George Hotz · 2026-07-12 · notable
I Love LLMs, I Hate Hype — Hotz says frontier labs won't capture AI value
George Hotz publishes a follow-up essay saying he is excited about LLMs but critical of hype from both sides. He argues AI progress is mostly Moore's law continuing, and frontier labs will not capture the value they claim.
George Hotz argues AI is the computer revolution continuing, not a singularity, and frontier labs cannot lock down what Moore's law is already delivering.
What is it?
I Love LLMs, I Hate Hype is a July 12, 2026 essay by George Hotz (tinygrad, tinycorp, ex-Comma.ai) on his blog 'the singularity is nearer.' Hotz opens by saying his whole career since 2014 has been AI, that he just set up a Linux box with OpenCode on a local GLM-5.2 and loves it, and then rejects two flavors of hype: doom talk about the 'window closing' and jumps from 'fancy autocomplete' to 'flash of light in the sky' takeoff.
How does it work?
The argument runs through concrete counter-examples. Coding assistants are compared to compilers and find/replace — real productivity but 'not a new law of physics.' A Linus Torvalds quote pegs agents at ~10x productivity vs. ~1000x for compilers. Hotz points at the lack of 'new magical software' as evidence that vibe-coded output is still slop, and calls Moore's law, not any single lab, the actual driver of the last three years of gains.
Why does it matter?
Hotz's central claim is not that AI creates little value, but that frontier labs 'won't capture it,' making trillion-dollar valuations a bet against commodification. The essay hit the Hacker News front page with 399 points and 249 comments, giving open-source-AI advocates a shareable rebuttal to both doomer and singularitarian framings during a week when GPT-5.6 usage and Fable-5 access are the loudest AI-Twitter topics.
Who is it for?
AI engineers weighing open-weight vs. frontier-lab bets, open-source-AI advocates, and readers tired of both doom and singularity hype
Try it
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/12/i-love-llms.html