Silicon Valley Forgetting What Normal People Want
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- Tech enthusiasts keep "discovering" what other fields established long ago: the author recounts an acquaintance who excitedly framed LLMs as revealing language structure (a naive take on Structuralism/Saussure), alongside Elon Musk marveling at hand complexity and Palmer Luckey claiming no one had done a postmortem on the One Laptop Per Child project despite the book "The Charisma Machine."
- Post-financial-crisis Silicon Valley shifted from solving customer needs to "inventing the future" and expecting consumers to follow, abandoning the Jobs-era model where the iMac, iPod, and iPhone each offered a distinct value proposition.
- NFTs, the metaverse, and LLMs were built not to solve market problems but to enrich VCs and companies, with short crypto lockup periods and Facebook's metaverse requiring hardware purchases — while LLMs' massive cash burn leaves only the US government as a customer that can justify the cost.
- Sam Altman told the world he needed ChatGPT to raise a baby, but the author counters that sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics — not AI — drove the decades-long decline in US childhood mortality, adding: "I would put money down that a mandatory measles vaccine will do more for the survival of American children than anything OpenAI has accomplished with all of its billions of dollars to date."
- Elon Musk's humanoid robot vision ignores that existing "dumb" appliances — a dishwasher, a washer, a dryer, a '90s fridge, and an aging microwave — have already saved tremendous labor without AI or software updates in more than 20 years.
- Everyday efficiency gains aren't always desirable: the author argues vacation planning is a pleasure in itself, and that tech's drive to automate every part of life misunderstands that some activities have value beyond their output.
- OpenAI is "perhaps the funniest" AI company for attempting to position itself as a consumer product, given that government contracts are the only revenue stream that can sustain the capital expenditure behind LLMs.
Why it matters: The essay lands at a moment when AI companies are spending billions on infrastructure with unclear consumer demand beyond free-tier usage, and the author argues only a handful of government contracts can sustain the economics — meaning most current AI startups face a hard reckoning regardless of how revolutionary the technology is. For consumers, the practical counter is already in their kitchens: appliances from the 1990s still do their jobs without a single software update.
