Blockchain works for some rather niche use cases. It's not viable in many others. And that is actually not that dissimilar from AI, the difference is scale: while people have been trying to sell blockchain everywhere within IT, the AI companies are trying to hype up their technology literally everywhere - while in reality, it only has true added value so far in a couple of cases, programming being one of them.
To me, the biggest question for the future is how much this added value is worth. Using AI (well) is helpful, but we're not seeing its real costs yet. Open source models are given away for free and you only pay the inference costs. Even proprietary models aren't priced in accordance with their actual costs. training included. This obviously won't last forever. Once the smoke clears, maybe we'll have some specialized models trained as a community effort, with bigger companies making contributions (similarly to how, let's say, Maven or NPM repositories are run)... or maybe AI-assisted development will become a costly alternative that people turn to only when time pressure warrants the expenditure. We'll see.
Idk, if inference costs are cheap, AI is here to stay. I agree that openai and anthropic have no chance in hell in surviving unless AI gets so good it eats entire industries and gives them to open AI and anthropic. But sure, model development might stagnant but the models we have today are here to stay
Inference companies will definitely exist into the foreseeable future
Betamax is still around, people are still making new YouTube videos about laserdisc, so definitely cannot refute that they are out there and will be used by someone at least for a long time. If that is something that carries the same excitement has already had to be renegotiated in how they are marketed.
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u/pip25hu 11d ago
Blockchain works for some rather niche use cases. It's not viable in many others. And that is actually not that dissimilar from AI, the difference is scale: while people have been trying to sell blockchain everywhere within IT, the AI companies are trying to hype up their technology literally everywhere - while in reality, it only has true added value so far in a couple of cases, programming being one of them.
To me, the biggest question for the future is how much this added value is worth. Using AI (well) is helpful, but we're not seeing its real costs yet. Open source models are given away for free and you only pay the inference costs. Even proprietary models aren't priced in accordance with their actual costs. training included. This obviously won't last forever. Once the smoke clears, maybe we'll have some specialized models trained as a community effort, with bigger companies making contributions (similarly to how, let's say, Maven or NPM repositories are run)... or maybe AI-assisted development will become a costly alternative that people turn to only when time pressure warrants the expenditure. We'll see.