AI doesn’t solve the real problems. It’s surface level pseudo productivity.

The only new things or features I’ve really seen are related to AI. So it’s just AI adding AI to stuff. I’m still waiting for this big renaissance of innovation.

Good question. Big companies participate in incrementalism. Many companies invent one big thing and ride it for decades. Few build new things and succeed. (e.g. Apple). Some try, e.g. Microsoft with Xbox, Meta with VR, but even then often it ends up being billions of lost profits. Innovation often come from small groups of persistent and intelligent people and their first few acquisitions as they succeed. e.g. Microsoft with DOS, Windows and Office. They're still riding it.

The last startup boom began in the mid-2000's (around when Y Combinator began, you can read all about it on Paul's blog), when cloud computing was still new and lowered the cost of creating online businesses. It was also in the wake of the tech bust - a lot of tech employees became unemployed.

My view is, when the layoffs complete, the dust settles and you have millions of tech workers who are willing to accept only equity, with a new technology they can rent for $200 a month from DeepSeek or Anthropic or OpenAI, we may see the green shoots of a new wave of disruption.

Maybe there's a bit more to a company and its software than the quantity of code it generates? And maybe there's a built in moat that a lot of these companies have that takes a lot of effort (and marketing, etc) to overcome?

People don't just jump social networks because a new one exist, there has to be a compelling reason to migrate over to it. And for a lot of people, there needs to be a sufficient number of people (and probably existing friends) already using the app for them to expend the effort to start using it.

It's not like there haven't been other attempts at competitors for these over the years, and you haven't heard about them probably because none of them ever got any traction. And that takes more than just building software.

Like DuckDuckGo has been competing with Google search for years (it first came out back in 2008, it looks like), and likely is way better developed than anything someone will crank out with A.I. in a short period of time. And it still has a tiny fraction of Google's marketshare.

I'm not saying there won't eventually be other competitors to these, but it'll take more than just whipping up an MVP with A.I. in a few weeks.

AI can help you write code, but it still can't help you get customers, or attention. In fact, it makes it worse. AI helps with introducing more noise, more content, and more people clamoring for attention. It's a lemon market.

Two hypotheses:

1) LLMs just aren't good enough

2) Making a billion dollar company is too expensive. Netflix lost money for years. Amazon lost money for years. Tesla lost money for a decade. Spotify took 18 years to become profitable. The AI companies are losing billions of dollars each month.

It's simple: AI can't really write software. AI is good in generating garbage code averaged from millions of repos.

Here is an example of software that can scale with a single person assuming AI can write software: a web-based alternative to Photoshop built on wasm. Figma is analogous to that and it's worth $10Bn.

AI is not just disrupting companies and contributing for layoffs but it's also changing the buyers and customers.

Why build a new Google when the potential Google customers now just get their results from LLMs instead of SERPs?

How to be the next Jobs when there's no actual new product, just essentially an assistant tool?

How to create the next Disney, Netflix, Blizzard or Pixar when LLM's are still not good enough to produce quality content and many people are also starting to despise AI generated content? Art is still an intrinsic Human thing, even if LLMs are able to produce it.

So, although these LLMs are super amazing and definitely revolutionary, this whole AI/AGI hype is still a bit on bubble territory imho so I'm not really sure we'll see what you're hinting at with this generation of LLMs.

Also, wasn't AI supposed to be the last product we'd ever need to invent and then it's utopia and singing kumbaya for all eternity?

We won't need new companies, big personalities or heroes once Skynet/Hal9000/GLaDOS/Agent Smith/etc are in charge :)

Can you frame your question in a single sentence? Even after reading everything you wrote above, I’m not clear what the essence of your question really is.

AI is just not that good.