Live data from Hacker News

CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

techdirt.com

271–280 of 337 posts

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#271
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow". Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.

> Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows. Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.

You say that as if "align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded" isn't one of the hardest, most fundamental problems in all of organization and management.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

I’ve been wondering if “you’re not google” when learning about googles software dev process applies to Anthropic. Anthropic is a company that A. Has cheap unlimited access to its models and B. Is probably largely insulated from the types of tradeoffs that the rest of industry has had to observe in the post-ZIRP era. Like did they break through the productivity seal? Or are they willing to spend that much more on it s…

Why try to disrupt software though?

Isn't this the classic "dev wants to do start-up, has no skills ouside dev, do builds a dev tool" trap?

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#273
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/…

I think taking Anthropic or any company in this space at face value is naive at best though. AGI has been 6 months away for years now. Surely anyone can think this through: Anthropic knows what theyre doing with their public facing repositories, they know to make things enabled by their tech seem impressive. I would consider Bun etc. examples of this. Realistically, nobody intellectually honest really knows.

No thats just not true.

Plenty of people say that by 2030 we have AGI, others estimate 10-20 years.

I personally say 5-15 years.

AI 2027 estimates for 2027: "OpenBrain automatescoding"

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#275
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how that helps, unless you actually mean open source, rather than open weights like most people do. Without everything that goes into the model, including training data, these things are opaque.

Actual open source is hard without a big war chest that allows you to flagrantly steal the training data.

Honest question, I wonder why that is? Surely we have smart humans that did not read and learn "all the books". Can AI not be trained by re-reading material multiple times to reinforce?

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt. Maybe a couple of years ago, but these days, Opus 4.8 is frankly writing better software than what I've seen over the previous decades in non-tech enterprise. These previous two months, we've replaced so much technical debt we've been dragging along for the previous 5 years as our team went from 25 to 3 people. This is in non-tech ent…

> Maybe a couple of years ago, but these days, Opus 4.8... No. Opus 4.8 still writes bad code, just like every other time AI boosters have claimed "but the newest models are really good".

The code I get out of Opus 4.8 is better than the code produced by most programmers I've met.

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#278
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think taking Anthropic or any company in this space at face value is naive at best though. AGI has been 6 months away for years now. Surely anyone can think this through: Anthropic knows what theyre doing with their public facing repositories, they know to make things enabled by their tech seem impressive. I would consider Bun etc. examples of this. Realistically, nobody intellectually honest really knows.

No thats just not true. Plenty of people say that by 2030 we have AGI, others estimate 10-20 years. I personally say 5-15 years. AI 2027 estimates for 2027: "OpenBrain automatescoding"

Genuine question - What part of ”that” is just not true?

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual open source is hard without a big war chest that allows you to flagrantly steal the training data.

Honest question, I wonder why that is? Surely we have smart humans that did not read and learn "all the books". Can AI not be trained by re-reading material multiple times to reinforce?

Start up a seti at home style of open source LLM training! Assuming there is an ability to merge the sub models trained on each user's home PC into a larger model...

Re: CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

#280
AI impacts so much. So many white collar chores just get obliterated with AI. Legal & regulatory docs, production planning, sales materials, etc. Just yesterday I used AI to generate 235 new system docs based on our codebase, and added automated .md -> html publishing so final drafts go straight to the website. This work that would've taken a contractor 1-2 weeks got done in a day, by me, someone who definitely isn't a technical writer.

When the person who knows what's needed can handle the technical execution themselves, you no longer need that second person.

I certainly wouldn't say you need "more humans"

Post reply on HN