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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Outside is pretty cool too.
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
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
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.
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
I did my master’s thesis on AI feature extraction during the same time period. I’ll second what this person is saying.
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
This is my own fault. I’ve been on Facebook for way too long honestly it’s been since 2007 don’t know but now they won’t let me login. I guess I don’t know what I wanna do but these bastards need to die. I guess this is my reckoning gosh darn
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.
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
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.
sounds like they are creating another excuse for another round layoffs.
they are already in the middle of one. (huge It consulting company)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh look, the thing we all knew was gonna happen is happening.
It’s weird - competent management wouldn’t require employees to fly helicopters to work without flight training, but many managers somehow think, “Everybody use AI now,” makes sense.
