I feel like I’m in a strange place because as a person in a tech field I have to know AI. To use it. 95% of the time I use it its completely hosted on my own system. I feel it’s a tool that’s not going away and I think open-weight models that are hosted on your device is going to be the future and datacenter type AI will be only for specialist tasks.
I want to say also that I think this article makes a ton of valid points. There is no real intelligence in current AI and it won’t have actual intelligence until there is some major breakthrough in how it fundamentally works. Like, I 100% believe all the concerns about it especially the big datacenter concerns. But I literally can’t say “no, I’m not ever going to use AI if I can help it.” I might as well throw away my entire career. I gotta eat.
By all rights it should be a tremendous automation tool for all desk workers but that requires a lot of skilled labor capacity to keep from becoming slop, I don’t see US companies providing this, just PR and justification for layoffs
Hit the nail on the head. In the tech world, especially in startups, the labor was really inflated. Deliberately. It was big easy to tell investors that you were growing and doing well because you had butts in the seat. That’s what in the 00s and 10s you’d hear all these stories about people working at startups and they were so cushy with tons of benefits and so on. It was a game to lure investors. As soon as AI comes along, you don’t need that excuse anymore. Now you can sell investors on token use. The bank crash in silicon valley helped. That’s why we saw the tech world get hit the hardest. Well that, and an infinite number of monkeys at a typewriter reproducing code. That’s what AI is. Code is predictable and structured. AI likes that.
Not to mention the non-deskwork side, direct management of logistics, factory floors that can be switched up via software in robot arms etc rather than expensive & real estate-intensive machinery, that’s being completely neglected by US firms. The whole thing looks like a recipe for implosion
Oh, its even worse for other fields. Even before 2000 there was software that used machine learning (but was not AI) that could outperform human beings by a large margin.
I feel like I’m in a strange place because as a person in a tech field I have to know AI. To use it. 95% of the time I use it its completely hosted on my own system. I feel it’s a tool that’s not going away and I think open-weight models that are hosted on your device is going to be the future and datacenter type AI will be only for specialist tasks.
I want to say also that I think this article makes a ton of valid points. There is no real intelligence in current AI and it won’t have actual intelligence until there is some major breakthrough in how it fundamentally works. Like, I 100% believe all the concerns about it especially the big datacenter concerns. But I literally can’t say “no, I’m not ever going to use AI if I can help it.” I might as well throw away my entire career. I gotta eat.
By all rights it should be a tremendous automation tool for all desk workers but that requires a lot of skilled labor capacity to keep from becoming slop, I don’t see US companies providing this, just PR and justification for layoffs
Hit the nail on the head. In the tech world, especially in startups, the labor was really inflated. Deliberately. It was big easy to tell investors that you were growing and doing well because you had butts in the seat. That’s what in the 00s and 10s you’d hear all these stories about people working at startups and they were so cushy with tons of benefits and so on. It was a game to lure investors. As soon as AI comes along, you don’t need that excuse anymore. Now you can sell investors on token use. The bank crash in silicon valley helped. That’s why we saw the tech world get hit the hardest. Well that, and an infinite number of monkeys at a typewriter reproducing code. That’s what AI is. Code is predictable and structured. AI likes that.
Not to mention the non-deskwork side, direct management of logistics, factory floors that can be switched up via software in robot arms etc rather than expensive & real estate-intensive machinery, that’s being completely neglected by US firms. The whole thing looks like a recipe for implosion
Oh, its even worse for other fields. Even before 2000 there was software that used machine learning (but was not AI) that could outperform human beings by a large margin.