zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
All these improvement in a single year, 2025. While this may seem obvious to those who follows along the AI / LLM news. It may be worth pointing out again ChatGPT was introduced to us in November 2022.

I still dont believe AGI, ASI or Whatever AI will take over human in short period of time say 10 - 20 years. But it is hard to argue against the value of current AI, which many of the vocal critics on HN seems to have the opinion of. People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.

Being more of a Hardware person, the most interesting part to me is the funding of all the developments of latest hardware. I know this is another topic HN hate because of the DRAM and NAND pricing issue. But it is exciting to see this from a long term view where the pricing are short term pain. Right now the industry is asking, we have together over a trillion dollar to spend on Capex over the next few years and will even borrow more if it needs to be, when can you ship us 16A / 14A / 10A and 8A or 5A, LPDDR6, Higher Capacity DRAM at lower power usage, better packaging, higher speed PCIe or a jump to optical interconnect? Every single part of the hardware stack are being fused with money and demand. The last time we have this was Post-PC / Smartphone era which drove the hardware industry forward for 10 - 15 years. The current AI can at least push hardware for another 5 - 6 years while pulling forward tech that was initially 8 - 10 years away.

I so wished I brought some Nvidia stock. Again, I guess no one knew AI would be as big as it is today, and it is only just started.

>>ksec+RD
This is not a great argument:

> But it is hard to argue against the value of current AI [...] it is getting $1B dollar runway already.

The psychic services industry makes over $2 billion a year in the US [1], with about a quarter of the population being actual believers. [2].

[1] The https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/psychic-ser...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692738/paranormal-phenomena-met...

>>wpietr+T61
2022/2023: "It hallucinates, it's a toy, it's useless."

2024/2025: "Okay, it works, but it produces security vulnerabilities and makes junior devs lazy."

2026 (Current): "It is literally the same thing as a psychic scam."

Can we at least make predictions for 2027? What shall the cope be then! Lemme go ask my psychic.

>>ctoth+mA1
2022/2023: "Next year software engineering is dead"

2024: "Now this time for real, software engineering is dead in 6 months, AI CEO said so"

2025: "I know a guy who knows a guy who built a startup with an LLM in 3 hours, software engineering is dead next year!"

What will be the cope for you this year?

>>bopbop+KD1
The cope + disappointment will be knowing that a large population of HN users will paint a weird alternative reality. There are a multitude of messages about AI that are out there, some are highly detached from reality (on the optimistic and pessimistic side). And then there is the rational middle, professionals who see the obvious value of coding agents in their workflow and use them extensively (or figure out how to best leverage them to get the most mileage). I don't see software engineering being "dead" ever, but the nature of the job _has already changed_ and will continue to change. Look at Sonnet 3.5 -> 3.7 -> 4.5 -> Opus 4.5; that was 17 months of development and the leaps in performance are quite impressive. You then have massive hardware buildouts and improvements to stack + a ton of R&D + competition to squeeze the juice out of the current paradigm (there are 4 orders of magnitude of scaling left before we hit real bottlenecks) and also push towards the next paradigm to solve things like continual learning. Some folks have opted not to use coding agents (and some folks like yourself seem to revel in strawmanning people who point out their demonstrable usefulness). Not using coding agents in Jan 2026 is defensible. It won't be defensible for long.

>>aspenm+n42
> You then have massive hardware buildouts and improvements to stack + a ton of R&D + competition to squeeze the juice out of the current paradigm (there are 4 orders of magnitude of scaling left before we hit real bottlenecks)

This is a surprising claim. There's only 3 orders of magnitude between US data centre electricity consumption and worldwide primary energy (as in, not just electricity) production. Worldwide electricity supply is about 3/20ths of world primary energy, so without very rapid increases in electricity supply there's really only a little more than 2 orders of magnitude growth possible in compute.

Renewables are growing fast, but "fast" means "will approach 100% of current electricity demand by about 2032". Which trend is faster, growth of renewable electricity or growth of compute? Trick question, compute is always constrained by electricity supply, and renewable electricity is growing faster than anything else can right now.