Ask HN: How will the AI endgame play out?

My question on the three narratives is always: "OK, how is that going to happen?" "It's a bubble" can answer that question very easily and has plenty of historical precedent. The other two seem to be very vague notions without any obvious intermediate steps that takes us from here to there. To borrow from the Underpants Gnomes: Phase 1: Adopt "AI" Phase 2: ??? Phase 3: Human Extinction/Utopia

1. abundance of digital goods 2. automation of computer work 3. commoditization of "intelligence " 4. collapse of frontier labs humans will be fine, we'll have rapid progress on anything a human could do on a computer but it will take a really long time to trickle into the real economy

Your categories are broad enough that no matter what future someone predicts, you'll be able to say, "Oh that fits category X". But anyhoo, to answer the broader question: The truth is that LLMs caught people's attention so strongly that standard tech strategy was thrown out the window. Before this, "tech" companies would test out new tech, tech-adjacent companies would be "leading edge, but not bleeding-edge", and more standard corporations would sit back and wait for the kinks to get worked out before adopting anything new. Well, now everyone is going for the bleeding edge. AI Everything. Use new models immediately, adopt new ways to use them on practically day 1, churn your IT solutions alongside with that bleeding edge. So it is by definition a bubble. There is a reason people used to hold back, wait, and see how new tech evolves and where it stabilizes. This stuff isn't stable yet, and the pain of keeping up is real. The future is that people will get burned and will step back from that edge. They'll be OK not being at the forefront, and people will establish best practices for where LLMs truly help vs where they are just a dangerous experiment. That will drive a business model where the AI vendors do not need to solely focus on the race, and can set up longer-living platforms using older models that allow non-tech companies to have stability in their IT shops while still using LLMs. It will become viable to succeed as an AI vendor without having to lead. If history repeats itself, the early vendors will crash out, a new crop will come in to run lower risk playbooks, and hopefully sanity will resume in the industry. How long will that take is the question - We're seeing the cracks in their business model today, so I think we're closer to 2-3 years out than 8-10, but time will tell.

It seems like the economic system collapses, because people can't compete vs AI -- so you end up with UBI/Socialism ... something like that.

Hasn't it already transformed the way we live and work? I don't know a single person who isn't regularly using some kind of AI chat product. That doesn't mean it's not a bubble. Good enough models are commodities now. If OpenAI and Anthropic disappeared tomorrow I would be a bit sad because their models are maybe 10% better than the others, but it wouldn't matter that much really.