This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If your company uses AI (in the colloquial LLM sense), it deserves to go bankrupt.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Period.
If it uses it as a core pillar of their business, the owners deserve to empty their entire life earnings to the employees in perpetuity and they shouldn't ever own anything better than a cardboard box home.
We need to make using this absolutely painful for owners.
For people like Altman, it should be death row worthy.
I hate the notion of "laying off people to generate returns" so fucking much.
No higher ROI AND they now have a mission critical dependency on a powerful third party (rather than on the far more fragmented and generally weaker counterparties which are employees).
Even on pure business terms and not even considering the longer term accumulation of problems and hence fall in returns over time due to second order problems of using AI in certain areas (i.e. the consequences of the much higher high-severity-error rates of AI compared to even barelly trained humans or the inability of AI to learn and improve) it's a seriously incompetent choice.
I mean, you can excuse a Manager for not understanding the higher level structural problems of AI given how much the messaging around it for non-techies so far has just swamped people with "butterflies and rainbows" views on AI, but considering the risks of dependencies on third parties is a central skill for any decent Upper level manager as is looking at what an investment is returning and pivoting when it's not delivering.
If you lay off all the humans so AI can be cheap labour for corporations then there are only three alternatives.
Or you can start a land war in asia. Talked to a 44 year old on the train who's basically living at a shelter. He would join the army if they would take him....
you also end up with AI buying AI from AI as there are no humans to generate or recieve the AI output.
🤔🧐😈
Maybe we shoild all rush into doing things we dont undrrstand
The big shots try to hold it back.
Fools try to wish it away.
The hopeful depend on a world without end.
Whatever the hopeless may say.
Once politicians start to decry it, it's too late.
I think replacing my boss might be possible. The error and hallucination quota seems similar.
I feel like a variation of this exact article gets posted here every single day for the past year or so, and every time the same comments show up underneath. Nobody ever opens one of these threads and discovers a surprising or novel point of view.
I don't understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don't like. It's so bizarre to me.
I don't understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don't like.
If people left me alone about it then I wouldn’t talk about it…reality is closer to this.
Where do they not leave you alone about it? 95% of AI related content I encounter online is people complaining about it on Lemmy.
Do you use Google search? That's just one quick example I can think of off the top of my head.
Edit: In case it's not clear enough, I was talking about Google shoehorning AI into the search bar and results.
Work? It sounds like thousands of idiot ceos are buying into the fake hype over this shit and forcing it on their employees. Before firing them. And then there's the AI slop articles and imagery that's cropping up everywhere...
Well it’s not just that people don’t like it, there are a lot of people whose jobs are on the line because of it.
So I guess it’s kind of hard for them not to keep talking about the thing that’s threatening their livelihood, which makes sense.
And of course they want to see news that tells them it isn’t going to be so bad and that their expertise will still be in demand.
I disagree - people's jobs are not on the line because of AI. They are on the line because of the economy and AI is the excuse/fad of the year so AI is what is blamed. However I maintain it is the economy not AI at fault.
Yes. But if it wasn’t for this particular fad their jobs would not have been on the line because there would be no alternative for their employers.
And of course it is not AI that is doing this. AI, can’t feel, think or do anything. It is simply another tool. Just like production robots have replaced automotive factory personnel on a large scale. And you couldn’t blame the people who lost their job for hating the machines that replaced them. It may not be rational, but it is understandable.
And of course if we are going to try to rationalise things, it is also not because of the economy. It is the people who benefit from replacing people with AI: the CEOs, employers and shareholders who care more about the companies’ profits than the human beings they employ. The people who have dehumanised their employees so much that in their minds, they are simply a tool to be used and discarded without any regard for the lives they are destroying. The reason why these people are the way they are and act the way they do has many factors that are way too complicated for any employee who is about to lose their job to an AI to understand.
But if it wasn’t for this particular fad their jobs would not have been on the line because there would be no alternative for their employers.
There have been many layoffs over the years. Laying people off because the economy isn't good is nothing new, and AI did nothing to make it more or less possible.
If the economy was really good AI would have been used not to replace people but to make them more productive thus earning the company even more money.
Machines also kept replacing car factory workers even when the economy was thriving, so that’s not it.
I’m pretty sure it’s human greed.
While very different in some ways, some parallels between the AI-driven layoffs and the offshore outsourcing layoffs of the mid-2000s are striking.
Ultimately both scenarios were/are driven by corporate greed. And it looks like the AI one is backfiring for many of the same reasons as the offshore one.
They are replacing experienced staff who have strong critical thinking abilities and hands-on knowledge, and the replacements lack the institutional knowledge and the ability to look at the big picture, and they substitute speed for methodological discernment.
Time is cyclical.
Shocker. Just another excuse to fire higher paid workers, point at a line going up (until it doesn't), say AI a lot, and then hire lower paid workers for the same (or worse now fighting AI in some cases) job.
This is the real answer. AI is just an excuse to cut costs while the economy is going to shit. By claiming it is all about AI, they get to cut and slash all they want without signaling to the stock market and their competitors that things are going to shit. It also allows them to cut without blaming the economy because pointing out the failing economy would upset the man-baby that is fucking up the entire world economy.
Agentic AI. I always cringe a little when I hear that term.
Like, no shit the plagiarism machine that cannot create anything truly novel and can only regurgitate other people's already existing work can't replace professionals. I legitimately hope all of these companies go under.
They will, but they'll take you with them
Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to 'optimize your token usage with well crafted prompts the machine can understand' otherwise you'll burn through the energy Cleveland uses in a year, and end up costing the company millions.
Dumbest fucking bubble so far other than tulips and beanie babies
No it's dumber. Beanie babies at least left you with a little doll kids could enjoy.
Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to ‘optimize your token usage
In some companies, 'optimize your token usage' means using as many tokens as possible.
Yeah part of our performance evaluation at my company now is how much of our code is "made by AI". I said sure buddy, added a code attribution to Claude so all of my code gets marked as AI generated even though I manually edit Claude's subpar output all the time.
As long as I initially generate the code with Claude I can manually change whatever I want and it still somehow marks it all as "AI-generated". It's a stupid ass metric for so many reasons, especially because of how dumb their metric-generating LLM bot is.
Indeed.
"AI is good" became "Good employees use AI" became "The more AI the better" became "The more tokens used the better the employee."
What's incredible is that none of these are self-evidently true premises, but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.
but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.
When many decision-makers are incentivized to only care about their next quarterly bonus or stock grant, just like the subprime crisis, people will absolutely set their company up to fail regardless of the consequences. Companies have trained people they are disposable so why would they act in the long term interest of the company? Economics, that is, incentives, are undefeated in making people do things. It may not be what someone intends, but being naive about economics is why adults are needed in designing reward systems (from government policy to company programs).
Two things.....
Is.....is Cleveland known for high energy usage? I don't get the reference.
Tulips had a bubble? I'm so confused.
Ah, it happened in 1634. That's why I hadn't heard of this. I wasn't born yet for a few more years.
Damn whipper snappers
Go for the flowers, stay for the etymology of fictional country names
TIL the two countries in The Princess Bride are both named after a Dutch currency
I think he just picked a decently big town as an example, and Dutch tulips were the very first stock craze.
The area is known for causing the 2003 blackout, but that was really due to the heat that day.
And that all the vibecoding they do instead will eventually turn their whole product into an unmanageable mess which cannot be salvaged.
"Yeah, lets't get rid of the knowledge of how our stuff actually works and replace it with a statistics fueled computer, woo, AI all the way!"
This is what pisses me off the most, the willful disregard for knowledge and skills in organizations.
If you don't have the knowledge or skills, specific to your oranizations needs, then you can't evaluate if the AI is doing a good job.
If every company is using the same few AIs, they're basically the same company. Everything unique about them will deteriorate until it's just corporate grey goo.
I mean... That's not really saying much will change in the majority of cases?
The companies deserves to crash and burn when they finally figure out that the AI did in fact not do such a good job after all, and there will be noone around able to fix it.
I work in the food industry in a somewhat big company in Italy. In all the productive process, we have found exactly 1 (one) application for an AI. And I'm not talking about an LLM, but about the good ol' machine learning: It's a system that checks the labels of the product to see if they are good or not. It needed training but now it can check if the labels are fit for the market faster than a person. That's it. That's the single part of the whole process in which an AI has removed a person and just because it's a job that a human couldn't do it fast enough anyway.
For the rest? The higher ups realized that there's always the need of human intervention because even the simpler work requires of a decision making that a machine simply can't do.
We also have nopilot for the computers but only because it comes with the office package that the company pays. Nobody actually uses it other than to ask it stupid things.
CEOs are getting their pockets filled so, yeah, I think its exactly the way companies think.
