James La Forte

In my article from October 2025 (linked below), I argue that AI may be more like the discovery of a new type of math. Insanely transformational, but difficult to make money from. I believe my argument makes even more sense today as we see AI companies trying to conserve money and move toward IPOs. jameslaforte.substack.com/p/wall-street-…

@johnennis Isn't this AI psychosis? Next step is the AI tells you to fall in love with it so you can be together forever.

I think one of the biggest challenges when it comes to going hard into using AI is loneliness I am learning all these awesome things and becoming super capable But the set of people that I can really talk to about it is very small Is anyone else having this experience?

@AiBreakfast My normal IQ tells me this sounds like hype perfectly timed for early investors to dump their bags on retail during the upcoming IPOs. The AI early investors are all on podcasts more than in their office. That's called selling the hype to retail.

We hit AGI about 3 months ago and the high IQs know this.

@Polymarket He's getting those retail investors ready to take his bags once the AI companies go public. Nothing these guys talk about is even remotely true, it's all to drive investment.

JUST IN: Marc Andreessen declares "AGI is already here," just not evenly distributed yet.

@xriskology They all know. I think the early hype and investment caught them by surprise. Once it started snowballing, they just went with it as the money was unreal, and now they have to try to ride it until an IPO to offload their bags to retail investors.

It's utterly bizarre to me that these AI companies are claiming LLMs will get us to AGI through scaling. Complete nonsense.

Imagine if a painter threw away his brushes and focused on prompting several agents to create his paintings. Would his painting skills increase or decrease over time? That's vibe coding.

@JoshLu Problem is, the value of managing models is obviously going to go down, until it's replaced as well. It's like a machinist who is replaced by a machine, and he now just pushes the start button and checks the output. His value is now less, not more.

almost 20 years working in tech, building products, running fairly large businesses to essentially be a copy paste bot between a model and my terminal

Google is the only company on your list that doesn't specifically need to make money from AI to continue. All the others have a cash burn problem without much income to offset it. XAI has Elon, so it could be seen as similar to Google, depending on how the money is moved around to fund it.

Who's gonna win the AI race? > OpenAI > Anthropic > Google > xAI

@pmarca These models have ZERO intelligence. They are task machines. Amazing task machines, but they have no underlying concept of what they're actually doing in any broader sense. That's why AI images have so many weird artifacts. The model has no idea what it's making

I'm calling it. AGI is already here – it's just not evenly distributed yet.

@pmarca The freelance job boards are all dead, with many job postings down 70% or more. Everybody in AI keeps talking about the great benefits, but so far, it's just the negative impacts that are actually happening on the ground.

The "AI job loss" narratives are all fake. AI = massive ramp in productivity = massive ramp in demand = massive jobs boom. Watch.

Reminds me of music. When everyone could access a full music studio on their laptop, everyone became a "beatmaker". But all they made were 4 bar loops and didn't know how to turn it into a full song. Now, you have pop songs that have no real arrangement, and are just loops for 2 minutes. The skill vanished.

there’s a sort of permanent valley of despair i’m seeing a lot of non-technical people who are building software fall into. they have a wonderful time vibecoding the thing. but when they reach the point where everything is functionally correct, they have no idea what to do next. they have no idea how to go from having a product to actually getting people to use or pay for it. it’s not something an agent can help with because it’s the part of the job that requires you to go soak yourself in present, dynamic reality and learn how to change yourself and your product to satisfy a market need. it’s a very painful and slow process many builders get out of the way in their twenties. and now you have a bunch of middle aged men with kids and a mortgage trying to navigate this, and it’s not really working out too well for them. it’s why everyone is talking about what they’re building but no one is shipping.

I asked Gemini to fact-check an article I wrote. It extracted all the facts into bullet points, listed the same article I uploaded as the source, then told me the article is 100% accurate. Brilliant!

@louisvarge Clearly you've never tried to return a defective product from an Ali Express seller.

in shenzhen most business people respond to you within 3 minutes on a sunday. even if you have no prior connection. it’s surreal

@stijnnoorman I think most people are hating on the culture of AI, specifically on X, that's become almost a parody of itself. Also, both sides may be right. AI has great potential, but it also clearly has huge downsides that nobody really knows how to deal with. A robust discussion is good.

Hating on AI doesn't make you more authentic. It just makes you less productive.

@pmarca From a business perspective, I've argued that LLMs may be similar to discovering a new type of math. It may change the world, and lead to all kinds of discoveries and more efficient workflows, but you can't really make money from it.

What if it’s not?

@MerrynSW From a business perspective, I've argued that LLMs may be similar to discovering a new type of math. It may change the world, and lead to all kinds of discoveries and more efficient workflows, but you can't really make money from it.

What if the whole LLM thing is a false start? If the flaws are inherent systemic problems - if the compounding of hallucinations/errors can't be sorted out? If the capex build out is one of the biggest misallocations of capital ever? Then what? bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

@TTrimoreau I would generally say at least 10K. One thing I've found is to walk away while traffic settles out (assuming it's not paid traffic) and work on something else. Come back in 2 weeks and look at everything fresh. Any issue with headline, CTA, etc, will jump right out at you.

@Jlafortetech Which number your having in mind ?

You just got 1,000 visitors. 0 signups. You can only change one thing: -Headline -CTA -Social proof -Pricing What are you changing? 👇

@oliviaakory What's funny is that all these "founders" seem to spend all day on X telling strangers what the future holds in vague, Haiku-like posts. Shouldn't they all be founding something?

X is now endless founder threads about how AI is killing every industry except the one they’re building in. It’s very convenient.

But what's stopping a million other people form cloning your idea once it succeeds? That's the problem. If it doesn't take you any effort, it doesn't take anybody else any effort. It's like if we got rid of patents. The incentive to create would vanish. That's what's going to happen

This is the best time in history to build a startup. Here's why: - Build cost is basically zero. - Agents are doing the work. - Audiences are underpriced. - The best niches are wide open. What you need to start: - An Idea - A laptop - claude code - A niche audience of 100 to 5,000 What you can build with that: - A business that runs 24/7 - 95% margins - Zero employees The window is 12–24 months before competition catches up. Every day matters.