"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Not everyone is using AI for everything
191–200 of 565 posts
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll find it hard to pin down what you mean by "everything" otherwise you wouldn't have said that. Nobody uses the internet for everything. Local models are highly likely to dominate in the long run as "good enough" inevitably becomes trivially cheap. This is a very different pattern of incentives and adoption compared to the internet. I think it's more similar to the advent of personal computers. They had a brief…
It seems fair to leave the definition of "everything" to a reasonable person's interpretation. It's obvious that the internet is beyond ubiquitous in modern life. I agree that where models run will will change over time, probably they'll run everywhere, but it's still the same kind of AI we are talking about. Smartphones are personal computers.
Just about every app has a "help" button, but do you really use it? What about captions on a video or any number of other accessibility features? They're in everything, but not used for everything.
It makes perfect sense that they exist and were way overdue for an update, but they're just extra blades on the multitool. Perhaps in some designs they become more integral, but that is expected and invisible.
Yes "everything", but that's not even close to sufficient to become a huge breakthrough like the internet.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#193I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added
As a contractor who built a lot of predictive systems and workflows in last three years I can tell you that quite often there is a specific request to put AI into it even when it is not needed and would objectively make the system worse, slower and more expensive. The AI psychosis is a real thing.
Maybe it should have clicked earlier in life and I'm perhaps that much dumb dumb, but it only recently occurred to me (from experiencing it at two very different companies and discussing with peers having reached a certain seniority level more or less at the same time) how dysfunctional many companies are, and how often they produce incentives that are misaligned with the overall company goals and sustainability principles. I blame in large part a layer of middle management that selfishly puts itself above all else, misguides, misrepresents, because it essentially pays larger dividends (literally and not) to "play the networking game than to be an efficient and effective productive structure". Maybe that's to be expected in a services-driven economy where the value of the work is immaterial and subjective (and the whole phenomenon of bullshit jobs).
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#194On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…
still 10x better than the 'finish this leetcode tweak algorithm in 20 minutes and tell me your thought process along the way, and yes you will never need that skill in the real job but we need find out who had time to cram for the algorithm books in the last few months'
How are the technical interviews these days? Do they still ask Leetcode style questions or is it getting deprecated?
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. Why? If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?
Often the hiring manager will have the person to be hired somewhere in his report chain. So if a person can't effectively communicate and can't properly respond to a "I only have 2 minutes, shoot", then I am getting a future liability into the company that will slow down all future communications. I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the s…
That does sound like a bad org tho, sorry to say that.
Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.
Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.
But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#196On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…
Just answer honestly, and include a note that you intend to fully comply with the companies AI policies. Thats the best answer anyone can give.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#197On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…
Replying as a hiring manager since this might help other post-grad job seekers: - Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years. - Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.
your post on Who's Hiring provides some needed context...
want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#198I understand the point being made, but it does feel a bit like writing a post in the early days of the internet saying: "No, everyone is not using the internet for everything." Which would have been entirely true when written, and entirely false a relatively short time later. Everyone does use the internet for everything today, and everyone will use AI for everything soon.
In my non-tech circle, most people don't even realize how the internet is running literally everything. Even if we start to use mass scale AI for something, they wouldn't realize or care much about it.
They at best turn on the TV to watch netflix or look at the phone to send messages on whatsapp.
If all of that went away tomorrow, they'd be inconvenienced at best and then go on with their day to day life.
This feels like we are literally all in our IT echo chamber where we throw stuff on walls and go crazy, while the world is sunshine and rainbows, always been.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#199A counterpoint to this is that we have some real different definitions of AI.
If you consider things like the machine learning filters in your smartphone camera and Google's AI Overviews for searches it's entirely plausible that the US is currently at 75%+ of AI usage.
Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Acknowledging that my perception might be skewed because there are still a ton of social safety nets in place. The same might not be true everywhere.
Last time I was in Germany I saw what appeared to be homeless children
Welfare doesn't entirely eliminate homelessness.
It's… like… not that simple.