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CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs

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

#321

Post by vips7L »

DanielHB wrote: post #292
onion2k wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Even if that were 100% true, it only collapses the coding effort to near zero. Anyone who's built and shipped a real product should know that coding is maybe 50% of the work, and on a mature product it can be much less.

I work on a 10+ year old codebase, there are some weeks I barely change any code. Sometimes it takes hours of discussion and tracking down decision-makers just to figure out what the intended behavior is.

AI fans would say “this is what the spec is for”.

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

#322

Post by vips7L »

amai wrote: post #258

AI is the new outsourcing. It is cheap in the short term, but in the medium to long term it generates many problems, like loss of know-how and competitivness, huge maintenance cost, loss of control, and dependency on other foreign companies, with misaligned goals compared to your company. Before using AI ask yourself: Would you outsource this task, with all the risk that come with it? If yes, go for it. But if no, th…

Fits perfectly with typical capitalistic short sightedness.

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

#323

Post by BobbyJo »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

Software companies really are just operations companies that use software to deliver services.

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

#324

Post by ksec »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #39

Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work." I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing". There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported. I liken it to having children. Conceiving them…

Or more like the last 20% of work takes the same effort as first 80% of work. Which is the 80/20 rule. But increasingly I believe the 90/10 rules works better.

As a matter of fact I tend to think of it the first 80% is 80% of work, the 80% of the 20% left is same as first 80% of work. The last 4% polishing is another first 80% of the work. I think that is a good rule for general project management.

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

#325

Post by koe123 »

Qhemlomo wrote: post #273
koe123 wrote: 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"

Plenty of people say vaccines contain microchips. Research is not linear so this simple linear regression I see people doing regarding capability scaling makes no sense. Nobody can forecast a breakthrough, what makes you believe you can?

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

#326

Post by Qhemlomo »

koe123 wrote: post #325
Qhemlomo wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Plenty of people say vaccines contain microchips. Research is not linear so this simple linear regression I see people doing regarding capability scaling makes no sense. Nobody can forecast a breakthrough, what makes you believe you can?

People can interpolate.

But lets be honest, I do not know, thats true.

I ahven't seen technology like this which affects me directly. But from past we know what disruptive technology looks and feels like. The weaving chair/loom disrupted an industry, energy, steam engine, internet.

Now we have the most generic technology an LLM/AI at a time were every major problem was solved:

We have the internet which allows for fast communication, we have very fast hardware, we have a supply chain which can react/act very fast globally and we have the richest companies on our planet investing into this technology unseen amounts of money. We have a local race between the richest companies on the world and a global race between the biggest world powers on our planet.

And we have the smartest people on our planet involved in this too. A lot of peple from academy went to the industry, some gave up their tenure for AI.

It would be very ignorant to assume that all of this can't lead to significant and fast change in our society.

It might not, but its like looking at a huge wildfire 50km away and just going to bed.

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

#327

Post by Qhemlomo »

chadgpt3 wrote: post #302
Qhemlomo wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" AGI has been 6 months away for years now." No one said 2 years ago, that AGI is coming in 2026.

You're absolutely right — they said 2025.

I'm following plenty of people, i never heard 2025

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

#328

Post by misano »

sbarre wrote: post #10
pavel_lishin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> though this is not an exact figure You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.

So what if it is? The example still stands. A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business. For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-) So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you. T…

exactly

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

#329

Post by misano »

jjk166 wrote: post #94
yCombLinks wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like 5 humans got replaced by AI. I don't think most people worry about whether all humans will be replaced, simply whether or not they will be replaced, or people they care about.

Or all 15 people are still employed doing the work of 22.5. Or even more people have been hired now that each person can generate 50% more value than they previously could. Or people are reallocated from the AI assisted task to another. Or some combination thereof.

I had thought about this and this is an accounting issue. It's not always the case that if one worker can build one meter of rail per hour, then with a thousand workers we can finish one kilometer of rail in an hour. Maybe more efficiency is not needed and we need to produce a cheaper product, so we make layoffs.

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

#330

Post by misano »

figers wrote: post #202
misano wrote: post #5

A common misconception about AI is that it is intended to fully replace humans, which is incorrect. The purpose of AI is to reduce the need for human labor, and it has already been doing so. For example—though this is not an exact figure—a task that previously required 15 people might now only need 10. In no instance has the human element been completely replaced; rather, the reliance on manual labor has simply been…

You'd think we would see a large spike in unemployment if AI was reducing the number of employees needed for jobs the way these CEO talk about AI replacing people...

In a free market, there are many competitors, new startups, companies and teams may be created, but the general trend is that fewer people are needed to produce a product as productivity increases. A few years ago, a programmer would look for a front-end programmer and vice versa, but now it is not an obvious issue because they can almost work full stack for their small projects.
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