🔗 ongoing by Tim Bray · The Real GenAI Issue:

The business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology. They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products. Do you think your management would spend that kind of money to help you with a quicker first draft or a summarized inbox?

Yeah, I’m sure that the dream of not having to pay employees is a big part of this, but as with all super-villain theorizing, I think we tend to overestimate how much strategy is actually involved here.

I remain convince that a non-trivial portion of tech industry mania for LLMs is just blind hope in The Next Big Thing as a means to keep the party going. If not this, then what? These guys have nothing else, so they have to believe that Growth can continue for ever. If they start thinking too deeply about it, that’s going to raise some deeply unsettling questions about they economic system they all take on faith.