For the last few years, I have been warning you that the mania for LLMs would break eventually.
The technical foundation was, as I argued all the way back to the early days of GPT-2, never strong enough to support the hype. Since August 2023 (in essays like What if generative AI turns out to be a dud?, and What exactly are the economics of AI?), I have been repeatedly warning that the economics don’t make much sense either.
But until recently enthusiasm kept rising and rising, no matter I said.
But then we all say what happened with GPT-5; Altman spent years promising the moon, and in the end, long overdue, didn’t even come close to delivering. A lot of people took note.
Could things be changing? Is reality at least settling in? One never knows, but here are a few potentially significant signs from just the last few days:
Even influencers who have nothing to do with tech are starting to see it.
And for that matter, even Sam Altman himself seems to see it:
Ok that‘s a faked image that someone sent me, which was too funny not to share.
But …. this (which inspired the faked photo) is actually real:
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Not that Sam is deterred; in his mind, a fuckup is just an excuse to ask for money:
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Without saying for sure that I know what will happen next — after all things like stock prices and the valuations AI startups are as much a matter of unpredictable crowd psychology as they are of (in this case, shaky) technical and economic fundamentals — I will leave this here, a cartoon I made (with ChatGPT’s help!) in mid-July.
Once the markets really understand this, enthusiasm may indeed collapse fairly quickly.