This line: "this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it."

That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, though bounded, amount of tokens), frontier models are a no-brainer, most folks and companies will use them. But, at token rates, 10x or 100x the cost of open models or what I was spending on the frontier models a month ago? That is a harder question to answer "yes" to. I certainly wouldn't spend $1000 a month for the best model, much less $10,000; my employer might pay $1000/month, but definitely not $10,000. The frontier labs need everyone to answer "yes" to spending 100x what they currently spend to justify the valuations, and it's just not going to happen as long as everyone knows how to make these models.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to figure that out now. Anthropic, in particular, has their finger on the trigger...they want to push people to usage-based billing for Fable. But, OpenAI released 5.6 Sol, competitive with Fable (or close enough), and it's available via subscription (even the $20 subscription!), and there's no moat keeping someone from switching. If Anthropic really does end Fable access on the subscription plans in a few days, I predict a large market move back toward OpenAI.

The market isn't going to bear the cost of making the frontiers investment make sense.

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?

It's running, privately, in my homelab.

I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy.

This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases.

You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from a lot of the software that these presumed trillion dollar companies are putting out. The future is sausage.

I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

I get it, I want to agree, I really do like the “this is a new tool in the toolkit of the professional software craftsperson” argument…

…but consider: the Q-tip. “Don’t use it to clean your ears”, but for most people that’s all they want to do with it, and empirical observation indicates that this dynamic results in either “using Q-tips irresponsibly” or “not using Q-tips”, with “uses Q-tips properly” being a small-to-vanishing proportion of the whole.

He says he might have been too harsh in his “eternal sloptember” post from may: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-e...

I wonder what he thinks was too harsh, still seems pretty bang on, I think it’s going to age well.

I felt the same way in 2024-2025. Then Sonnet 4 was released, and things started feeling different. Opus 4.5 was another step change for me. Everything feels like it's accelerating, and timelines are getting crunched. I guess in some ways I envy OP, who would "bet everything" against ASI - the truth is I don't know, and I don't think anyone knows, where this ends.

There's good reason to hate the merchants and their marketing. But builders are not merchants. They build with whatever tool is available.

Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

it's kinda like riding an e-bike, but in heavy and unpredictable pedestrian traffic.

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

It's possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off about a "perpetual underclass." I love the internet, but it really feels like (now more than ever) you have to be intentional about what sites you visit.

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

It's bullshit in the sense that they don't know for sure, but the author doesn't either. Why might or might not it be true?

> A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

> AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing.

But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

This guy is sooooo annoying with his stale takes.

This is what he wrote before.

> I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t.

Now he's writng

> I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs, self driving cars, video generation models, and coding agents.

SMH now he writes about the hype. My brother in absolute Deity, *you* should have believed the hype.

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind.

> And two, this strawman jump from, oh hey, it’s a fancy autocomplete, smart compiler, better search engine, to it’s gonna like own the whole light cone bro like if you aren’t in SF and at the right parties there’s gonna be like a flash of light in the sky one day and you’re not even gonna know what happened but everything just Changed.

Haha, OP has a way with words.

In a way, both these emotional extremes (FOMO & the singularity) are just tools being used to continue driving the massive CapEx behind LLM improvement. Hate to love it? Love to hate it?

> But models are useful just like... all the regexes I never learned how to write and now never will!

Wait, does this mean I'm better at something than geohot? All that time spent learning regexps wasn't a waste!

I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on.

In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence.

Now I can just ask AI about fleeting ideas and always have a starting point for some area of some project to work on.

A lot/some of the concerns about the AI Age could be alleviated if people got UBI and a 4-day workweek.

like if AI's supposed to be so great why do we still have to work so much??

and if we don't have to work, how do we pay for food and bed?

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind.

The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

I hate LLM. I hate people who push any digital artifact with LLM. Fuck you all.

I think big money/private equity/vulture capitalists tend to ruin everything. They set these unrealistic goals and force companies to do shady shit in order to meet these often unattainable goals or achieve unicorn status.

It’s why con artists, scammers always flood every hype cycle. Greed ruins everything.

As soon as we started unironically calling LLMs "AI" we went down the hype path. That has plenty of downsides, like stressing out the entire world and attracting cryptocurrency bros, but also the major upside massive of funding/acceleration.

So far, all we have is more software running on computers. It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic.

Calling it "AI" was possibly a net-negative but we don't know yet.

Your SF hate isn't a good look.

There are many things to be critical about but shoehorning an entire metro into the echo-chamber you're supposedly beyond yet can't help but orient your entire world view as the anti-SF-tech-bro all while running a startup and discussing AI on HN.

TLDR: SF is more than Paul Graham worship parties.

EDIT: Think I'm being misunderstood! author goes out of his way to blame shitty San Francisco.

> This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

How to you love this stuff so hard? I could newer love any ai generated music, book or artwork. Anything ai gemerated i have ever seem or heard was either disgustingly slop or indistinguishable from something else which was real. It‘s a like finding a cool track only to discover it‘s a lazy bootleg.