The reality is, the economy is on a ticking timer for when it will be turned upside down by 1) LLM agent workflows 2) AGI 3) superintelligence. There are many companies who know this and want to hedge against that future but they simply don’t know how yet. The tricky part about productizing LLMs is that your product designers need to have a full understanding of LLMs and what they can and cannot do. So currently many of the existing product designs and AI user experiences still suck.
The biggest misconception is that just because chatbots are now more capable that somehow that means that you should replace your UI with one.
For example, AI leveraged SOC is going to be operational within 3-5 years, and there goes 50-70% of jobs in that sector.
Others segments are significantly behind (robo-taxis) and I'm sure there are other segments much further ahead (call center automation), but the change is absolutely coming - not because of LLMs alone, but because the entire ecosystem around ML/AI is a 15 years old now, and there's an entire generation of SWEs that are just as competent as ML PhDs were 15 years ago.
I don't think superintelligent AGI will occur in our life span.
That said, most investment in ML/AI is around applications of ML in automating specific domains.
My argument is against this:
> FOMO investment completely pointless
I have an example of a 10-11 figure TAM industry that is actively in the process of migrating to being majority automated, and there are plenty of other industries in the midst of this as well.
The part of my post you're replying to concerns my thoughts on something much broader, though. My claim is not that all investment today is pointless, but that investment predicated on the belief that we're a few years away from the economy being "turned upside down by 1) LLM agent workflows 2) AGI 3) superintelligence" is bad.
It feels like a Motte-and-bailey type issue. If I point out that the original claim doesn't have enough evidence and is purely speculation, I don't really want to hear about how call center jobs are being affected by LLMs. I don't disagree, but we're not talking about the same thing here.
> investment predicated on the belief that we're a few years away from the economy being "turned upside down by 1) LLM agent workflows 2) AGI 3) superintelligence" is bad
No one is investing on that assumption. I've been in the PE/VC for a couple years now and I've never heard anyone from Associate to LP say that straight faced and unironically.
I am pretty sure some are. Some very rich people are talking as if AGI will happen soon they for sure are investing into this assuming that billions will turn to trillions, as long as they invest in every AI company they will get it right for one of them.
This happened in the IT bubble as well, most companies were overvalued but the total set of IT companies went on to become many trillion dollars of value, so if you invested in every IT company then you became really rich, they expect the same thing to happen now but even more extreme.
Now I don't expect this to turn to AGI, but many do, and those who do would be stupid if they didn't take that into account for investments.
> I've been in the PE/VC
Are you talking about the calculated VC groups? Or are you talking about eccentric rich individuals? The first group for sure wouldn't it would be career suicide to do it there but some of the second group would since they invest their own money. Think people like Elon Musk etc.
I’ll… well, I’ll believe the magic robots replacing security people when I see it. That seems a _particularly_ implausible one, really.
As you imply yourself, robotaxis did not deliver on the grandiose promises of a decade ago. What makes you so sure that the generative stuff will be any different?
The biggest misconception is that just because chatbots are now more capable that somehow that means that you should replace your UI with one.