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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

ceodinner.substack.com

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Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#71

Post by [deleted] »

lkbm wrote: post #64
bgwalter wrote: post #27

It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now. "AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies. This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was base…

I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping was maybe 30% as fast. I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.

[deleted]

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#72

Post by delfinom »

karlgkk wrote: post #46
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #44

With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI musi…

That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.

> if you’re making engineer money,

SV & big tech engineer money.

Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#73

Post by m4rtink »

GMoromisato wrote: post #40

If energy is indeed the limiting factor here, then maybe the companies building space-based compute (in which energy scales linearly) will remain after the wildfire. The key is for them to build before the money runs out--I'm not sure they will have enough time.

That is a very optimistic scaling assumption - and would almost certainly require substantial in space infrastructure (large scale lunar and asteroid mining and refining, lunar mass drivers, at least solid core nuclear drives) before you can even thin building all the necessary radiators and structural mass.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#75

Post by pizlonator »

khannn wrote: post #65
never_inline wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's AI writing. Big words and rule of 3.

I forgot about the rule of 3 but that's obviously AI writing

Yeah maybe the AI thought leaders will be replaced by AI

But not in the sense of singularity and explosive intelligence, but in the sense of a flaming explosive bubble of slop

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#76

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

throw310822 wrote: post #37
Eisenstein wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone. Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money. I think it should be natural that jobs end…

> we haven't gotten more share of the money. But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine, instant access to information anywhere in the world.

Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in

    the number of expenses required to minimally live
       (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and
    the ever escalating costs of those added requirements
Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.

More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#77

Post by pizlonator »

com2kid wrote: post #47
pizlonator wrote: post #21

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?

Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.

That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening?

Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#78

Post by karlgkk »

delfinom wrote: post #72
karlgkk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.

> if you’re making engineer money, SV & big tech engineer money. Majority of engineering fields do not make that kind of money to retire at 50. Comfortable compared to the rest of the country, sure.

I think maybe that was implied, considering the topic of conversation and website we’re on.

That said if you’re making $250k+ a year and not on track to retire by 50, seriously please open a retirement calculator and figure out what you need to do to get there.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#79

Post by jakeydus »

striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

You forgot the italics on Y

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#80

Post by jakeydus »

pizlonator wrote: post #77
com2kid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.

That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening? Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.

I think that is it happening is an important question, but “does the consumer actually want it to happen” should be equally important. It won’t be, because the c suite will just make the decision for us all, but it ought to be.
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