61–70 of 71 posts
> Oh dear, oh dear, it's with a heavy heart That we must make an announcement, and we must impart Some news that's not so jolly, not so fun But we promise to make it better when all's said and done The Dr. Seuss one is amazing. Honestly, I'd rather read that than any corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo if I ever get laid off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the contrary. The more you want to squeeze out of AI, the more people you need. You'd be very surprised... > AIs need a bit of hand holding and judicious application to shine. You can have 1 person do the hand holding, and get rid of several others, as the AI still lets the single person do their work far faster... e.g. instead of a week for the person to write a program, an hour or less to get the AI to write i…
There is no AI system today that can take high stakes decisions without human supervision. Not even invoice data extraction bots unless you want it to send 1,000,000 dollars from your account every now and then, instead of 1,000.
I covered this exact point directly on the comment that you're answering it: "You can have 1 person do the hand holding (...) [spend] a hour to get the AI to write it with appropriate prompts, and then a day or for the human to clean it up and fix any gaps..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the contrary. The more you want to squeeze out of AI, the more people you need. You'd be very surprised... > AIs need a bit of hand holding and judicious application to shine. You can have 1 person do the hand holding, and get rid of several others, as the AI still lets the single person do their work far faster... e.g. instead of a week for the person to write a program, an hour or less to get the AI to write i…
The parent isn't wrong. Even assuming you have superhuman AI with unlimited funding, your bottleneck will be human prompting and curation. The person who assigns more workers to that sector will scale faster and eat more of the market.
It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match.
This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow.
No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent isn't wrong. Even assuming you have superhuman AI with unlimited funding, your bottleneck will be human prompting and curation. The person who assigns more workers to that sector will scale faster and eat more of the market.
That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "as…
You're being unnecessarily fatalist and it's making your viewpoint sound as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend.
> That’s because AI is writing them! The first entry here is the proof! It would be nice if you presented some qualitative analysis to go with... any of this. As-is, this is just AI generated text with a preface saying "draw your own conclusions!" and my conclusions are "wow neither AI nor humans are good at writing layoff letters".
someone else with no sense of humor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's assuming some ever expanding workload. It's not like e.g. a company will start selling 10x of their product just because their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow. No need to "as…
Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money. If you legitimately believe that people are paid for their "single threaded" potential to write software, what kind of business do you run? You're being unnecessarily fatalist and it's making your viewpoint sound as ridiculous as the self-proclai…
This means a more or less same-ish workload. And if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow.
No need to "assign more workers to the sector". Sure, some sectors with big expansion potential might grow their business too due to automation, but for most businesses it will just be increased productivity...
>Yeah, no. Firing everyone because AI can do iptables now is the sort of pipe dream you sell to a crazy one-man startup, not a pre-established business looking to save money
Notice how nobody said anything about "firing everyone"? Notice how I explicitly said "if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it with 1/5th or 1/10th the devs plus AI tomorrow"?
I think ChatGPT would do better in understanding my comment. In fact let's try it:
Q: Assume you read this comment:
"It's not like a company will start selling 10x of their product just because
their productivity is 10x better due to AI. So it's not like their workload
with increase 10x to match. This means a more or less same-ish workload. And
if this takes them, say, X devs today (without AI), they could perhaps do it
with 1/5th or 1/10th the number of devs plus AI tomorrow".
Does the above comment imply the company is going to fire all of its
employees?
A: No, the comment does not necessarily imply that the company is going to
fire all of its employees. The comment does not make any specific claims about
firing employees, but rather suggests that the company may be able to achieve
the same results with fewer employees by leveraging AI technology.
First of all, there are millions of devs "paid for their 'single threaded' potential to write software". It's called code monkeys. Many roles don't need anything more than that: take specifications, prepared by someone else, and churn out this or that part of the code.
Second, not sure why developers having more than "'single threaded' potential to write code" would change things. LLM AI doesn't have single threaded potential in writing software alone either.
Third, of course you've missed the whole argument, which isn't that AI will write software alone. It is that the extra coding speed as helped by AI will means less developers will be needed for the same workload. And that in many cases workloads wont just expand as if there's some cosmic contract to always keep number of employed developers more or less the same.
>as ridiculous as the self-proclaimed 10x devs that could lay off entire software teams because they wrote Homebrew in a weekend
I've seen at least three different 10x developers do what "entire software teams" couldn't do in a year. And absolutely having 2 of those in our company meant we could do with hiring way less developers than we'd need otherwise. In areas where they weren't interested in, like UI or APIs, we had to get more people.
The most interesting part of this is that ChatGPT can create content with more "whimsy" and "humanity" than many tech leaders. IMO The purpose of such announcements is to maintain the leadership (willing followership) role by reconnecting with followers with a hard-to-fake heart-to-heart. Without this, the warmth is gone. Followership becomes cold and is based primarily on health insurance, salary, visa, greencard, e…
The first version is way better than most actual layoff announcements - it focuses on the subject and gives relevant information. Many actual companies don't have the balls to be direct - they don't use the word layoff, they put some vague title about change or "refocusing" and the talk about a bunch irrelevant crap in an attempt to be positive. I'm still not over Satya Nadella ending Microsoft's layoff announcement…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no AI system today that can take high stakes decisions without human supervision. Not even invoice data extraction bots unless you want it to send 1,000,000 dollars from your account every now and then, instead of 1,000.
> There is no AI system today that can take high stakes decisions without human supervision. I covered this exact point directly on the comment that you're answering it: "You can have 1 person do the hand holding (...) [spend] a hour to get the AI to write it with appropriate prompts, and then a day or for the human to clean it up and fix any gaps..."
I am currently working on a schema matching task, just mapping fields from one schema to another, semantically. If you sample 5 responses from the model, only 70% of the time they are all in agreement. Many times it contradicts its own predictions. And this is a simple task. There is task intent ambiguity, input ambiguity and model ambiguity in there. It is weaker for matching fields in other languages.
That's why I think AI, as wonderful and surprising as it is, can't do any high stakes task on its own. It is just a starting point that gets you closer to the solution from the first step, but not a task solver. It needs validation systems and feedback to improve past this stage, and that usually means human in the loop, rarely we can automate validation on top of AI.