1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
dwaltrip · 45m ago
Microwaves are relatively simple machines with fundamental limitations in how they cook food.
With gen AI, it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
bigyabai · 7m ago
> it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
Looking back on BERT I can name a handful of dealbreakers that haven't changed and have no solution on the horizon.
dewitt · 3h ago
The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.
I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
cosmic_cheese · 3h ago
The point may be that while AI may become ubiquitous in dev toolboxes, it’s not going to supplant traditional tools and devs who use it only for minor supporting tasks won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage. Kind of like how a chef might use a microwave to soften butter even if they don’t do any actual cooking with one.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
techpineapple · 3h ago
I think the microwave is actually the perfect example, per your data, I, as an AI skeptic don’t think AI is going to go the way of the Segway, I think it will have real solid use cases and quickly grow to sustained usage that will persist. And like the microwave, will plateau long before the “end of all white collar jobs and scarcity” superintelligence, but yeah, a solid $100 billion dollar a year business? Great? But people are investing in it like it will be the only tool ever used for everything, and a multi trillion dollar business.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
WheelsAtLarge · 4h ago
Is this satire??
TheAlchemist · 4h ago
It's satire describing the current state of AI hype. Pretty accurate in my opinion (although not very funny).
allears · 4h ago
Um, yeah, but I'm still trying to figure out if it's funny.
fuzzfactor · 4h ago
This was amusing:
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
With gen AI, it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
Looking back on BERT I can name a handful of dealbreakers that haven't changed and have no solution on the horizon.
I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
Don't ask me how I know . . .