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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

ceodinner.substack.com

61–70 of 218 posts

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#61
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million different people: I've used AI in X way and it helped me. You: No one knows anything AI helps with. Yeah, okay, if you ignore everything every user says then it is indeed a mystery.

Are these "million people" in the room with you now? Or are they just the bot and shill accounts you're reading on "X"?

They're me, my coworkers, my friends. Talk to people. ChatGPT and the other big LLMs has hundreds of millions of users.

You might not like using LLMs. You might not find them useful. You might think they're bad and harmful (I do). But to claim that no one finds them useful is a completely different position, and one that's about as disconnected as it's possible to be.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#62

With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI musi…

If you're a tech employee in a large company with lucrative compensation, you should be aggressively reducing your expenses and banking your excess so you can weather what might be long period of unemployment and can adapt more smoothly to employment at more modest compensation when you manage to get back in.

Unless you're working very obviously outside the blast radius of an AI-bubble correction (you'd know if you were) or are a very high-value VIP (again, you'd know), you should assume you'll be spending some time without a job within the next few years. Possibly a long time.

You might get lucky, but it's not really going to be in your control and "milking the AI wave, learning all the tools" isn't going to change your odds much. It really is musical chairs. Whether you lose your job will depend on where you happen to be standing when the music stops. And there are going to be so many other people looking for the same new chair as you, with resumes that look almost exactly like yours, that getting a new job will basically come down to a lottery draw.

If you think the AI stuff is cool, study it and play with it. Otherwise, just save money and start working on the outline for that novel you've been thinking about writing.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#64

It is worse than in 2000 now. Amazon, Microsoft all had good products back then. Amazon was in fact better than it is now. "AI" hardly has any working products. Vibe coding is foisted upon companies by CEOs who want to promote their friends' products or who want to use it as an excuse for firing people or who have circular revenue agreements with other companies. This is like the housing bubble of 2008 which was base…

I think Amazon search was likely better, and there weren't fake products, but there were also far fewer products, and shipping was maybe 30% as fast.

I wasn't a fan of any Microsoft products at the time, though Excel was pretty good when I started using it heavily a few years later.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#65

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?

It's AI writing. Big words and rule of 3.

I forgot about the rule of 3 but that's obviously AI writing

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#66
post #55
post #17

I don't see how nvidia come out of this stronger their huge customers will be able to produce ASICs hat will be faster and cheaper to operate than their GPUs jensen has to be the luckiest man in the world, first crypto, now "AI"

Gaming, then crypto, then AI - all GPU hungry!

And each one requiring an order of magnitude more GPUs than the last!

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#67
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if you look at language learning reddit, there are about 10 ads a day for shovelware of AI powered apps that no one ever needed. They would be those pets.com

Maybe I just didn't notice. Fair. But are these ads from companies that are collecting large capitals, or from small shops that just use the APIs provided by the few big players?

I am pretty sure they use API and dont have millions on training.

I have no idea about their financials. They just annoy me, because they mask their ads as posts/comments. And use ChatGPT to generate those, they are like 2 page long drivel.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#68
post #46

With little growth and hiring happening outside of firms betting the farm on AI—and getting the funding to stay alive and play the lottery—what is a random tech employee supposed to do here? It seems like right now the most rational move to stay in the industry is to milk the AI wave as much as possible, learn all of the tools, get a big brand name on one's resume, and then land somewhere still-alive once the AI musi…

That “rational move” has always been a good move, regardless of AI. This is a boom/bust industry, and the next boom will come in a few years. While we’re at it, if you’re making engineer money, you should be targeting retirement at 50. I’m not saying you have to do that, but it sure helps to have that option.

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Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#69

I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a pi…

California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania. Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic.. We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different". "AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immor…

[deleted]

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#70

I think this article is nearing the truth in the future of AI. I think the avoidance of claiming it is a bubble is a good sign, but saying it's an AI wildfire is still hyperbole. The idea that inference will drive compute demand is not what I experience because inference is a much easier problem than training. The training of an AI (LLM) is especially demanding and if and when we complete that, inference will be a pi…

California gold rush is practically the textbook example of a mania. Gold, tulips, real estate, rail, witch hunts, satanic panic.. We shouldn't be worried because "this time it is different". "AI" is none of those things. It is "totally different this time". "AI" is going to do all the work for us, we are all going to get UBI then at some point as it grows the "ASI" is going to either figure out how to grant us immor…

Not not mention the California gold rush basically killed the existing functional local community (often literally) with very few people actually getting rich and even fewer from the gold itself.

Har not to see parallels with the current AI bubble.

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