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.
OpenAI already explicitly postponed their IPO somehow hoping for a better climate to IPO in…
A certainly… optimistic expectation.
You should not try to make sense of a decision they probably used chatGPT to make. It’s bad for your metal health
NASDAQ just crested a new high this month, before stumbling last week.
If the death of the tech industry is on the horizon, I can’t see it.
DJIA crested a new high September 3rd 1929 before stumbling 3% the next week.
If death of the market was on the horizon, they couldn’t see it.
The slide being attributable to some "I told you so"s coming to pass may bode ill for the bigger "told you so"s that come due in a few months.
But the market doesn’t act rationally, both going up and going down, so who knows.
DJIA crested a new high September 3rd 1929 before stumbling 3% the next week.
And over a century later, what has become of it?
If someone bought $100 of stock in 1929, how much would it be worth today?
$100 of Krueger and Toll? $0
$100 of the entire DJIA on September 3, 1929 adjusted annually: $13,633
If you’d invested in January of 1929: $16,913
If you’d invested in January of 1920: $72,275
January of 1930: $31,708
It’s never gone to $0
This has strayed quite a bit from the assertion that there can’t be enduring problems in the current crop of AI investment because it was at a high a while back.
But to continue, if you invested in the makeup of the DJIA in 1929 and left it in those companies, you would not be having a particularly good time.
If you kept refreshing the investment in the companies deemed to be the ‘good’ ones over time, then yes, your investment fared well, but that says nothing about the enduring value of the companies that made up the index in 1929. This is the current topic. It’s also wild to be this dismissive of the Great Depression as nothing to worry about because, eventually, we decided on a new set of lines that could go up.
So “line goes up” by definition is not really an endorsement that all companies lines go up, we shift the criteria over time to make sure that we measure whatever works in that moment.
They’re already billionaires many times over. Hard to feel nervous with that kind of wealth in your pocket
If they weren’t needlessly nervous (by that I mean paranoid), they would not be in that position. Whatever their wealth, those people cannot feel safe.
Idk about that. Musk and Zuck seem like very careless people.
Musk is never happy. He’s either chasing a ketamine high or getting rage baited on twitter. Real daddy issues with him. Zuck is just a hollowed out human.
Based on the current valuations of their companies. They will likely remain 0.1%ers, but it will still hurt.
Place your bets
Place your bets
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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. 😂
Keep spending that shit left and right!
- Tell your employees to use AI without enough training.
- Tell them to keep doing it without enough money.
- Profit!
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.
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.
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.
But you better keep that output high. In hindsight this was so obviously gonna happen
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.
Ah see, they’re forgetting to tell AI “make no mistakes”
And use best practices. Or it won’t use best practices. Which best practices? Best practices, you luddite, don’t you know the best practices? Which specifically? Best practices!!!
I just don’t understand this, one can make a wall out of lots of cardboard if it’s ventilated and covered from wind and snow and rain and mist and whatever else. What one shouldn’t do is to expect that wall to be as good as a brick wall.
It’s a tool to shoot slop code where humans too repeat slop code. Replace stupid and sizey code with machine-generated same thing, but cheaper.
One would expect a commercial product to not be something main features of which rely upon generated code. At least without proper testing. Eh, OK, now I’ve remembered how I work.
My favorite is “you’re an expert in SQL”, or whatever tech.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Angry or yawning?
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.
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?
Even if that happened it would still be a terrible technology. The damage to the environment isn’t worth it.
