alt Hacker NewsThis is what so many people on HN and the market are constantly missing.
Jason Kottke almost didn't found his blog in 1998, famously quoted as saying: "I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested." Needless to say, the internet was a tiny joke in 1998 compared to what it is now.
We are just barely scratching the surface of what's possible with AI, both in terms of the leading edge and in the 'torso' of the economy (the portion you're describing).
Folks from Silicon Valley working in AI-forward companies have a skewed perception of how many people have adopted this technology so far. Codex recently celebrated hitting 10 million users. This is a great milestone and all, but to put it in context, Microsoft office has a billion users. Sure, many people use Claude Code and or some other harness and the growth is staggering, but the overall scale is tiny compared to software as a whole. Costs of serving and usage are still very high, prohibitively so for many, so we aren't even close to market saturation.
And even at the leading edge, people who do work in those AI-forward companies; models are still slow, require hand holding, and produce suboptimal outcomes sometimes. Imagine the value when instead of needing to prompt it once per 30 mins, you prompt it once per day. Then once per week. Then once per month. Imagine all this running not on 3 trillion parameter models, not on 10 trillion, but 100 trillion. What kind of computer infra will be needed then? Certainly more than we have today.
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Yes and no...
So much of the dotcom bust was essentially: "anything internet will work", but even after it was pretty easy to find different ways to publish web pages or migrate to new forms of social media, video, short-video, etc.
It's orders of magnitude harder to automate work, which is the business value proposition of AI (whether you are displacing worker or adding breakthrough capacity), and it's not clear the LLM hyperscalers will get the value-add from that.
On the consumer side, it might be a race to the bottom: same ad profits, but now you need AI to produce it.
I've always marveled at how one can pick any year since the internet went mainstream and in that year people thought, "Oh my goodness, the internet is amazing!"
Then, move five years forward from that year and look back. In every case, people think, "Hah! The internet was so simple then!"
In 2031, I suspect we'll say the same about 2026.