The Valley Bubble Breaks

KaiserPro

I agree the valley is in a bubble, but I wouldn't agree with the self flagellation. That would imply a level of self understanding that would require repentance. One of the big issues with silicon valley (or how I see it) is the lack of ability to look out side and ask why something is the way it is, before trying to slap technology on it. The smell of money which distorts people's reality to carry on doing something that looks and sounds like a disaster, is too strong.

CharlieDigital

> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people. An anecdote from a recent occurrence. We show up for a team offsite. Several leaders presented decks. Of course, AI generated decks. Some of the animation was broken. Many of the read throughs felt like they were the first time folks saw the decks. Cannot state how off-putting this was as someone participating in this team activity. The talks I appreciated the most were the ones where people didn't have slides at all and talked off the cuff.

bix6

SV will remain the number one hub because of the amount of money there and its history / culture. NYC and LA are 2nd and 3rd funding wise but it’s like ¼. I do think VC is broadening to other areas but SV remains the Mecca.

jatora

> All the while I acknowledge that there is something there that will change programming WILL change it? This guy is under a self-inflicted rock.

chao-

>...but did any AI-related stock ever tumble before now? Yes. For many days after the DeepSeek R1/V3 release in Jan/Feb 2025.

ThePhysicist

AI is great, it just needs to have its Linux moment. I mostly enjoy using it, I can never imagine going back to doing things manually. Like I can have it fix my computer and reliably automate like 80 % of mundane tasks that I sometimes spent hours on, why would I hate that? The models are already so good for must stuff, I can't remember Claude giving me a wrong answer when debugging something recently, and it is crazy good at solving the most complex issues that would have taken me hours or days to solve. So yeah, maybe the market will crash because people were too greedy and racing each other too much and the markets aren't absorbing what they put out fast enough, but regardless AI is here to stay. A healthy market crash might actually be good to get things back to normal and give people more time to think about the risks and societal issues this stuff creates before we end up wiring it up with everything.

mkarliner

"AI can copy, it cannot innovate." https://blog.karliner.net/posts/chatgpt-and-the-velcro-test/ admittedly a bit old now, but...

magic_hamster

> All the while I acknowledge that there is something there that will change programming — just not as radically as the US-based doomsayers think. AI can copy, it cannot innovate. This seems a bit out of touch. The metamorphosis of programming is already done. Doing any kind of manual programming in November 2026 is a luxury that most tech workers don't have. Delivery rate has gone up and for any chace to keep up, you have to generate your code. The differentiator now is how you ensure the quality and alignment. But the days of typing code are over. It's done. Programming is now a hobby, a luxury, a sport, but no longer a job.

paganel

> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially disliked, and the Valley is not equipped to detect that. It has no experience with being disliked by normal people. They did start having that experience in the last 6 or 7 years, give or take (I'd say even earlier than that, 2015-2016-ish), but the money those techies were bringing home was too good so they didn't care, case in point many (most?) of the users on this forum (and its very founder). But at this point it looks like these tech people are about to cause a multi-trillion dollar economic implosion that would make September-October 2008 look like a gentle summer-storm in comparison, so curious what the near future will bring to them in terms of public perception. I've said it before, the jocks were right to make fun of the nerds and to keep them under their heels, look what happened when the nerds were let loose. Also curious what will happen to this very forum after the upcoming implosion. Will the money still be there to keep this SV-propaganda machine running? Food for thought.

applebottomjean

Get rid of the middle class? What middle class?

dofm

> It has no experience with being disliked by normal people. I mean, crypto and NFTs ought to have given them a taste of it. But then perhaps it did, and they are now inured to it, because it's a lot of the same guys, including Sam Altman.

jimbokun

> All the while I acknowledge that there is something there that will change programming — just not as radically as the US-based doomsayers think. It has changed programming radically, already. Not sure how much he thinks US-based doomsayers think it will change. > AI can copy, it cannot innovate. Is this falsifiable? Is there an example of an AI output that the author would agree verified that the AI innovated, if he or she saw it?

pastureofplenty

Good to see PPK blogging again. I learned JavaScript largely from reading Quirksmode circa 2003.

ivolimmen

I think that 'AI will fix that' is the equivalent of 'This year will be the year of Linux on the desktop'

BeetleB

> The Valley doesn’t understand how fed up normal people are with AI. I occasionally hang out with normal (non-tech) people. They're either agnostic to it or they love it. None hates it, unless they have some reason to think they're going to lose their job. HN is that one place where I routinely hear negative sentiments about LLMs.

atleastoptimal

I feel that those who assume that everyone hates AI and that the SF tech sphere is a bubble are in a bubble themselves. AI has a lot of people who hate it, but it is neither wholly unpopular nor useless. ChatGPT has over 1.2 billions WAUs. There are millions of people who spend hours watching AI generated media. Demand for AI is universal in white-collar professions, as it automates a large portion of previously human-bottlenecked work. Pretty much every email I get now I assume comes from an API key, as the task of copywriting was abandoned readily once chatbots could do it for us faster and better. Sure AI has a notable unpopularity among a certain subset of erudite, well-educated near-elite liberal types, but this is far from the global majority who are driving demand for the AI boom.

jauntywundrkind

The title here made me think this was going to be in economic terms. And I'm happy to see it's a much broader post about the role of tech in the world. The post talks about today, about the bubble bursting now with AI. And it's so clear why, there is so much absolutely no effort shit shovelling nonsense happening, such a continued expectation that those titans up above keep dictating down. But too: the bubble of tech being a force for progress, for unchaining humanity? That burst a while ago. Cambridge Analytica scandal really distinguished, remains a a clear point on what was nebulously known & felt. It crystalized the realization of how and by whom our data, what we were being used for. CA indicated what the cloud really meant. And until recently little news has been good news. It's been almost all more of the same. A never ending year after year series of press conferences where companies get up and say how they can intermediate their lives if you let their product in to do its thing. And AI, more many people, will be yet more control technology. More things that mechanize humans, soulless systems that leach off our energies and steer us, order us to do things. That allow some of the controlling class to not have to deal with us even more than ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p... But too: this is the first time humanity at large, in my view, stands any chance against that which was already deeply in progress. We don't have to accept the world as it is anymore. We couldn't even see the world , were rebuffed from the technological systems all around us. And DMCA violation that it may be, no one cares. Our moral spiritual saintly right to see the world is triumphing over the systems of technological control, as we reverse engineer tvs, video game consoles, flock cameras. We aren't stuck accepting the swill the corporate world produces and streams downhill at us. As a work technology, as a means to be Franklin's holstic in our capability, we have plumbed the matrixes and happened upon a universality of means and understanding that finally swings wide the doors of tech, that makes it possible for those of will to reclaim a spot, from a world that has forced its anti-will upon us for decades. What any of us can do is unimaginably bigger than two years ago, giving us access to the world around us, taking everything electronic out of the lockbox and stealing the electron back from titans. I could not be more excited. And no, I don't think silicon valley is right now in a position to establish itself as a strong part of this, even as openai and anthropic swell, even as they are crucial. It's a back to the garage moment in the world, the nerds working fervently quietly to help give humanity back the world that is its, in my view, a birthright. If our human liberty, our culture of science and peer ship and understanding and permission. > for the record I think it's wonderful that non-programmers can now build software, and furthermore I think programmers should be ashamed that this is what it took to make computing accessible https://bsky.app/profile/garrison.corporate.fm/post/3mzlijew... It's unclear what role the titans can make for themselves in this new world, those few who have like Saturn devoured all their children thereby obstructing innovation and change and competition. Their glamor is not there, and it's unclear what they would become if they decided to stop hording the electron from mankind. But perhaps they can grow up. Perhaps they can wisen up. Perhaps they can find a way to still be relevant and useful and helpful to the small little souls of humanity, us meek, that are about to inherit their earth.

VCFundedGenYer

People are tired of the low quality AI generated nonsense that has flooded everything. This tech is a certified failure and needs to be regulated out of existence (or pigeonholed into very specific niche use cases). The election confirms this. AI was a mistake.

steveBK123

> This is the first time ever a technological advance is so cordially dislike Lot of contributors to this. Macroeconomics are bad, high-ish inflation and hard job switching market. Meanwhile everyone's bosses telling them to use AI or they will fire you, AI lab heads bragging/threatening the replacement of all knowledge work in next 18 months (unless AI kills us all which they also scaremonger about). So use it until it replaces or kills you. Good luck staying poor because the IPO is coming after all the insiders 10000x their investment and the bag left for retail investors in the public market is physically impossible to 10x or 100x in most of our lifetimes (again if AI doesn't kill us and/or make us so poor we won't own stocks anyway). So yeah, lots not to like!