the holdings distribution. I pulled it recently. I might lose a few % at the top but when it goes bang I don't want to be near it.
>Y Combinator has been revered as a highly selective startup accelerator
Y Combinator has not been discriminating for a while. This is a graph of the companies they have graduated in the last 40 batches.
It's gone from 8 companies per batch to 400 in the last few years. Granted the insanity has died down a bit since covid and we're now only looking at ~200 per batch.
It's techno-opportunism at its worst:
"I can have this postmodern values but if you don't like it I can have these other ones. Repeat until something sticks."
we went from "truth is relative" to "truth is whatever sells the most"
A bit ironic to see this below the article:
> Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation.
This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with our tech culture pushing forward and rewarding "innovation" for its own sake, with little regard for whether it's actually solving previously unsolved problems. I mean, if the organization is already driving the world forward, it probably doesn't really need FastCompany's award.
The dead giveaway is that all companies stuff AI into their earnings calls. If you say AI only to pander to investors then it's not sustainable. It's FOMO-driven.
So here’s my theory. Everyone will start generating content by the buckets so web site numbers are going to double or triple over the coming years because you’d need somewhere to put all that content. There will be short term benefits for a variety of occupations related to building and maintaining web sites. So before the bubble bursts the web will see a new renaissance era.
Search engine discoverability is already crap. And it is already filled with stolen or just low quality content. And now this will get even worse? And harder to separate something sane from everything else...
I don't think there is enough money, and only winners will be the good SEO people.
>So before the bubble bursts the web will see a new renaissance era.
A new renaissance of slop content? Great, another boom in hiring and pay for web developers, followed by, oh look at that, a massive bust when it turns out that GenAI slop won't make any money, not enough to justify the engineering time in making and hosting it at least.
Actually, on the face of it, how can any of this work? Why would people (investors) believe that the general public is going to leave facebook, instagram, twitter etc to go look at https://sloppify.io in very large numbers? No, they're going to do exactly what is happening right now: fill social media with the genslop. So no, no building and maintaining website renaissance.
More content yes but not websites. The ai spam ALREADY being generated is in the form of tiktoks or insta reels. Auto-generated stories with complete voice overs generated or crawled visuals etc.
SV has been training the art of the grift for decades and hucksters around the world are eager to emulate. This hype is the biggest they've managed to land as of yet and the awakening will be rude when the party's over.
Amazing how every year since 2014 or so, someone would call DL a bubble or a grift, and yet, here we are: AI keeps getting better, while journalism & editorial standards keep getting lower. I mean, it used to be that journalists had the self-respect to not make up a 'trend' or 'era' before they could cobble together at least 3 anecdotes, and OP can barely even manage 1!
It's the grift era. AI is the current thing that that taint will cause to be used against us more than for us. If flying cars were invented tomorrow, that would be the thing that younger me would be surprised that older me isn't excited about.
Older you has clearly been around the block a few times and is much wiser. I think older me is as well.
I confess that I am somewhat excited about AI. Most of us have tried coding with ChatGPT at our side and it is picking amazing that it works at all. But, because I've been around the block myself, it's more of a measured excitement.
Always has been.
To me, this appears to be the democratisation of information (or bullshit, depending how you look at it) dissemination. In the past, only a select few told stories to the masses. With each new invention (printing press, camera, internet, AI), more people gained the ability to share their ideas. Now we've reached a point where almost anyone can tell stories, even those who previously struggled to express themselves.
Each time, we observe the same pattern: the established storytellers predict doom, fearing the loss of their privileged role. Once again, we're eliminating the middleman. We're approaching a state where peer-to-peer communication is once more possible (something we lost when we grew from tribes into nations and "the world"). This development is deeply unsettling to existing gatekeepers who have derived money and power from controlling the flow of information.
And "information wants to be free" after all, so things like "licences" and "intellectual properties" are going to suffer too.
And a reminder that the full quote from the 1960s (!) is this:
"On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."
I agree.
But we've used that control of information to form super-tribes and it sits at the base of our civilization. National identity, various large group identities. Fandoms.
What happens when everyone is in an n=1 bubble?
Do we revert to bloodlines? Do we let AI match us? Physical proximity?
This is silly. If there's a lot of investment in something, there's going to be a lot of fraud. That doesn't mean it's all fraud or it's mostly fraud, or that there's even a significant amount of fraud.
This is true. No one wrote "websites have entered the grift era" in the early 2000s when non tech savvy marketers figured out that 50 bucks for a csv database and "scripts" meant they could throw up seo spam on the web for page view revenue