Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars
Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have used a compliant media and braindead investors to frame unprofitable, unsustainable, environmentally-damaging and mediocre cloud
Thing is, it doesn’t replace workers. And it won’t for the foreseeable future. Even Microsoft itself had to admit that their studies show AI assisted coding to be bad and making developers worse.
There is hardly any market where these systems can reasonably compete with exploited humans. It’s just that the tech bros have nothing left to invest in. The same idiots that pushed crypto, NFTs and the Metaverse are now pushing for AI. There is hardly any innovation anymore, so the only ways to make line go up are rent seeking and investing in bubbles in the desperate attempt, that something might stick.
It seems like we have a problem where there’s too much money at the top of society that’s trying to chase returns that can’t exist because there’s enough money at the bottom to buy products, so it just gets invested in bad ways. This will probably continue until they waste enough for their own money on bullshit that they no longer have it
You’re right in your analysis, but the prediction is wrong, I’m afraid.
The next “big thing” is taking over the government. See Musk and his gang. He’s not alone and the US isn’t the only country this is happening in. Corporations inject themselves into each and every transaction, every aspect of life and politics. That way they have essentially infinite money at their hands.
Eventually the only way rich people can get richer is by stealing from other rich people because the economy is so heavily weighted toward the rich that there’s just no money to extract from the poor. I think that’s related to what we’re seeing here … And probably everywhere else as well.
Not actually to discredit you, but I really would love to send some studies to some people I work; by any chance do you have the links to Microsoft studies
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/ai-deteriorates-your-brain-according-to-microsoft-study/ar-AA1yQnGA
Searching for AI and Microsoft is an absolute shit show, btw. There was also a study about the code quality, but I can’t find it among all the marketing bullshit.
Edit: just found another one https://futurism.com/openai-researchers-coding-fail
Translators and junior level devs.
Translation on a level an AI could do is already pretty cheap, nobody’s gonna throw a nuanced legal document at an AI and rely on it.
Junior devs are much smarter than any current AI, because they know what they want to achieve and why. There’s a reason why all the demos are toy examples. Actual code is messy and full of quirks because of weird requirements.
My case in point. Instead of farming out translation jobs for 12 languages in WPML to people, we now auto translate all content via AI. That’s jobs lost. Complicated legal docs is an edge case in the content world.
Cursor is agent mode with Claude 3.7 absolutely writes well enough after indexing our codebase to mean less junior devs. I’m sorry that doesn’t fit into your narrative.
That’s not to say the world isn’t full of AI slop, and there aren’t huge issues around LLMs, But there are some solid use cases for this technology in replacing meat bags.
I tried cursor, claude, copilot. They’re not good.
Like, they can sometimes generate 10 lines of perfectly reasonable code, but they constantly completely misunderstand my intention or simply produce garbage. But the garbage looks just good enough, that you actually have to read and understand it, which slows me down.
Maybe we’re operating in completely different worlds, but even for the junior devs in my company, typing speed was never an issue. I’m sure, within a few years LLMs can generate much better code, but I don’t see widespread unemployment. They need way too much babysitting and result in worse code.
Oh sweet summer child
See, acting like a condescending asshole without any substance is a task that AI may never take from us.
Are you a junior developer by any chance?
That’s exactly what I mean. Condescending, arrogant, and confidently incorrect.
Oh my. You completely missed the point.
No, I fully understand your point, I just think it’s shit, and since your first reaction to being challenged is a shitty attempt at belittling, I have to assume you’re about as valuable as your point.
Why would I trust the judgement of someone who can’t even fathom the concept of “someone else might have a valid point”?