It's hard for me to reconcile this piece with my personal experience as someone who works in AI and knows many others that do<p>The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.<p>The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies. The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious. The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world<p>I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.<p>> <i>Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies</i><p>This is simply not true?
Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage.<p>Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
What's often understated is how much of an advantage the US has because it speaks the language of global commerce and technology, which for the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st has been English. That's huge. It means teenagers reading man pages are reading fluently.<p>At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.
I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience:<p>- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.<p>- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere<p>- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.
I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences.<p>Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.
I'm English, my Danish friends have less of an English accent and are considerably more literate than the average of the people I interact with at work over most days.<p>It isn't a moat, My partners written English surpasses mine and it is her <i>third</i> language.
The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.
I'll push back against most of the points in your comment.<p><pre><code> > The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.
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This isn't a sign of a successful, sustainable business; it's what a bubble looks like. Between the <i>aggressive</i> marketing (including astroturfing!) that LLM companies are engaged in, the perceived stock market advantage companies can gain by shoving LLMs into their offering, and the missile-gap-style approach that many businesses are taking around this, this centre cannot possibly hold.<p><pre><code> > The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
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American companies are, to be fair, flaunting safety and ignoring the wider social impacts of this technology, and both the US federal and state governments seem to be more than willing to go with the flow on that, probably at least partly because of a recognition that the LLM industry is propping up a significant part of the US economy.<p><pre><code> > The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious
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They are, emphatically, not. For me and my peers (most of us, individual contributors in software -- and emphatically, those of us working at companies who haven't fully leaned into vibe coding), our jobs have become babysitting claude agents and spending most of our time cleaning up its messes and doing code review. Short-term, sure, this might lead to <i>some</i> productivity gains, but long-term, this is going to lead to <i>mass</i> burnout.<p><pre><code> > The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world
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Unfortunately, the US is in the midst of cracking down on immigration, and the international perception of the country is increasingly that it is an unsafe one.<p><pre><code> > I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.
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What I see in the US's LLM-backed economy is what I see in many businesses in this same economy, increasingly: the blanket of AI is being used to paper over serious, systemic issues in the organization, but <i>this clearly won't hold.</i> In a world where we have an ounce of responsibility for what we produce, and where customers care about the quality (notably, quality as in <i>correctness</i>) of what's being delivered, this will eventually collapse.
Thank you for your perspective!<p>I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball.<p>I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join).<p>I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise.<p>As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.
> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming.<p>Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand.<p>I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore
He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening:<p><i>When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.</i><p><i>They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.</i><p>...<p><i>One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.</i><p>(from an earlier post, <a href="https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-programming/" rel="nofollow">https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-progr...</a>)
Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much<p>I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty)<p>The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast<p>Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
I wonder if this is a sign of bad value. Long ago you'd be willing to pay. The relationship was clearer , simpler, stabler. No sudden change of price or rules, no constant false improvement. It was less flexible, and riskier on a way, but it cleaned the noise.<p>My 2cts
> Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value<p>So the solution is to reduce the cost to zero, instead of competing to provide the best outcome and highest value?
> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies.<p>Prior restraint is going to put a damper on American state of the art for the foreseeable future.<p><a href="https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-era" rel="nofollow">https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-...</a><p>In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke.<p>> as long as American companies control the talent flywheel<p>The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem.<p>Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.
Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint.<p>I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now
What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ</a><p>And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward.<p>The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.
Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...
ai generated video script<p>"Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now"
- just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha<p>the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable<p>I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace