Technology

Some of them won't even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.

Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don't even want to invest that much to get to that point.

AI however, is the next new thing. It's gonna be big, huge! There's no telling how much profit there is to be made!

Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.

However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don't.

And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.

I'm curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.

Tech CEOs really should be replaced with AI, since they all behave like the seagulls from Finding Nemo and just follow the trends set out by whatever bs Elon starts

Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it's a bubble and it'll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company's performance, so no need even to know.

Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet's major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.

Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn't risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.

And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.

Just a conspiracy theory, don't treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.

Similar experience here. I recently took the official Google “prompting essentials” course. I kept an open mind and modest expectations; this is a tool that’s here to stay. Best to just approach it as the next Microsoft Word and see how it can add practical value.

The biggest thing I learned is that getting quality outputs will require at least a paragraph-long, thoughtful prompt and 15 minutes of iteration. If I can DIY in less than 30 minutes, the LLM is probably not worth the trouble.

I’m still trying to find use cases (I don’t code), but it often just feels like a solution in search of a problem….

With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?

Either spell the word properly, or use something else, what the fuck are you doing? Don't just glibly strait-jacket language, you're part of the ongoing decline of the internet with this bullshit.

they will rehire, but it will be outsourced for lower wages, at least thats what the same posts on reddit of the same article is discussing.

Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time

I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I'm making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.

AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I've now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn't already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I've brought on will quickly find better employment.

The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse...

We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.

We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.