Nah. No they aren’t. Maybe a few did, but there’s still enough assholes spending money on pushing AI and using AI that it fucks up a bunch of society, still.
They have contracts, the article headline could be correct and everybody would likely still be locked in contract.
I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it’s just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It’s fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it’s always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don’t do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.I’m in a similar situation. My workplace has been heavily pushing implanting AI tools into our daily workload, but I’ve struggled to find a more meaningful use beyond a technical search engine: eg. How can I calculate x in the most resource efficient way?
My IDE told me that there is a new version of some library which fixes security bugs. I asked the AI what will break if I update. It actually found out that the new version requires a license key which has to be updated yearly even for the free use case. So I had it refactor the single use of that library to use another library instead. I then polished the refactored code myself a bit.
When I am done with something, I ask the AI what it thinks about the changes. It then tells me where I violated the style guide and sometimes it finds silly bugs I somehow missed. In rare cases it also finds serious stuff. the code definitely never got worse by having the AI look over it. Btw, looking at it doesn’t mean changing it. I had to tell it to save in its memory files that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.
When I am not sure why something is like it is, I ask the AI. It then comes up with one or more potential explanations and often I then remember what was actually the reasoning if it’s my own code or the code becomes somewhat understandable when it’s written by someone else.
When some behavior looks like it should be impossible, I ask the AI how it’s possible, and it usually tells me the actual reason or gets close enough to make it much easier for me to find it.
When I’m unsure how to implement something, I discuss some options with the AI. It’s reasoning isn’t always sound. But sometimes the internal dialog is just not enough and chatting with AI works surprisingly well for me.
Just treat it like an extremely knowledgeable college with a serious psychedelics addiction. Can’t let it do stuff unattended. But when it isn’t hallucinating, it is pretty capable. Also, it doesn’t care how much you ask it. In general, every easy to explain task with easy to verify results and low damage on failure can be done by AI. But it is often faster to just do something yourself than explain it to the AI and polish the result.
that it should only change anything when explicitly asked to.
Does that work?
Ding ding ding. It’s fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation… Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.
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We all said this was what would happen
They only listen to people who’s wage or billable hours are close to the order of magnitude as their own.
You mean malicious compliance works for the mid management too? I believe it.
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If only literally everyone warned them this would happen…
But [company] selling [thing] told me it’s good, it’s not like they would lie about that!
The salesman took me out for a steak dinner and then a strip club! He’s my friend!
“Why would I deceive you?”
She just exudes “Gollum pretending to be Sméagol” energy.
Someone sent me what was clearly an AI generated doc. I read it, realized it was all AI, had my AI summarize it and ended up with nothing that brought new thinking
What a loop…
This is the thing that drives me absolutely nuts with how most people use LLMs at work. I’m fully capable of asking the LLM to create slop, I need others to actually check and ensure their documentation is useful and correct before communicating it with others.
What, you don’t want to read a 10 page doc made from a 2 sentence prompt?
Just have AI summarize it into 2 sentences
you are part of the problem
They’re just quoting the article… Which you’d know if you bothered to read at all, or even just look at the fact that it was quoted in their comment.
I did read the article, but missed that this was a quote. I stand corrected.
It happens. Props for not dirty deleting.
Angry or yawning?
January: We’re going AI native, please use AI as much as possible.
March: Everyone needs to attend workshops on how to maximize AI productivity.
July: Some models are only available for special (properly justified) cases. Speak to your manager. Turns out that some people did everything (even commits) with top cost models.
August: Ok, we’re setting some limits on token usage, due to some people spending 1000% over the average.
September: we are creating additional frameworks and limits to AI use.
It took a bit of time for the actual AI cost/benefit to reach the top management and put some hard numbers in contrast with the hype machine, but it’s happening.
Everyone who was paying attention even a little bit has known this would be the trajectory from the beginning. And we haven’t even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.
And we haven’t even gotten to the crazy price hikes per token that are coming.
Why do you think that?
IMHO, API prices are likely to drop over time as we scale up and efficiencies are found, combined with general pricing pressure from the competition… SOTA models will continue to have SOTA prices, of course, but reasonable priced distilled and open weights models are already common.
A consequence of API prices dropping is that “heavily discounted” consumer plans will also adjust and won’t be so generous relative to API prices.
They were supposed to do their IPO and have positive cash flow already. Time is running out before investors are getting antsy and there’s no more money available for scaling up.
They gobbled up the easy money… now they have to work harder for more, and yeah, they may have to slow down a bit and embrace fiscal responsibility… I expect to see restructuring of debts along the way, but I’d be very surprised to see any of the major US based players implode.
Both Anthropic & OpenAI have debt repayments coming up in 2027 that:
- cannot be restructured
- cannot be postponed
- they absolutely cannot pay back without even more VC money, and that faucet is being cut off right now.
Both Anthropic & OpenAI have debt repayments coming up in 2027 that:
- cannot be restructured
- cannot be postponed
- they absolutely cannot pay back without even more VC money, and that faucet is being cut off right now.
Well then. I stand corrected. The random Internet person with unprecedented access into the books & private financial dealings of two major competitors has an air-tight argument.
I suggest we come back to this thread in a year’s time and see how it is playing out.
It’s actually common knowledge if you’d just fucking look.
Also, LOL
That’s a capital furnace. Not a company that will ever turn a profit.
Look up some well known critics in the AI space and you will see a bunch of information that aligns with OPs statements. Its always been scheduled for Q2/Q3 2027.
Because these companies started selling at a loss from the start to get people hooked. Neither Claude nor OpenAI are turning a profit right now.
The biggest problem isn’t cost of running the models right now, the biggest problem is all the debt they built up on training and data center buildouts. That’s what they need to recoup and that’s what’s going to drive prices up. And once it’s recouped they’ll need to make pure profits.
And I hope that debt kills them because all the big AI companies are terrible in one way or another, and the eventual price disparity will make it uneconomical to use their models. Then we might return right back to development focusing on small models, not large ones.
But look how dangerous these models are. They need to be regulated so that only responsible closed model providers can produce them.
Just ignore that the responsible closed model providers are the ones opening their sandboxes and training their models on blackhat sources.
But aren’t the AI companies always needing to train the next version and replace/upgrade the HW? If it were just a one time startup cost then maybe they could become profitable, but if they will always need to invest heavily in traing the next gen and replacing HW every 2 years, then that’s more of an ongoing expense.
And I’m sure you’ve noticed how all the revenue and profit numbers that leak out ignore “one off” costs like training and data centre building.
IMHO, API prices are likely to drop over time as we scale up and efficiencies are found, combined with general pricing pressure from the competition… SOTA models will continue to have SOTA prices, of course, but reasonable priced distilled and open weights models are already common.
Some of this seems like wishful thinking to me.
“as we scale up” We already have large data centers, and, if anything, “scaling up” is just driving up expenses for debt and hardware. The real problem with AI, relative to the internet boom, is that the more you use it, the more expensive it is. The economies of scale to be taken advantage of are minimal.
I do think price of compute will come down, but exactly because people will be running their own open source models on their own hardware instead of Sam Altman to stack GPUs in a warehouse, but it will still be too expensive and inaccurate.
And we’re still headed for a financial cliff in this scenario.
Like a fraction of a percent of people will run their own models. It won’t influence price. Remember that coders/tech people are only a minority of users.
Oh, I see. I was mistaken. I thought tech companies were OpenAI’s major customers, and they certainly could make their own data centers for internal work, and that coders–that minority of users–were the only ones likely to pay full price for tokens, the rest of us wouldn´t be willing to pay full fare for a machine that is right most of the time sort of. Thanks for setting me straight on that.
Some large companies do it … but I think you greatly overestimate the willingness of large enterprises to build and maintain their own infra. Once a company has lost the competency (and many have), it’s hard to get it back. There are always pockets of people with the right skillset in a large org, but they mostly don’t want to do DC work anymore. Team/personal servers and beefy laptops, otoh…
Of course they want to turn the corner and ideally keep all their infra, but they might need to restructure their debts if/when the creditors come knocking.
BUT: they have a money printing machine with inference… Enterprise is where most of the money is made, as they pay (closer to) API prices… consumer & small business plans are heavily discounted in comparison, with mostly underutilized use-it-or-lose it plans. They’d be stupid if they were making an opex loss on inference.
As for why API prices are dropping? Competition is a bitch… but they seem willing and able to play the game for now.
If we’re talking about the survivability of AI as a technology, I agree.
If you’re talking about the viability of the hyperscaling business model, I think we are looking at wildly different sets of information.
Do we work at the same company??
I think this was the standard management reaction across all the companies that embraced AI as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
They thought it was their ticket to fire everybody, and the more they made you use it the sooner they could fire you.
Soon, the guys upstairs will realise that the real savings are in replacing the middle management with agents, not replacing the workers. Fingers crossed.
That will just become a different kind of hell
I don’t doubt that for a second, my friend.
I was a PM at a major now-hyperscaler and one of the engineers on my team was pretty vocal about PM not contributing.
He ended up leaving for a team that didn’t have one. A few years later I happened to be in his new building, he saw me, and came up with this huge grin on his face, “oh wow are you joining our team?”
You always hate the chick writing the specs until you don’t have one any more. 😂
C-Suit are herd animals. Same schools, same country clubs, same conference. They all are formed the same. And they don’t take advise from people who earn a few orders of magnitude less.
Fortunately, the people above them care about numbers, and these don’t add up.
Keep spending that shit left and right!
My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days
Still in March over here. My management is pushing hard for us to start doing shit in copilot, and I’m humoring them, but I’m looking at current news with a very Ralph Wiggum “I’m in danger” mindset
Our management is so “forward-looking” that we are still in the March stage: they want AI used everywhere, and added everywhere in the product.
Saying that sometimes you still need to use the brain for big decisions will make some people question your prompting skills publicly.
Hell, we even rebranded the whole company to be an “”“AI company”“”. I hate it there and I sense layoffs coming soon, but finding a job in this period is hard. Wish me luck.
I feel like we’re co-workers, with how perfectly that timeline matched the day-job’s progression.
We’re at “did you take the seminar on looping that uses tokens like a firehouse so you can use less tokens? Why are you using too little (/not enough) tokens, and why is it not magically 10x-ing all of your (fucking ansible) config?” Or some shit.
We are ruled by idiots. It’s probably been that way for the majority of history.
Most places I’ve worked, management has been a negative force.
Management is good at accumulating and maintaining power. Competence in actually getting stuff done doesn’t really help with that.
Competence would require pointing out flaws someone else is responsible for, which would certainly enganger your career eventually. So, not only is competence unnecessary in management, it is actively selected against.
Ironic
Just follow trumps stock trades. That will talk you all you need to know about where the market is headed.
Ernst and Young say 36% of companies using AI have experienced catastrophic incidents.
Hopefully some of them go bankrupt. That would be a stellar way to get rid of some bad management.
get rid of some bad management.
Good luck. Like cockroaches, they’d probably survive a nuclear holocaust.
Is it because they turn bad once they become management? Or were they like that from the beginning?
Personally I think it’s both, but mostly the latter.It also attracts narcissistic people without empathy (and sadic people), a bit like the church attracts pedophiles. Not everyone is, but in the end it’s too many (over 0).
It also attracts narcissistic people
This has AFAIK actually been documented.
If you have more information about that, I’ll be all ears!
I wrote AFAIK, which means I don’t have a source at hand, only memory of having seen the claim documented by research somewhere…
It is well observed that psychopaths (a.k.a. sociopaths) are found both in prison and in managerial positions.
That comment is made by a PhD psychologistm and confirms it.
Feel free to investigate further, at least you now know there is something for sure.
Ah yeah, bank managers (AFAIK! or heard) is often people without empathy for example, guess some jobs attract some types of people.
It’s a feedback loop.
Upper management can’t tell what good work is, and thus whomever is the most shameless in talking themselves up wins, unless they royally screw up in a way that can’t be missed. If you have any shred of humility or nuance about your work, you are almost certainly not management material.
I have met like 3 or 4 people that I actually had respect for in management roles, but overwhelmingly they were there solely on an overinflated sense of self importance rather than substance.
Both. People who are promoted to management because they are good individual contributors are often lacking in management skills (they turn from something they are good at to something they are bad at), and people who crave and hard pursue management positions rarely have management skills (always bad).
That sounds extremely plausible. 👍
I think they get promoted to management because they’re bad.
They’re not going to promote the guy who knows what he’s doing, because they need him to keep working in his current role. The guy who slacks off, bosses people around, and gets chummy with the boss though? Perfect candidate for promotion.
Frankly, I think we all have a bad manager inside of us, and the problem is that being put in a manager position exposes you to humanity-draining incentives that feed the bad manager parts of you, until it defines you. Higher compensation and promotions for focusing on costs and not quality, and short-term gains rather than long-term stability.
If you’re unusually self-aware and smart, and put effort into grounding yourself, you may counteract it, but most people probably just float through life and let those incentives define them and their choices.
Interesting point.
Both. Whether you’re considering empathy or competency.
Increased power—in pay or in authority—may be followed by decreased empathy (they turn bad). Conversely, dark triad traits have been linked with success (they were bad already). The research on this side has been criticized, mainly for methodology. I think the underlying idea makes intuitive sense.
On the competency side, there’s the Peter Principle, originally satirical but subsequently researched. Good employees are promoted to a position of incompetence (they turn bad, or rather, are promoted until they are no longer good). Or, they were incompetent and promoted anyway to get them out of the way (they were bad).
And the mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. E.g., a good employee is promoted, they are bad as a manager, then entrench as their new authority leads to less empathy.
Hahaha. No. Management is not losing jobs over this. Not in the quantities needed.
No I know it’s a mostly futile hope.
If anyone important does get fired they’ll just get re-hired by another company who needs some doofus to fill a position in upper management.
“And why did you leave your last job?”
“The company went bankrupt due to severe mismanagement.”
“How did you get your management position at that company?”
“My dad was rich.”
“You’re hired.”
People at my company are broadly phoning it in with AI. Everyone on my team was complaining the other day that people keep posting in our team Slack channel with Claude and we are the only humans in the conversation.
Recently in my team people are posting AI output for review, and others feed it into a chat bot and paste the result.
So which trade are you thinking of changing to?
So which trade are you thinking of changing to?
I’m sure there will be a lot of demand for AI slop cleaner-uppers in the near future.
Yes. Refactoring for clue will be a huge growth market; and so many people will be just unable to fill those roles now with the mental degradation.
Yes, in the future being created for us, 95% of jobs will be janitors mopping up AI slop.
To be fair that’s been a common industry for much of human history.
The professional fixer of the stupidity of the rich. Is a age old profession and well respected.
Just this times it’s, the slop machine is working what are we paying you for. The slop machine is broke what are we paying you for!
Water treatment technicians are in very high demand. That’s my next move I think. It won’t pay half as well as tech but there’s room for growth and good benefits. I think I’m just about done working for these shitty executives.
Management spent two years demanding everyone use AI, then discovered everyone was using AI. Now they’re shocked the office is a conveyor belt of hallucinated PowerPoints reviewed by other bots. The real productivity breakthrough will be executives learning that buying subscriptions isn’t a business strategy.
Yeah, turns out the executive class, the would-be nobility, are incompetent idiots by their own standards, and are primarily driven by their own malignant sociopathic narcissism, not any of the stories they tell about themselves.
If you want competent executives, they’d need an actually effective selection pressure that punishes incompetence and rewards competence… but they already destroyed that.
So, either we, or somebody, builds some mechanism or system that does that… or they all preen themselves rigourously while steering the ship directly into an iceberg, with all of us onboard.
They will genuienly not understand why we hate them for killing us all.
I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I’ve asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It’s certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more…
Careful they might just hire two AI using interns to replace you. Maybe bad mouth how much the AI is making mistakes and get them to make you stop using it and then ask for help when production slows.
Being short staffed is the whole point. They believe (where they are right or wrong) AI will replace the employees.
If you use AI and still have to work overtime you are your own problem. As long as you deliver why would they change anything? Don’t deliver. It is not worth sacrificing your health for someone’s else’s profits. You have only one life.
When the clock strikes 5:30 we usually tell each other to get the fuck out the office. Ensure no one ever accidentally does any unpaid overtime.
After talking to some people who actually have been forced to work with AI on projects in teams Its been horrifying to find how little time they are given to build out proper safe guards, rules and test the process.
Management seems to be expecting these stupid robots to work the first time every time
Even in small projects for every 8 hours of work there’s a good hour or two of adjusting memory, standing rules, hooks, and countless other things.
It’s endless upkeep. Every shift in work flow tends to create knock on effects.
Management of the bot it self becomes a massive work load if you want them to be even remotely reliable.
I’m not surprised their use in a corporate environment is backfiring massively.
It reminds me of talking to a coworker where I teach about taking on a side job. “All he wants is to take stuff from these 3 databases, and then reformat them to go into this database that he can use with this other software.”
They didn’t like when I told them that they couldn’t just vibe code it in a month and that my previous job was working with a persistent and ongoing team of almost 10 people doing that same type of thing.
To clarify before anyone asks, yes, these are all 3 live databases in production environments.
I sort of know what you mean. The company I work for has been encouraging the use of AI/LLMs. But some of the company leadership has been smart about it. We recently got some AI agents to use as tools in our workflow. However, they tested the agents for a few weeks before allowing us to use them, so that they know the agents do what they’re suppose to do.
However, they tested the agents for a few weeks before allowing us to use them, so that they know the agents do what they’re suppose to do.
I hope they’re planning on doing that for every model change, or pinning it to a specific model. Otherwise, you’re gonna have a bad time when model updates completely change how the bot functions.
The idea of AI is not the problem. It’s the execution. Both in it’s used wrong and that the people wont benefit.
If we could all leave work 2 hours earlier because of enhanced production, we would all fight for this shit.
But that’s not gonna happen.
The idea of AI is not the problem.
For many of us, the idea is also the problem. Stealing the collected works of humanity in order to build a machine meant for delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience is deeply antisocial, and an attack on our dignity as people
Which is why it was supposed to be an open technology with no profits as its a culmination of humanity. Nobody should own it or make a profit from its creation.
Even if that happened it would still be a terrible technology. The damage to the environment isn’t worth it.
delegating the thinking and feeling parts of the human experience
This would be a problem even if the technology were completely free and open. LLMs poison peoples minds and make them boring, helpless and stupid.
If Facebook were a nonprofit, it would still be terrible for people.
I don’t know. I think Facebook took a turn when it was engineered to boost engagement. Otherwise, it’s just a forum for friends to make posts. What’s wrong with that, in theory?
It’s the execution. Both in it’s used wrong and that the people wont benefit.
deeply antisocial
It doesn’t really have to be. The problem is that the profits that comes from that machine are not spread among the working people - that would be the social way to implement it.
That’s only one of many harms it does to the human experience. Look at a company like Facebook. Do you think socializing that industry and sharing the profits with the users would mitigate the harms it does to our lives? I sure don’t.
It in fact would, because there would be no incentive to keep it like it is - it would never have been made so bad if it was a democratic decision.
Facebook and Co. is bad today because there’s a conflict of interest between users and shareholders, and Zuckerberg chose the shareholders cause they line his pockets. This conflict would not exist if it was democratic.
