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The AI Replaces Services Myth

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Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#31

Post by pjmlp »

crinkly wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently not, given that it is the bread and butter of Fortune 500 consulting.

The consultancies are successful. The customers aren’t usually quite as fortunate from experience. A great example is the current Tata disaster in the UK with M&S.

Yet they keep sending RFPs and hiring consultancies, because at the end of the day what matters are those Excel sheets, not what people on the field think about the service.

Some C level MBAs get a couple of lunches together, or a golf match, exchange a bit of give and take, discounts for the next gig, business as usual.

Have you seen how valuable companies like Tata are, despite such examples?

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#32

Post by crinkly »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
crinkly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consultancies are successful. The customers aren’t usually quite as fortunate from experience. A great example is the current Tata disaster in the UK with M&S.

Yet they keep sending RFPs and hiring consultancies, because at the end of the day what matters are those Excel sheets, not what people on the field think about the service. Some C level MBAs get a couple of lunches together, or a golf match, exchange a bit of give and take, discounts for the next gig, business as usual. Have you seen how valuable companies like Tata are, despite such examples?

Yes and you allude to the problem: you can make a turd look good with the right numbers.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#33

Post by pjmlp »

crinkly wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet they keep sending RFPs and hiring consultancies, because at the end of the day what matters are those Excel sheets, not what people on the field think about the service. Some C level MBAs get a couple of lunches together, or a golf match, exchange a bit of give and take, discounts for the next gig, business as usual. Have you seen how valuable companies like Tata are, despite such examples?

Yes and you allude to the problem: you can make a turd look good with the right numbers.

Doesn't change the facts, and how appealing AI is for those companies management.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#34

Post by Sol- »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #21

> Need an example? Good. Coding. > You must be paying your software engineers around $100,000 yearly. > Now that vibecoding is out there, when was the last time you committed to pay $100,000 to Lovable or Replit or Claude? I think the author is attacking a bit of a strawman. Yes, people won't pay human prices for AI services. But the opportunity is in democratization - becoming the dominant platform - and bundling -…

How much demand for software is there, though? I don't buy the argument that the cake will grow faster than jobs are devalued. On the bright side, prices might collapse accordingly and we'll end up in some post scarcity world. No money in software, but also no cost, maybe.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#35

Post by [deleted] »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #14

Do execs really dream of entirely removing their engineering departments? If this happens then I would expect some seriously large companies to fail in the future. For every good idea an exec has, they have X bad ideas that will cause problems and their engineers save them from those. Conversely an entirely AI engineering team will say "yes sir, right on it" to every request.

[deleted]

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#36

Post by Quarrelsome »

crinkly wrote: post #27
Quarrelsome wrote: post #14

Do execs really dream of entirely removing their engineering departments? If this happens then I would expect some seriously large companies to fail in the future. For every good idea an exec has, they have X bad ideas that will cause problems and their engineers save them from those. Conversely an entirely AI engineering team will say "yes sir, right on it" to every request.

Yes. Execs love AI because it’s the sycophant they need to massage their narcissism. I’d really love to be replaced by AI. At that point I can take a few months off paid gardening leave before they are forced to rehire me.

Idk I feel like execs would run out of make up before they accept their ideas are a pig. I worry this stuff is gonna work "just enough" to let them fool themselves for long enough to sink their orgs.

I'm envisioning a blog post on linkedin in the future:

> "How Claude Code ruined my million dollar business"

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#37

Post by neuroelectron »

I have yet to see LLMs solve any new problems. I think it's pretty clear a lot of the bouncing ball programming demos are specifically trained on to be demoed at a marketing/advertising thing. Asking AI the most basic logical question about a random video game like, what element synergies with ice spike shield in Dragon Cave Masters and it will make up some nonsense despite it being something you can look up on gamefaqs.org. Now I know it knows the game I'm talking about but in the latent space it's just another set of dimensions that flavor likely next token patterns.

Sure, if you train an LLM enough on gamefaqs.org, it will be able to answer my question as accurately as an SQL query, and there's a lot of jobs that are just looking up answers that already exist, but these systems are never going to replace engineering teams. Now, I definitely have seen some novel ideas come out of LLMs, especially in earlier models like GPT-3, where hallucinations were more common and prompts weren't normalized into templates, but now we have "mixtures" of "experts" that really keep LLMs from being general intelligences.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#38

Post by XenophileJKO »

neuroelectron wrote: post #37

I have yet to see LLMs solve any new problems. I think it's pretty clear a lot of the bouncing ball programming demos are specifically trained on to be demoed at a marketing/advertising thing. Asking AI the most basic logical question about a random video game like, what element synergies with ice spike shield in Dragon Cave Masters and it will make up some nonsense despite it being something you can look up on gamef…

I don't know, I've had O3 create some surprisingly effective Magic the Gathering decks based on newly released cards it has never seen. It just has to look up what cards are available.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#39

Post by crinkly »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #36
crinkly wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Execs love AI because it’s the sycophant they need to massage their narcissism. I’d really love to be replaced by AI. At that point I can take a few months off paid gardening leave before they are forced to rehire me.

Idk I feel like execs would run out of make up before they accept their ideas are a pig. I worry this stuff is gonna work "just enough" to let them fool themselves for long enough to sink their orgs. I'm envisioning a blog post on linkedin in the future: > "How Claude Code ruined my million dollar business"

Working out how to capitalise on their failures is the only winning proposition. My brother did pretty well out of selling Aerons.

Re: The AI Replaces Services Myth

#40

Post by outworlder »

neuroelectron wrote: post #37

I have yet to see LLMs solve any new problems. I think it's pretty clear a lot of the bouncing ball programming demos are specifically trained on to be demoed at a marketing/advertising thing. Asking AI the most basic logical question about a random video game like, what element synergies with ice spike shield in Dragon Cave Masters and it will make up some nonsense despite it being something you can look up on gamef…

I don't disagree, but your comment is puzzling. You start talking about a game (which probably lacks a lot of training data) and then extrapolate that to mean AI won't replace engineering teams. What?

We do not need AGI to cause massive damage to software engineering jobs. A lot of existing work is glue code, which AI can do pretty well. You don't need 'novel' solutions to problems to have useful AI. They don't need to prove P = NP

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