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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#211

Post by barchar »

It's often overlooked that bubbles like this actually validate themselves. It's not like the demand, revenue, or profits are fake or made up.

Investment mechanically _causes_ profits, and if you're as big as big tech is then some of that profit will be yours. In the end stupid investment will end badly, but until it actually plays out it can very much be rational for _everyone_ involved; Even if none of them are lying about anything.

Bubbles probably don't even have to hurt after the fact if the government is willing to support demand when things go south. The real cost is in the things we could have done instead. At least GPUs are genuinely useful (especially with the end of Moore's law), Energy investment is never a bad thing in the end, and those assets have very long useful lives.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#212

Post by uhoh-itsmaciek »

carlosjobim wrote: post #2

Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend…

>The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted.

It wasn't a curse. It was basically divine punishment for hubris. Maybe the reference is a bit on the nose.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#213

Post by kakacik »

friendzis wrote: post #199
01100011 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to jump on the train. I'm a cranky, old, embedded SWE and claude 4.5 is changing how I work. Before that I laughed off LLMs. They were trash. Claude still has issues, but damn, I think if I don't integrate it into my workflow I'll be out of work or relegated to work in QA or devops(where I'd likely be forced to use it). No, it's not going to write all your code for you. Yes your skills are still needed to d…

The moment your code departs from typical patterns in the training set or ("agentic environment") LLMs fall over at best (i.e. can't even find the thing) or do some random nonsense at worst. IMO LLMs are still at the point where they require significant handholding, showing what exactly to do, exactly where. Otherwise, it's constant review of random application of different random patterns, which may or may not satis…

A contrarian opinion - I also didn't jump the train yet, its even forbidden in our part of company due to various regulations re data secrecy and generally slow adoption.

Also - for most seasoned developers, actual dev activity is miniscule part of overall efforts. If you are churning code like some sweatshop every single day at say 45 its by your own choice, you don't want to progress in career or career didn't push you up on its own.

What I want to say - that miniscule part of the day when I actually get my hands on the code are the best. Pure creativity, puzzle solving, learning new stuff (or relearning when looking at old code). Why the heck would I want to lose or dilute this and even run towards it? It makes sense if my performance is rated only based on code output, but its not... that would be a pretty toxic place to be polite.

Seniority doesn't come from churning out code quicker. Its more long the lines of communication, leading others, empathy, toughness when needed, not avoiding uncomfortable situations or discussions and so on. No room for llms there.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#214

Post by friendzis »

highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies.

What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level.

At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enough" in multiple contexts) operating at "good enough" enough level in multiple verticals becomes profitable over operating ant specialized level and this is when the general purpose technology starts replacing specialized technology/personnel. Very much not all general-purpose technologies reach this stage at all, this is only applicable to highly successful general purpose technologies.

Then market share of general technology starts increasing rapidly while at the same time market share of specialized technologies drops, RnD in general tech explodes while specialized technologies start stagnating. Over time this may lead to cutting edge general purpose technologies surpassing the now-old specialized technologies, taking over in most areas.

> A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead. > everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars.

We are nearly two decades since the Tesla "expensive sports car" and pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option, despite massive subsidies. If anything, everyone at Toyota were right. Furthermore, they have been developing their electric drive-trains in parallel via the hybrid tech: surfing the same wave while raking in profits.

In fact, BEV sales outpace other drive-train sales only in regions where either registrations of those are artificially limited, or the government heavily subsidizes both purchase and maintenance costs. If you don't have government subsidized rooftop solar the cost per mile of BEV is more or less on par with a HEV and in most cases worse than diesel for long range trips.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#215

Post by m4rtink »

bostik wrote: post #195
SoftTalker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

Right now I see "use AI" to be in the same phase as "add Radium" was shortly after Curie's discovery. A vial of magic pixie dust to sprinkle on things, laden with hidden dangers very few yet understand. But I also keep in mind that radioactivity truly transformed some very unexpected fields.[ß] AI and LLMs are tools. The best tools tend to be highly focused in their application. I expect AI to eventually find its way…

AI - like asbestos but radioactive!

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#217

Post by alfiedotwtf »

I don’t know a single developer who is NOT using LLMs in some form, so either they or their company are paying for it. And that’s just a single service - they probably have a home account, and another few different services to test things, so it’s not exactly making zero.

Lately I’ve been finding LLM output to be hit and miss, but at the same time, I wouldn’t say they’re useless…

I guess the ultimate question is - if you’re currently paying for an LLM service, could you see yourself sometime in the future disabling all of your accounts? I’d bet no!

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#218

Post by whstl »

monkaiju wrote: post #88
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

All I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...

I recently had a very interesting interaction in a few small startups I freelanced for recently.

In a 1-year company, the only tech person that's been there for more than 3-4 months (the CTO), only really understands a tiny fraction of the codebase and infrastructure, and can't review code anymore. Application size has blown up tremendously despite being quite simple. Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends, and sales is CONSTANTLY complaining about small bugs that take weeks to solve.

The funny thing is that this is an AI company, but I see the CTO constantly asking developers "how much of that code is AI?". Paranoia has set in for him.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#219

Post by oblio »

sfgvvxsfccdd wrote: post #94
oblio wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps devel…

> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.

Pick other examples, then.

We have superhuman coding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45977992), where are the superhuman coded major apps from small companies that would benefit most from these superhumans?

Heck, we have superhuman requirements gathering, superhuman marketing, superhuman almost all white collar work, so it should be even faster!

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#220

Post by whstl »

overfeed wrote: post #175
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of firing and replacing me with AI my boss will pay me to use AI he would've used..?

No one's switching to AI cold turkey. Think of it as training your own, cheaper replacement. SWEs & their line managers develop & test AI workflows, while giving the bosses time to evaluate AI capabilities, then hopefully shrink the headcount as close to 0 as possible without shrinking profits. Right now, it's juniors who're getting squeezed.

I don't think bosses are smart enough to pull this off.
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