I am pretty sure the biggest thing in question is if OpenAI and Anthropic are as valuable as they say they are vs any other AI labs. I guess we will see, but I still feel it doesn’t take many ex-employees from them to build something that can wrestle them, and also it’s weird seeing other players that also have comparable AI models (Alphabet, Meta, whatever company owns Grok these days, …) do not get as much in value. There is also the “Can local models disrupt this?” question (and the Chinese labs), and there is also the question of hardware availability (will some player change this?).

I feel the projected value of both OpenAI and Anthropic requires that nothing changes in a space of technology where things seems to change a lot and reasonably suddenly.

Not people on here or who use it regularly, but on other parts of the net.

Maybe they know on some level it won’t go away, but the “wishcasting” leads to rooting for the bubble in the hope that maybe it actually will.

No, no one believes that. Everyone can see that AI is going to change how many industries work completely. The parent is constructing a strawman argument "the reasoning is motivated and that motivation is nostalgia (or similar)".

Even Ed Zitron rarely talks about AI outside financials. I have no idea what OP is talking about.

I guess they mean as far as AI being this utopian cure all for the ills of the world that some might have us believe is coming, its BS?

Yes, quite a few people believe AI is a big scam and it’s not actually good for anything.

I know this might seem crazy to software developers who handed all their dev work over to Claude 6 months ago. But most people are not software developers.

I mean if one of the big labs collapse, then yes it mostly will? Like sure, the tech will stick around in some way or another as long as it makes money or provides a good user experience, but the forcing a garbage chatbot into every product surface, the constant flavor of the week hype, the endless doom from every CEO will all cease to exist.

> Do people believe that?

No, but it is incredible for somebody to use the word “wishcasting” and then describe a group of people that would need to materialize in order for their point to make sense

I think a lot of people who post on HN don't want to admit that, apart from chatbots, AI is completely invisible to the user. A lot of users already hate chatbots to begin with and avoid using them.

So, it has already mostly disappeared, and the lack of practical applications means it will continue to bleed money. Software devs aren't using AI either for the bulk of smaller tasks that require teamwork with non-technical stakeholders.

Yes, it totally can disappear from society. The remaining use cases go with local LLMs and specialized software built around it. From the user's perspective, that's the way things always were and we'll be back to "the way it was" when the bubble is done bursting.