I feel like the whole market at this point is just AI since big tech other than Apple are all massively invested into that. Everyone owns either the S&P or the total world ETF which are both heavily skewed towards big tech and this trade - so literally everybody is in it. It might go well for a few more quarters/years but once something breaks or gets exponentially cheaper this will take down the whole market with it.
It's just hard to tell the difference between "real" demand and "circular." That's the concern.
PG had an essay about this during the dotcom, when he worked at yahoo. Iirc...Yahoo's share price and other big successes in the space attracted investment into startups. Startups used that money to advertise on yahoo. Yahoo bought some of these the startups.
So... a lot of the revenue used to analyze companies for investment was actually a 2nd order side effect of these investments.
Here the risk is that we have Ai investments servicing Ai investments for other Ai investments.
Google buys Nvidia chips to sell anthropic compute. Anthropic sells coding assist to Ai companies (including Google and Nvidia). They buy anthropic services with investor money that is flowing because of all this hype.
Imo the general risk factor is trying to get ahead of actual worldly use.
The Ai optimists have a sense that Ai produces things that are valuable (like software) at massive scale...that is output.
But... even if true, it will take a lot of time, and lot of software for the Econony to discover this, go through the path dependencies and actually produce value.
The most valuable, known software has already afy been written. The stuff that you could do, but haven't yet is stuff that hasn't made the cut. Value isn't linear.
While value isn't linear, prejudgement of value for allocation of resources is very imperfect.
A lot of stuff that doesn't make the cut is the the stuff that does have value. When you're lowering the bar, remember it's a noisy bar - so a lot more good stuff is going to come through as well.
.. and that entropy can be where all the ultimate value is. That said... considering the point at hand is the context, it's important to start with the diminishing marginal returns.
To give a simple example... Google and FB do not have "invest able software opportunities" at hand. They've been searching everywhere for nails for their "build software" hammer. They are well resourced and risk tolerant.
The diminishing returns curve for "more software" is steep.
Good stuff coming through often starts with $100m markets becoming $1bn markets. That's not even noise at the scale they're thinking about. Long term, sure. Plausibility range is as wide at it has maybe ever been.
Most places I've worked have roadmaps, i.e. investable priorities.
If you can burn through lower priority experiments quickly it's great!
They might be working on all of the super high level things they can think of, but there are always more A/B tests, more features, etc. that are just lower priority, and the chaos of scaling up the org to address them all is super linear whereas the return on going down the list is sub linear.
So you end up with an equilibrium. If the cost shifts, just like in econ 101, the output will change.
I'm starting to transition how we build software at our company due to the power of AI. No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies. There is going to be a giant sucking sound in India.
I can't continue the current model. The dev that gets AI is done in five hours, the ones that don't are thrashing for the next two weeks. I have to unleash the good AI dev. I have the Product team handing us markdown files now with an overview of the project and all the details and stories built into them. I'm literally transforming how a billion dollar company works right now because of this. I have Codex, Claude and GitHub Copilot enterprise accounts on top of Office 365. Everyone is being trained right now as most devs are behind, even.
> No more: five code monkey contractors under a lead. Two top-notch devs are all that is needed now, unrestrained by sprints and mindless ceremonies.
This doesn't tell me anything. Two devs who cared and didn't have a bunch of pointless meetings could already, and regularly did, scoop the big tech teams.
There were always 2 ways to complete a ticket. One that did what the stakeholder wanted, and one that does what the ticket says.
But devs that care about the product and what the stakeholders need are rare, and finding one of them was already a significant bottleneck on most projects.
AI might be an accelerator, but we've yet to see if it's optimizing the part that was actually the bottleneck yet.
Ok... but extrapolating from this to "whole market" paradigms is speculative.
The (imo) question isn't how you produce software, but what the value of this software is. Are you going to make make/better software such that customers pay more, or buy more? Are those customers getting value of this kind?
The answer may be yes. But... it's not an automatic yes.
Instead of programming think of accounting. Say you experience what you are experiencing, but as an accountant. 6 person team replaced by 2-3 hotshots.
So... Maybe you can sell more/better accounting for a higher price. But... potential is probably pretty limited. Over time, maybe business practices will adjust and find uses for this newly abundant capacity.
Maybe you lower prices. Maybe the two hotshot earn as much as the previous team.
If you are reducing team size, and that's the primary benefit... the fired employees need to find useful emplyment elsewhere in the economy for surplus value to be realized.
Mediating all this is the law of diminishing returns. At any given moment, new marginal resources have less productive value than the current allocation.
I don't think the likelyhood of "electricity and Internet, running water grocery stores" being pulled out from underneath you (either by long term failure or prohibitive cost changes) is anywhere near as high as it is for subscription-based AI tools (at least not in the US).
That was a factor with electricity early on as it was first put to use. The flip side of the infamous "does it make the beer taste better?" adage/nonsense is that, per the story, back then you had breweries build their own power plants, because electricity was just that useful. It took a while for the market to start feeling comfortable with reliability of electricity supply and price point.
Except the dev that gets AI done in 5 hours will have a poorer mental model of the code. Whether that's important might or might not depend on whether that bites you in the ass at some point.
Don't agree - the dev is productive because they have a good mental model of the problem space and can cajole the agent into producing code that agrees with the spec. The trend is for devs to become more like product managers (which is why you see some whip-smart product managers able to build products _without_ human devs)
I believe these tools change the value of different skill sets in a very profound ways. Being good with rules of a programming language and syntax is no longer as valuable as it used to be.
Understanding the problem space is becoming more valuable. Strength in architecture of a solution is another skill that is becoming very valuable.
We are close to getting to a point where someone with overall general (and perhaps not very detailed) understanding of arch and design and a good understanding of the problem space and having a good taste in usability will be able to create awesome solutinos.
I can't wait to see these solutions being created by one or two person teams.
If you write a program in Python or JavaScript, you have a terrible mental model for how that code is actually executed in machine code. It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.
Even if you don't have a great mental model, now you have AI to identify the problems and generate an explanation of the structure for you.
No, but you have a great mental model of the interface between your problem domain and the code, which is where you can affect change.
Outsourcing that to an AI SaaS might be ok I guess. Given past form there's going to be a rug-pull/bait-and-switch moment and dividends to start paying out.
> It's irrelevant though, you figure it out only when it's a problem.
For the past decade people have been clawing their eyes out over how sluggish their computers have become due to everything becoming a bloated Electron app. It's extremely relevant. Meanwhile, here you are seemingly trying to suggest that not only should everything be a bloated, inefficient mess, it should also be buggy and inscrutable, even moreso than it already is. The entire experience of using a computer is about to descend into a heretofore unimaginable nightmare, but hey, at least Jensen Huang got his bag.
That is the doom side. However AI has found and fixed a lot of security issues. I have personally used AI to improve my code speed, AI can analyze complex algorithms and figure out how to make them much faster in ways I can do as a developer, but it's a lot of work that I typically wouldn't do. Even just writing various targeted benchmarks to see where the problems really are in my code is something I can do, but would be so tedious I often would not bother. I can tell AI to do it and it will write those.
Only time will tell which version of the future we end up with. It could be good or bad and we will have to see.
In terms of runtime performance of applications, AI is a net win. You can easily remove abstractions like Electron, React, various libraries. Just let the AI write more code. You can even do the unthinkable and write desktop native again.
I personally make sure I really diversify, so that when I buy funds, I buy those with stocks of EU companies which pay dividends. AFAICT there are 0 European AI companies that pay dividends.
For tax reasons most companies are avoiding paying dividends. It still happens but it's not nearly as common and companies are trying to get away from it because for many investors it is better not to have dividends paid.
If only Austria would do nuclear than the grid would not need an expansion and electricity would be way cheaper. Or alternatively fracking could be used to increase the domestic gas production. There are plenty of reserves.
Would not necessarily call it a meme stock as long as people are trying to value it based on future uncertain cashflows. Nobody knows for growth stocks how high they'll be; that's why they're very volatile. Yet I'd argue that most people buy for the future cashflows and it's not a meme cult like GME
(this is also why AMD popped 10% at open yesterday - this is a new development and talks from their 2025 "Advancing AI" event were published late last week + over the weekend)
Yeah it's still a few years behind but it's getting better. They are hiring software and tooling engineers like crazy. I keep tabs on some of the job slots companies have in our area and every time I check AMD they always have tons of new slots for software, firmware, and tooling (and this has been the case for ~3 years now).
They've been playing catch up after "the bad old days" when they had to let a bunch of people go to avoid going under but it looks like they are catching back up to speed. Now it's just a matter of giving all those new engineers a few years to get their software world in order.
They pay hardware rates to software engineers (principal engineer at the salary level of a decent fresh graduate) so I won't be too optimistic about them attracting software people that would propel them forward.
If you are what AMD needs to catch up then you can just go work for NVidia for 3x the pay. This market sucks but top tier engineers in the niche they need are not a dime a dozen.
What I said was: “it’ll likely make up for lower compensation.”
The point is, someone might join AMD because they believe in the mission, not just for the paycheck. I followed that with: “It isn’t always about the money,” which is consistent with my original comment.
The real subtext is something I care deeply about: Nvidia is a monopoly. If AI is truly a transformative technology, we can’t rely on a single company for all the hardware and software. Viable alternatives are essential. I believe in this vision so strongly that I started a company to give developers access to enterprise grade AMD compute, back when no one was taking AMD seriously in AI. (Queue the HN troll saying that nobody still does.)
If the stock goes up while they’re there, great, that’s a bonus.
Your original comment only talked about compensation and why AMD's stock might make up for lower pay. This thread tangent (starting with your comment) was about compensation and explaining why working for AMD, if your goal is to maximize profit, is dumb. Adding "well there are other reasons" after your original comment doesn't change your original comment where you had none of that context.
In the context of maximizing compensation, working for AMD is dumb. Your own comments support this.
This looks to be about the point where this exchange turned into a tit-for-spat...a really bad one. This is not what HN is for, so please avoid this in the future. I know it isn't always easy to do that, but you both violated the site rules really badly here.
"Then why is your original comment about compensation?"
I answered your very specific question, even gave you my own additional context as a friendly thing to do, and now you are going off on some sort of maximizing rant for what purpose?
This looks to be about the point where this exchange turned into a tit-for-spat...a really bad one. This is not what HN is for, so please avoid this in the future. I know it isn't always easy to do that, but you both violated the site rules really badly here.
I guess what I was politely trying to say is your original comment is misleading and pointless if your actual point is that things besides what you mentioned in your original comment are what really matter. So my point was - why make the original comment at all if it wasn't what you meant?
You don't think it's misleading to talk about how working at AMD can make you more money because of the stock appreciation, despite this being objectively incorrect due to it being a public company, when you don't think the reason to work for AMD is because of money?
Sure, agree to disagree. You have been anything but clear.
You go to work at ANY company, public, private, whatever.
You probably get stock options.
Those stock options can gain or lose value over time.
Generally, the incentive for options is that by working at the company, you're contributing to the overall value of the company, which makes those options more valuable.
I believe there’s more to choosing a company than just money. I don’t work at my own company for the paycheck. I’ve put in decades of hard work and I’m fortunate enough not to need the money. I’m driven by a bigger mission: helping AMD become a real alternative to a monopoly. Nothing more, nothing less.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear to you. But when I was, you called my comment pointless and misleading. Now you’re just making it personal in an effort to psychopathically prove I’m somehow unclear. That’s not okay. Get over yourself, go outside, touch grass, whatever. I’m done engaging with you.
You do not need to work for a public company to own stock in that company. You can work at another company and simply buy that stock and get the same benefit.
I think you should take your own advice and go outside and touch grass. Cheers.
> You do not need to work for a public company to own stock in that company. You can work at another company and simply buy that stock and get the same benefit.
You have to work for the company to truly affect change within the company. That's the point you're missing.
If you really think whatever contributions you make to AMD with tens of thousands of employees are going to move the stock price so much that it's a better investment than working somewhere else that pays 3x better, then you're the one that needs to get over yourself.
You’re forbidden from shorting. Buying is completely allowed unless you are classified an insider and even then trades are open for I believe a month after quarterly results.
They pay terrible and still have legacy old guard managers. If you try to innovate on software you should look elsewhere or really make sure your manager knows what’s what
FWIW for the first time in 2+ years I managed to compile llama.cpp with ROCm out of the box and run a model with no problems* on Linux (actually under WSL2 as well), with no weirdness or errors.
Every time I have tried this previously it has failed with some cryptic errors.
So from this very small test it has got way better recently.
*Did have problems enabling the WMMA extensions though. So not perfect yet.
Oh I'm sure you are right its operator error, but I'd always have some issue installing rocm and getting the paths right or something. This is the first time I've managed to install rocm following the commands exactly and then compile llama.cpp without having to adjust anything.
BTW, this kind of dev experience does really matter. I'm sure it was possible to get working previously; but I didn't have the level of interest to make it work - even if it was somewhat trivial. Being able to compile out of the box makes a big difference. And AFIAK this new version is the first to properly support WSL2, which means I don't have to dual boot to even try and get it working. It's a big improvement.
You can blame the user for not using the tools correctly or the manufacturer for making difficult to use tools that aren’t straightforward or don’t work in various non happy path conditions (ie unreliable installers).
For example, to this day installing MSVC doesn’t make a default sane compiler available in a terminal - you have to open their shortcut that sets up environment variables and you have to just know this is how MSVC works. Is this a user problem or Microsoft failing to follow same conventions ever other toolchain installer follows?
Yes I'd agree with that. There is so much demand for inference which is maturing rapidly that even if a lot of the "R&D" is done on NVidia cards because of their (vastly, let's be fair) software stack, if AMD is competitive on the inference side (and perhaps more importantly have shorter lead times) then doing the inference on AMD is still an enormous market.
I suspect we will (or already are?) at a point where 95%+ of GPUs are used for inference, not training.
Fully disagree. Tokenization enables better financial markets. Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold). Ethereum in that sense is productive because you can stake it for a yield and collaterize it natively to borrow against it and you can tokenize anything on top of it.
There's an intermediary scenario to consider: when multiple trusted parties are involved. This is basic computer science, and software engineering: crash and byzantine fault-tolerant systems.
On a related note, blockchains often obscure the true consensus mechanism behind layers of complex jargon. Upon closer inspection, consensus is still built on trusted parties, just not the same ones typically found in the traditional economy. In Bitcoin, for example, you not only have the relatively few powerful miners but also the Bitcoin Core developers, who wield significant influence over which changes are incorporated into the Bitcoin node. For example, enabling the OP_CAT opcode again [1][2].
Parent's point is weak - it's not possible right now for people around the world to hold fiat/stocks in their own centralized, custodial wallets due to stringent KYC/AML, and blockchains currently fill that need for stablecoins, and will fill that need for tokenized stocks, treasuries, etc.
> Bitcoin is the useless asset since it's proven that productive assets (think stocks) are better store of values than unproductive ones (think gold).
This has hardly been proven. Gold has been recognized as source of value across several millennia and multiple cultures. I would bet that 1000 years from now gold will still have value, whereas stocks are only valuable in as much as the rights that they represent can be enforced by a court and implicitly the state backing it.
We are <one mile-sized asteroid made of gold> away from gold losing all its value. One such asteroid has been discovered already. It's called 16 Psyche, 140 miles in diameter and made largely of gold and other precious metals. To compare, all gold ever mined on Earth fits into a 22-meter cube.
If it’s truly digital gold, that will only lead to the demise of the chain as a result of block rewards going down and not enough transaction fees to support the miners. Bitcoin truly has a security budget issue.
I didn't say that mining would cease - it's that there would be way less incentive for people to mine, so less hash power, and more susceptible to 51% attacks.
Doesn’t it self regulate? If there is too fewer miners then reward goes up?
Also, unlike gold, you can anonymously transport it around the world without getting robbed.
Network effect, first-mover advantage, and fair launch that did not pre-mine coins for insiders. It's the only "pure" one because it was first and honest.
Satoshi ninja-mined in the beginning for themselves. If they had posted about Bitcoin further in advance and had many more people mining, that would’ve been different.
Every human endeavor since the beginning of history has had some form of information asymmetry. Not everyone can be lucky enough to buy AAPL in 2001 or BTC in 2009. Apple management and Satoshi both announced what they were doing publicly to anyone who would listen, but not everyone was listening. Unless you can conjure up a method to deliver every piece of information globally to everyone on earth instantaneously, you'll just have to accept that as a fact of life. It's not bitcoin's problem to solve. Complaining on the internet about how life is unfair certainly won't solve it.
Doge has unlimited supply, so there is an infinite amount of Doge.
Investing into something which has an infinite amount that will get created for free by the system (and therefore reduce the value of your investment) ?
Because more people have confidence in Bitcoin than the other digital golds because it has been in the news the most over the years.
Also, the price won't be as volatile as the other coins (even though it is much more volatile than dollars) because if someone decides to sell $50 million worth of Bitcoin, the price barely budges because $50 million is such a small fraction of the $2.2 trillion worth of Bitcoin in existence.
The price will move (down) until the sell is fulfilled - if there are not $50MM worth of buyers at that price point then the price will drop until buyers are found.
The 'market cap' of Bitcoin is irrelevant here, only the price sensitivity of buyers. Given there is no underlying income stream from bitcoin, there is no real floor. If nobody wants to buy it, a 50MM sell will go to zero pretty quick.
You are right about the fact that there is already a specific SaaS business for every use case that can be standardized.
However, what our customers build on Chartmat (also a no code tool) are custom solution: e.g. a therapist who has her own approach & wants to have an app for that approach that serves around 100 people. She could not use a custom SaaS because that would be following the approach of another "guru" in the industry. So there would not be a personal connection between her & her customers. Also for around 100 customers she would not want to hire a web dev agency to build a professional app. So that is kind of one of the use cases where a no code tool makes sense.
Another scenario is the following: let's say you are a small business (<5 employees) & you need a SaaS for time recording, billing, recording expenses, accounting, collecting customer information -> things that many small businesses like law firms need. Now you could have either 5-6 SaaS solutions for this or you could use one no code tool & process everything through one tool kind of like an ERP for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. So you would end up paying 29$/month instead of 5 x 20$. Additionally you could easily consolidate all the data that matters in one single dashboard.
Very fair argument. My counter would be that the use cases that you are describing are very apt for a low code tool, but it also sounds like the market for that very niche and small (I might be completely wrong). You are talking about small businesses with 10 or less employees. Cost of acquiring them would keep growing as it looks like the market is getting commoditized, barrier is getting lower and crowded. My argument is very simple, if I am a small business my first intuition would be to find a platform with white-label community management for my customers and not build an app. Similarly, If I am small business I would look for a product for law firm or client management platform not think about building my own platform. I am saying this because if I am small business, I would not have time to build my own platform.
what you say makes sense. we have been struggling with finding a customer acquisition channel that is scalable. However, there are situations in which customers prefer to implement custom solutions & not use a SaaS. In that sense no code is more a competition to web development agencies than to a SaaS business. In order to acquire a new customer you need to find someone who wants to build an app now & needs a custom solution
I'm semi-technical & worked mostly in non dev roles. I've been coding apps all the time in my previous jobs. Mostly this was done in JIRA or Excel - creating a workflow, validating new data that comes in. Easy repetitive things that frustrated everyone on the team & myself the most. Now I am helping other to do this as the co-founder of a no-code SaaS (Chartmat). the amount of people who love to build without depending on devs is mind-blowing. I'm looking forward to this next decade in which building websites, dashboards and apps becomes more of a commodity that everyone can do and devs move on to more complex and critical functions such as writing smart contract & scaling apps.
hey there, here is Rob, co-founder at Chartmat. Congrats on your Launch. this looks amazing. Also super interesting thread on HN.
At Chartmat we also provide internal apps, forms & dashboards (we are at an early stage though). however, we are targeting non-technical users (no-code niche), since we found it hard with our previous low-code iteration to get enough users.
I wish you guys all the best on your way & I'm always happy to exchange experiences. Keep the good work up!
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