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Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

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41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#41

Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines. How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

It's not. If my work (as a software developer) can be replaced more cheaply by a machine, it should be.

I'm still quite a bit better than SotA models, but I imagine that won't be true in 2034.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people get a chuckle out of it, but does it not make more sense to have CEO LLM that will make decisions without regard for its own needs, self-interest, conflicts and so on? Honestly, the longer this particular debate rages on, I think shareholders are looking the wrong set of humans to replace.

Liability. Till we solve this, we cant really give AI any real responsibilities.

It is already used widely across industries where one would think people should be more conservative ( healthcare transcription services come to mind, but it is hardly the only example of this ). As always in America, only lawsuits will shows us how the dust has settled.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#43

Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines. How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

It's different because automation of ports actually works

About as well as automation of devs.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#44

It's only a matter of time until one of these jackasses creates a ChatGPT wrapper called scab.ai and markets it for this exact use case.

Imagine. If there’s no more consumers with money to buy shit I wonder if these CEOs are going to realize where their market went.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#45

Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines. How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

To be fair, I think the public bristled at the longshoremen strike because the vast majority of their leverage comes not from (most) of their jobs being particularly high-skill but from the fact that they can unilaterally destroy the entire economy for everyone else. Add to that the fact that their union chief was extremely blunt about the whole thing, and that longshoremen make, on average, triple the average household income in the US, it wasn't a very sympathetic cause.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#46

Quite recently, lots of people were calling on almost-striking longshoremen to be replaced by machines. How is replacing tech workers with AI any different?

I look forward to executives trying it and discovering exactly how fucked they will be. I get the chance to talk to a lot of people who think this will work, and, it's really striking how poor their grasp of the business is.

What if they use it as an augmentation rather than completely replacement? Could it be used to reduce time required per person? Could it be used to reduce headcount, without a lack of quality?

Replacing your whole workforce with a machine, at this state, is silly, but that's not the only option.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#48
post #16

I find it a bit odd that Perplexity still have a human CEO.

I know people get a chuckle out of it, but does it not make more sense to have CEO LLM that will make decisions without regard for its own needs, self-interest, conflicts and so on? Honestly, the longer this particular debate rages on, I think shareholders are looking the wrong set of humans to replace.

Just hire a tall, handsome man with a full head of hair, but have all of their decisions and public statements scripted by CEO-BOT. You could train the LLM on a huge corpus of yes-men and sycophants, until it can perfectly imitate the output of a real CEO.

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#49
I like Perplexity as a product. I’ve used the product a bit and was always impressed that it seemed pretty balanced.

Why would the leadership of a fairly popular, generally well-liked company with a generally useful, generally well-liked product take a pretty strident stance at the maximally high-temperature moment: fuck labor as a bloc, we’ll cross the strike lines?

Don’t technology companies want to avoid this kind of political shit and just build and ship?

Re: Perplexity CEO offers AI company's services to replace striking NYT staff

#50
post #12

Honestly, the fact that he posted it the way he did, publicly in a tweet suggests he wasn’t trying to undermine workers but rather wanted to be seen as supporting election coverage. Based on his past interviews, he seems quite autistic in ways. But really I think this could have been a good opportunity to strike some licensing deal in exchange for technology, had he been a bit more discreet

Why should he care about another company's workers? He should care about his own company and workers and gaining them new customers.

If the idea of immoral business (under the false guise of "amorality" - false because amorality still implies the avoidance of explicit harm) becomes too widespread, the resulting suffering will be large enough that people will start killing CEOs (or the closest thing they can get) in numbers. Which, to be clear, is bad.
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