jj4211

Oh, based on my experience, there are plenty of people convinced they can't do anything without Claude anymore. Also based on my experience, I would be ecstatic if they actually stopped trying to do work because they sucked both with and without Claude.

Maybe not enough to fund their financials, but that was going to be a tall order anyway.

Yeah, that can be tricky. Under a previous manager where mostly he was ignored and I worked straight with the middle management, I had gotten the hang of the people inflicting the politics and crap and was significantly able to directly counter it to avoid spurious bullshit.

Then when that manager got laid off, and I got a new "I'll shield you" manager, who largely just takes whatever crap he's told and passes it on and says it's better to just take it than risk making waves. So I end up having to waste more time than I used to.

But absolutely was valuable in an early manager who took on the politics direct while I just did my work in early career. Of course he got fired for keeping documentation on a certain executive making a terrible call and actually sharing it with the senior leadership team when that terrible call went bad. Senior executives canned the executive, but let him fire the manager on the way out. Guess if there's one thing worse than an executive incurring risk, it's a snitch.

Even wilder, their fate stemmed from taking over McDonnal Douglas. That company was in bad shape because of their shit business leadership. After being acquired by Boeing, they got put in charge because investors thought they would be better at the business side despite having just run a company into the ground.

Applies to a lot of fields.

I have been in scenarios where business leaders doing their thing are frustrated by a competitor that has better product and better customer treatment (pricing, support, no superfluous subscriptions...)

Rather than adopt some of those business principles, they instead think that the competitors people are just betterexcept their leadership, that if they were in charge of the competitor company it would do way better, with good product and the better business practices like fucking up support, charging moore upfront, cutting employees, and hooking customers with subscriptions.

With many public companies, they have succeeded in convincing investors they are right and investors put them in charge.

A lot of folks got a very concrete reminder of how little regard management has for their judgement, even if not laid off or fired.

It wasn't "have access to new AI tools and use them as appropriate", it was "use these tools, they can do your job better than you can and you are an idiot if you think otherwise".

Note that a lot of IT stuff is much cheaper on-premise in very short timelines, but still businesses throw money at subscriptions for it anyway.

More to the point is the magnitude. Note that Ford ultimately didn't get a bailout, but between GM and financial sector they did about $500 billion, which adjusted for inflation would be about $800 billion. That's not enough to even cover OpenAI's obligations by itself, let alone the broader AI industry. GM's bailout was $50 billion.

It has affected mine. Sometimes a Google result suggested the only answer was in a reddit thread, and I would click to at least see. Now I get a 'log in" prompt and decide I didn't need that information after all.

But utilitarianism suggests that it is at least in service to some sort of valued utility. It's just stupid bullshit and corruption.

It's a stupid thing for him to say out loud, because the way tech has been, the consumer market is never going to be a threat by self hosting instead of renting it. Time and time again the consumer market has displayed that it will happily toss money at uncertain subscriptions. Even when they buy home electronics, they don't seem to mind when it's inexorably tied to a company cloud service subject to termination at will. Same for businesses. Even for things that are trivial to self host, or things that don't get value from an online service at all, people go for the cloud tied option.

They got the shit leadership, but not the utilitarianism.

In theory it can be more efficient but the consumer market never was going to contribute to the scarcity, and the bigger problem is the "must build AI datacenters" by all comers whether or not they actually have a plan to bring up and utilize.

Altman kicked off a corporate hoarding storm by committing half of the world's DRAM manufacturing supply, then every other corporate had to get in on it.

The result according to a report I read is that over half of the technology delivered to these folks are sitting disused. Because they couldn't get the right power to the datacenter, or maybe they did get all that lined up but don't have the business relationship with whomever actually would use the capacity, or they otherwise botched things so their setup is not viable.

The far bigger culprit is the bad datacenter buildout. Vilifying the consumer market is just a better narrative for his agenda.