Why would it obviously give attackers the upper hand? If we accept the premise that AI helps find vulns more efficiently, shouldn’t this be at least equally helpful in securing against attacks and make that increasingly efficient?

Particularly when you can't use Fable 5 to secure your software, you don't have access to Mythos 5, and you got your access to GLM-5.2 and other Chinese and/or open models capable of doing so taken away.

Good point. Within the next few years black hat open models will be able to do a lot of damage for very little cost.

It could easily turn into a Red Queen situation where companies that don't spend hard on security are going to face huge potential losses, and both sides will be scrambling constantly to get an advantage.

One of the weirdest things about the whole AI boom is the mass formation psychosis where everyone started acting like lines of code written was an important metric for software development productivity.

We've known for decades that more lines of code isn't good. Bill Gates was joking about it in the OS/2 days!

We've known for decades that the actual creation of the code is the smallest part of an actual software developer's job.

We've known for decades that "every line of code is a business decision" that has to be written with an understanding of the underlying goal, and the hardest part of training up software engineers is making them understand that.

We threw all that out because "the chatbox writes code really fast, software is a solved problem!"

Next you'll be telling me that using number of PRs deployed in a week as a KPI is a bad idea.

Wouldn't that explanation predict that lower ranking employees would be more impressed with AI than higher ranking ones? Because what we actually observe [0] tends to be the opposite. Executives are the most bullish on AI, followed by Managers, with employees having the least adoption.

[0] https://businesschief.com/news/why-are-executives-using-ai-m...

> it can make skilled people more productive by acting like a “mech suit for your brain.”

If mech suits existed and people actually lived in them they would either get super fat or super skinny. In either case they'd lose all muscle mass.

Speaking as a programmer, the net effect so far is that we work more and deliver far more results and get paid the same or less.

And I run my own firm... but I have to compete against a global market of other programmers using similar tools who are also trying to compete on price, and then there are hordes of new entrants who can vibe-code things that superficially look like they'll meet a customer's needs and are better at marketing than I am, so my area of business gets constrained to just customers who need help after the problems with the vibe-coded solution appear, the vendor who made it is long gone, and they already spent an inordinate amount of money on the vibe-coded solution since they thought it was complete and it looked pretty good.

Most of my past roles had very simple code at the important deliverable level, on bizarre and arcane platforms that would have little context for frontier LLMs. Most the creativity and complexity was in tooling for research/development/testing.

Agentic coding could help a lot for the latter, not necessarily the former.

Programmer work product (typically) benefits the capital class, directly via product engineering or indirectly via platform engineering.

If the aspiration of a 10x or more programmer is enabled through AI then the capital class win, in the typical case. Software eats the world.

What's the play for software engineers that lands them in a better place but doesn't leave money on the table for the capitalists?

Investors expect that they will, I guess. If you really believe the strong ai use cases (like exponential improvements, or it replacing hundreds of knowledge workers at every company" then maybe this isn't unreasonable.

I guess the bet is that they will become embedded in basically 8% of the tasks in every sector. which I guess could happen long term? thinking about the whole ass economy in this way always make my mind boggle so I don't really feel equipped to talk intelligently about this.

I suspect that they believe they can integrate with a substantial portion of not just the US economy, but also most of the European and formal Latin America economies. And I also suspect that the number is quite high because there are so many AI companies planning to snag like 80% market share for AI.

The share price is based on them eliminating entire sectors yes.

Public investment was responsible for Apollo, so there was no expectation of profitability. Private investment is largely responsible for the AI buildout, and private investment isn't doing that for charity

If I give you 5 trillion dollars I want to get that back plus a percentage increase on top for my troubles, right? Government programs might run without the expectation of paying back taxpayers but investors are less generous.

Because most of the capital assets depreciate over a period of 5 years or so so you have to make the expenditures back during that time or you can't book any revenue.

The Apollo program wasn’t for profit and if it was it never would have yielded a return on investment.

I wouldn't bet on token consumption going down any time soon. In the past year or so, the increase has been exponential [1].

[1] https://en.macromicro.me/charts/148532/world-openrouter-toke...

Even more companies are just starting AI/ML initiatives. The tokenmaxxing thing only happened at a handful of tech companies, most companies don't have unlimited money to do this kind of thing.

Once the Pathfinders find out where the real value is there is much more room for growth from companies who have be mindful of budget.

For the companies it's not clear.

For the state, like BVD, the goal is to be a loss-leader for Chinese infrastructure + manufacturing.

If the model is commoditized then the AI race becomes competition over building infrastructure to support it. China is very good at building infrastructure.

They don't need to run a business, they are a Chinese state enterprise. The tax dollars of Chinese workers covers the cost. China is a communist country with mock free enterprise, it is not the team blue version of the US.