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AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

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Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#51

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

stephen_g wrote: post #49
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...

Hopefully it’s better for individual strings, but I’ve heard a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-translated versions of articles by default. They are better than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough that they’d much rather just be served the English original… I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice translatio…

Exactly. I wouldn't use it for bulk translations. This was literally, 4 words.

What was useful, was that I could explain exactly what the context was, in both a technical and usability context, and it understood it enough to provide appropriate translations.

UPDATE: I went and verified it. The translation was absolutely perfect. Not sure what this means for translation services, but it certainly saved me several hundred dollars, and several days, just to add one label prompt to a free app.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#52

Post by altairprime »

The subhead makes a specific misstatement:

> Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making revenue per employee the new holy grail.

The corrected form is:

> Startups used to brag about valuations and venture capital. Now AI is making rate of revenue growth per employee the new holy grail.

Specifically, as with all growth capitalism, it is long-term irrelevant how much revenue each employee generates. The factor that is being measured is how much each employee increases the rate of growth of revenue. If a business is growing revenue at +5% YoY, then a worker that can increase that rate by 20% (to +6% YoY) is worth keeping; a worker that can only increase revenue by 5% contributed +0% YoY after the initial boost and will be replaced by automation, AI, etc. (This is also why tech won’t invest in technical debt: it may lower expenses, but those one-time efficiencies are typically irrelevant when increasing the rate of growth of income results in far more income than the costs of the debt.)

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#53

Post by delusional »

TaylorGood wrote: post #36

It’s true, especially with the “vibe” movement happening in real-time on X… “you can just do things” — I am building ai app layers b2c/b2b and while I do have an ml technical co-founder, I am largely scaling this with AI from strategy, visuals to coding. For example, with Claude created a framework for my company to scale, then built an AI powered dashboard in cursor around it as the command center. At scale we don’t…

> 26. lots of first-time founders will build faster than veterans because they are more AI fluent/grew up on vlogging.

Ahh yes, fantastic insights.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#54

Post by jack_h »

goatlover wrote: post #44
rahimnathwani wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

I'd prefer not to live in a fully automated society where shareholders and CEOs reap all the profits while the rest of us scrape by on just enough UBI to prevent a revolution.

I don't understand this scenario. If everyone is on UBI then most people are essentially near poverty. Where are these CEOs deriving all of their profit from?

I personally think a far more likely scenario is that small businesses of one or a few people become vastly more commonplace. They will be able to do a lot more by themselves, including with less expertise in areas they may not have a lot of knowledge in. I don't think regular employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing field against current CEOs.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#55

Post by delusional »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #13
ryandrake wrote: post #7

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you ri…

If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost. An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities. Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?

You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth.

There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actually has to maintain an inventory and relationships with their supply chain) and your favourite brand decides to bottom out their quality. It's not "good actually" because of economic whatever. Your soup just sucks now.

Oh but "the market will eventually provide a new brand" is a terrible strategy when they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever.

I'm not an ethereal being. I'm a human, I need it to be good now. Not in theory land.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#56

Post by tasty_freeze »

jordanb wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the productivity improvement you can get just from having a decent LLM available to answer technical questions is significant enough already even without the whole Agent-based tool-in-a-loop thing. This morning I used Claude 4 Sonnet to figure out how to build, package and ship a Docker container to GitHub Container Registry in 25 minutes start to finish. Without Claude's help I would expect that to take me a…

Eh I felt that way about the internet in 2010s. Seemed like virtually any question could be answered by a google query. People were making jokes that a programmer's job mostly consisted of looking things up on stack overflow. But then google started sucking and SO turned into another expertsexchange (which was itself good in the 2000s). So far from what I've experienced AI coding agents automate away the looking thin…

> expertsexchange

My vote for the unintentionally funniest company name. I wonder if they were aware when the landed on it, or if they were so deep in the process that it was too late to change course when they realized what they had done.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#57

Post by delusional »

spacemadness wrote: post #45

I think we’re going to have to deal with the stories of shareholders wetting themselves over more layoffs more than we’re going to see higher quality software produced. Everyone is claiming huge productivity gains but generally software quality and new products being created seem at best unchanged. Where is all this new amazing software? It’s time to stop all the talk and show something. I don’t care that your SQL qu…

This has been an industry wide problem at silicon valley for years now. For all their talks of changing the world, what we've gotten the last decade has been taxi and hotel apps. Nothing truly revolutionizing.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#58

Post by Hammershaft »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

It seems like a more and more recurring shareholder wet dream that companies could one day just be AI employees for digital things + robotic employees for physical things + maybe a human CEO "orchestrating" everything. No more icky employees siphoning off what should rightfully be profit for the owners. It's like this is some kind of moral imperative that business is always kind of low-key working towards. Are you ri…

Sounds unironically great if we could do it, the productivity improvements would allow dramatic improvements in living standards with moderate redistribution. I don't think this is where these llms are getting us.

Re: AI is ushering in a “tiny team” era

#59

Post by neom »

One area of business that I'm struggling in is how boring it is talking to an LLM, I enjoy standing at a whiteboard thinking through ideas, but more and more I see push for "talk to the llm, ask the llm, the llm will know" - The LLM will know, but I'd rather talk to a human about it. Also in pure business, it takes me too long to unlock nuances that an experienced human just knows, I have to do a lot of "yeah but" work, way way more than I would have to do with an experienced humans. I like LLMs and I push for their use, but I'm starting to find something here and I can't put my finger on what it is, I guess they're not wide enough to capture deep nuances? As a result, they seem pretty bad at understanding how a human will react to their ideas in practice.
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