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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

78 points by kawera

by whimsicalism

12 subcomments

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves.
It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

by dayofthedaleks

1 subcomments

Maybe worth noting in the title this is from Cory Doctorow.
https://archive.is/ctuVG

by ahachete

1 subcomments

There's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...

by baron816

1 subcomments

It’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself.
My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.

by winstonwinston

0 subcomment

The race to the bottom of software quality accelerates using AI to generate software. Based on my experience using Claude for software development.

by pessimizer

0 subcomment

They're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment.
Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars.
I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre.
Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again.
In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.

by stephc_int13

0 subcomment

How ironic would it be if the AI productivity miracle ends up being negative growth because of the cost of cleaning up of slop?

by jongjong

8 subcomments

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed.

by baron816

2 subcomments

> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels.
>Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market,
“Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.