I’ll admit I’m experiencing a degree of pleasure in thinking about how nervous Anthropic and OpenAI must be with their IPOs supposedly coming up.
They gotta pull Google and get into the advertising game. They are sitting on a gold mine of private data and I’m sure they know it.
Their IPOs are how they cash out and walk away. It’s just a matter of “does it crash before or after?”. Yes they’ll be anxious about getting there, but the fact the market is still behind them and they’re this close is very bad for the rest of us.
Looks like the market is now trying to get out from under them.
OpenAI already explicitly postponed their IPO somehow hoping for a better climate to IPO in…
A certainly… optimistic expectation.
What’s stopping people from using open sourced trained models? Like, why are tokens going to be needed in the future? Isn’t this their whole business model?
You need 200GB of video memory :)
Honestly, I have a little tin-foil-hat theory that the used their infine supply of venture to fuck the memory market to make sure people couldn’t run giant chinese models on solar and eat their lunch.
training a top-level model takes harvesting petabytes / exabytes of revelant data and then months of continuous 100% power on a large server farm costing many millions of dollars.
The hardware requirements are substantial. If companies or individuals want to run models locally, especially at the speed you’d expect from the big name models, then everyone needs a pretty serious GPU on their work station. That or the company needs to build and maintain a server capable of running whatever loads they expect to see.
None of this is impossible of course. But you pay for the tokens one way or another. Either you pay the upfront cost of the hardware and continuing cost of the electricity to run it, or you pay with the inconvenience of running a model very slowly on lower end hardware, or you pay a subscription for someone else to worry about all that.
This is why local models are still niche. Only hobbyists nerds are willing to go through the trouble of setting up and running a local model. Most companies still are not sure if AI is actually worth it for them. So it’s much easier to pay for tokens than the giant upfront cost required to build you own infrastructure.
If the numbers the AI companies are putting up as far as infrastructure cost vs revenue are anything to go by, it probably isn’t worth it to most companies.
They don’t need to, OpenAI and Anthropic are running at a huge loss to keep it cheaper to use them than to buy the comparable hardware required to replace them. The only way running open source models is cheaper is if you ignore hardware costs, or if you have a very specific and unusual usage pattern (i.e. constant 100% capacity, and not a clock cycle more or less), or if you go with another cloud provider who are also running at a loss.
For enterprise, I think same reasons why companies using paid software instead of open software. Someone else to maintain and blamed if something doesn’t work.
They thought they sold tokens, they actually sell marginally (6 months lead) improved models.
If you want it well rounded I can see the argument for enterprise but for me personally I programmed one on my workstation and it’s trained on very specific things I think it barely uses up all 24gb vram I have available.
come on, I’ve trained toy size models too, you can’t seriously say they’re even vaguely approaching the capability of models that takes a whole massive server farm weeks or months to train.
Right, and what proportion of enterprise use cases genuinely need an appreciable fraction of that power (because they are wide ranging and non-repeating)?
Anyone that says these things aren’t impressive is kidding themselves. But how do we get from impressive to productivity enhancing in excess of cost? I find smaller specialised models more plausible on that front, but jury is still out on the financials, we’ll find out I guess!
I’d love more of the msm to pick up these articles.
I need to convince my family this current state of AI is just smoke, mirrors and debt, but i need a normie-credible source to anchor it.
Does anyone know of one? Guardian would do.
Why do you need to convince them?
I don’t want them to plan their lives around it. My brother is thinking of switching career and my parents have some investments etc based around line-go-up.
But also I just look like a conspiracy guy until the bubble pops, but then im the “i told you so guy” and that sucks.
I would just tell them to think long term instead of focusing on the new shiny thing. Software development is still a perfectly valid skill to learn, and if your investments are in tech ETFs or mutual funds, they’ll be managed and hedged against avoid losing a significant amount of value.
If they still want to chase the shiny thing, you can’t logic them out of an illogical position. All you can do is recommend they have a fallback cushion, and only invest time/money/effort that they can afford to lose.
“hedged against… Losing a significant amount of value” boy do I have bad news for you about the ETF industry.
MSM is too scared to talk about these topics. If the AI companies fall, the global markets will crash. Banks lend out too much money to those companies, same for retirement funds and the owners of those media.
This might be a case of too big to fail and “look out China will use it to destroy us”. That’s what those AI companies are betting on at this point. Their last hope, apart from continuing the deception for as long as possible.
China is already eating our lunch in everything else. At this point, I’m just gonna learn some mandarin and wear a jade necklace.
and this is why I’m retiring in two weeks. They don’t get it, they never will. my work as a contractor trying to code review their slop and telling them what they needed to change fell on deaf ears. they cut me a cheque, thanked me for my time, and it was onto the next company/startup to perform the same song and dance.
i’m done. I’m done with the tech industry. 25 years just poof, gone. I’m in my mid 40s, i’m single, i own my condo, i’m done. I’m going to sit on my ass all day, play videogames, and clear out my codeberg and delete everything. I’m not even going to work on FOSS stuff anymore, i’m not going to maintain anything, I’m not going to contribute. I’m done. I want nothing to do with this crap.
And this is why I never turned my passion and hobby into a job.
Find a hobby or even many hobbies! its very important to stay busy and also connected to others or you’ll fall into depression. I’ve seen it happen. Volunteer somewhere where you interact with others. I say this as someone who’s been out of work 5 years and took the “bad” path to depression and watched many retires wither do to lack human connection and over all lethargic tendencies
Use or lose it is very real for anything humans do…
So get into exercise, get into FOSS, interact with people!
oh, mid-40 front end webdev here, i resigned this summer and i’m never looking back, moving into pastry. I haven’t touched my computer since mid september, all i do is whatever can be done on my phone or ipad (mostly entertainment, social and artistic activities).
Outside is pretty cool too.
Yeah, I still need quite a bit more money but absolutely feeling the same thing, at least when I engage in generic terms.
So far in my actual day to day job, it hasn’t encroached in a unwelcome way, but I have more autonomy by being in charge of the project I work on. Pressure in the abstract has been there, but also pulled back since they decided slop-heavy usage is too expensive.
So this article is actualy why I’m allowing myself to be a little optimistic that I won’t feel the crushing weight of wanting to just get out of the whole industry, if the general mindset swings toward being frugal about AI token usage.
Everyone I’ve seen retire at 40 ends up drinking every day from midday and watching game shows for hours on end.
Point being, find something else to focus on or you’ll drift.
And enjoy!
Man so envious of that, I’m just a bit younger and I can’t retire like that.
I will be sailing my job until they fire me. Don’t know what will happen next but maybe I can find something that’s more down to earth with my local community and still brings some joy.
good ending, took too long maybe
Make sure your retirement is not in the hands of any banks or retirement funds.
They will all go belly up in case the bubble bursts.
Congrats on your retirement!, I also just pulled the trigger myself. I think industry managers will need to see AI fail for a few years before they wake the eff up around where to use it and how to control it. Its like we are using horse reins on cars lately. The problem is that AI makes very compelling demos. It lets you fill in the blanks with what looks like an instant, high functioning product. You dont initially see the long tail of mediocrity and imprecision. We are used to just assuming tech products are consistent, endlessly iterable, and user friendly.
It is useful, I’ll give it that. But… we are barely doing code reviews anymore though, which is terrifying. Exec says invest in extra scoping an extra testing, and ignore the software creation part, let AI do its thing and trust it. May work. May not. My replacement will find out, poor bastard. Good luck to them.
I “retired” (fancy way of saying “was laid off”) from programming seven years ago and I haven’t written a line of code since. I’m happy to have completely missed out on the AI experience, although since I spent the last few years of my career mostly managing a team of offshore developers, I feel like I got close enough. Now I own my own small house and I drive a school bus and I couldn’t be happier. At some point AI will be driving the school buses (so that the kids can still go to school and have AI do all their work for them) but hopefully I will have died a painless death by then.
Fair. I have been a Linux hobbyist for decades. Up until being replaced by AI a year or two ago, I worked tech support and tech billing/contract roles for infrastructure and software giants. I have zero interest in perpetuating purportedly legal but sketchy billing schemes, using or selling AI, or enabling any foreign (or local) genocides or surveillance states with my work. I’d rather make less money and have my ethics a little less shattered.
The main reasons I work are to learn new skills and to get health insurance and money. I can learn skills on my own, I’m doing okay on money because my hobbies are mostly free or pay me a little bit. It’s mostly the threat of financial destitution, homelessness, and dying in a gutter because I caught a cold without health insurance that have kept me working full time, even when my freelancing was a big portion of my income. If we can solve the healthcare issue, everything will change for the better. I truly believe that.
If we can solve the healthcare issue, everything will change for the better. I truly believe that.
Exactly the reason the right have been fighting healthcare coverage so hard sor so long; they know that chaining your health insurance to
the anchor around your neckyour job, it makes you less likely to leave.Hell, assuming your company gets bought midyear, you can experience the joys of not having health insurance while you technically do have it! I had a few weeks this year effectively without insurance because the massive corpo fucknuggets that bought my comparatively tiny company weren’t competent enough to have the new insurance company (that they use for themselves) loaded with all of our info, so we got left in the lurch while being told for over a week that “they were loading our data now” (a week into the process) or they “had escalated the problem to the highest management” a full 5 days and a weekend before they started sending out paper letters with the info (that still didn’t fucking work for 2 days).
man i’m like a couple years behind ya. could you tell me the ballpark of what you’re retiring on so i can be envious :D
I dunno if retiring during a global depression will be a good idea
it is when you have a giant pile of money to live off of and buy stocks on firesale
Take how much you spend in a typical year and multiply by 25. Pre-trump conventional wisdom theorized that you need that much, and you cant count the money you lock into the house you will live in, unless you plan to sell it when you need to and pay rent.
Unfortunately the truth is AI is probably going to get good enough that it won’t matter anymore. I guess I’m just hopeful that it’s gonna build a space elevator or something and we actually get some benefit out of surrendering agency. There are enough open weight models that the millionaires won’t get there tech bro mad max dysutopian fantasy world with them at the top.
It’s quite literally not.
To paraphrase Doctrow, no matter how fast you breed horses, they will never foal a locomotive.
We might one day create AI that is good enough for this but it won’t be anything based on the currently trending transformer-based LLMs
Source: I completed a PhD in Natural Language Processing and transformers 2018-2022 and unfortunately for my own sanity I am still in the space
That’s cool but some guy who read a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction about it says we’re all gonna die. /s in case it’s needed lol.
what’s the p(doom) for me putting my phone in a blender for being reminded about this
I did my master’s thesis on AI feature extraction during the same time period. I’ll second what this person is saying.
Sure, you credentialed people have a certain view, but I will wait till I hear from a social media tech bro, thank you very much.
Yes, I agree. While these highly intelligent people with degrees have their opinion, I would prefer to hear from buttnuggettroll453 about why AI will soon be better than all the humans.
yeah, everyone who have 0 knowledge always is like “IT WILL GET BETTER SOON REPLACE EVERYONE” oh fuck off already, because you know shit doesn’t mean people know shit too
Well your angry about it aren’t you. Not sure how that’s my fault though.
Can’t wait to see this exact headline another 50 times but none of the companies in question facing any consequences for their actions, profit driven society is so fucking stupid.
The consequence is that they waste money and time. Which actually matters for businesses strapped for money or time. But most of the megacorps are swimming in money and in time. They waste those all the time even without the AI because the upper management accepts kickbacks to contract with the worst (but also the bribiest) contractors. And mid management, and everyone else, put their own personal interests ahead of the company’s. Now that the AI hype is here, they have a new tool to waste time and money with, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Big business is a lumbering inefficient bureaucracy by its nature.
they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)
they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc
two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.
€19 sounds like a per user subscription deal, but I didn’t think they were available to commercial customers anymore? What am I missing?
it’s 19 USD, not €. got confused. I think it’s this one https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing-and-usage/organizations-and-enterprises/seats-and-billing-cycles
Wait, we’re not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.
So next, you’ll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.
sounds like they are creating another excuse for another round layoffs.
AI is coming: Time to lay off people
AI is costing too much: Time to lay off people
they are already in the middle of one. (huge It consulting company)
But you better keep that output high. In hindsight this was so obviously gonna happen
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.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.
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?
Also not the person you responded to but in my experience, yes. I don’t tell it to “save it in its memory files” because I don’t think that’s a thing, but including “do not actually edit any files, only propose changes” somewhere in the initial prompt of a conversation has worked well for me.
Not the person you responded to, but yeah, it seems to in my case.
I’m one of those people that don’t exist, in that any AI code I generate is reviewed prior to running. I’ve been forced to use fucking copilot to check in the source I have to a new company repository, and so far diffing the code checked into source control is unchanged, but it seems to be good about updating the header to the standard in supposed to be using. I’m also having it do basic reviews of the code and only updating the files as I see fit.
At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn’t using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.
A couple of months ago, everyone’s AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.
Now they’re starting layoffs. Go figure.
now they are laying of staff? What, did they blow their whole budget out?
They were burning over $250k every single day. So yeah, gotta pay the reaper I guess.
No no no. Most companies already knew this. Most bosses just pretended it wasn’t happening so they could ride the bubble and bonus themselves… We all said this was what would happen, and it did happen, and only complete suckers would still have fallen for it. Of course some CEOs are suckers, but many of them are simply greedy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 😂
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…
Being short staffed is the whole point. They believe (where they are right or wrong) AI will replace large number employees. For example in my company where that are pushing vibe coding, my boss said that now they believe that the large projects need less people.
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.
I see people who embraced vibe coding still working overtime and over weekends, more than before.
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.
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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.
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.
This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.
Trend chasing upper class idiots
This. You’d almost think people are dumb enough to blame bad management decisions on software.
is that guy yawning
I think he’s waiting for someone to insert a penis into his mouth
Alright, I’ll do it…
Careful… lots of teeth showing
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.
Hahaha. No. Management is not losing jobs over this. Not in the quantities needed.
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.”
“Now watch this drive”
You forgot the part where they’re on the golf course and already know each other and are acting like there’d be an interview because pretending to be poor and like the world is based to any degree on merit is actually hilarious to them.
No I know it’s a mostly futile hope.
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’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.
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.
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 like promotion to management (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.
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. 👍
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.
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.
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!
“Why would I deceive you?”
She just exudes “Gollum pretending to be Sméagol” energy.
I feel some very disturbing mental health issues.
The salesman took me out for a steak dinner and then a strip club! He’s my friend!
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.
