I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and it’s impossible to have rational conversations with them about it.
Then those companies will die, as they should. There are also companies who will fail to adapt, either because they are so anti-AI that they actively refuse to do so, or because they are luddites that weren’t well-tuned to technological changes in the first place. Those companies will also die, as they should.
What’s left are companies having measured conversations about how to make use of this new technology without ignoring the problem areas, figuring out ways to work around them, being careful of security implications, and acknowledging the importance of human review and architectural design.
This is how all bubbles and trendchasing works. Investors in the 2000s learned pretty quickly that dumping billions of dollars into every company that was even vaguely connected to the Internet is not a long-term business strategy. All topics have nuance, and everything must be consumed in moderation.
Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty.
“companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively”… that sounds like a “you” problem, not a “me” problem. Git gud at running software projects, and don’t sign contracts with ones who are bad at it.
Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.
Fine, then those companies die. Fuck em.
If they’re so terrible at shipping software that they can’t even adapt to change, then they weren’t a good company to begin with, or they were so close to the edge of failure that they never had a backup plan, which is also poor planning. Nobody mourns Knights Capital.
We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway.
Then you will probably fail, as smarter competition that understands how to use AI will drink your milkshake. And if you don’t trust your vendors to implement these projects, which given the amount of boneheaded idiots under said “heavy AI psychosis”, might be a good stance, then do it in-house. Learn how it works, sidestep the contract costs, save money.
The entire rest of the article is “shitty companies do nonsensical business decisions around technology that they don’t understand”. Man, where have I heard that before? MongoDB, NoSQL, “web scale”, blockchain, NFTs, Bitcoin, Metaverse, 3D tech for movies, every single trend chased by Hollywood, and of course, the Internet. As always, it’s okay to explore new technology, as long as it’s designed around understanding how it works. LEARN SHIT before you DO SHIT! Is that really that fucking hard to understand?
This is for people that are just waiting for the bubble to burst and trying not to go nuts.
I’ve said this a thousand times and I will say this once more: The Internet bubble bursting did not cause the Internet to disappear. You cannot just stuff your head into the sand, cry yourself to sleep, and pretend that the big bad AI era will just disappear once this all blows over. This is not blockchain bullshit. This is real actual usable tech.
But, there’s too many dysfunctional idiots that don’t want to learn how it works and think they can just give some random LLM a massive task, push “Go!”, and it magically replace human workloads. If you give a caveman a computer, he will beat on the monitor with his club, dig out all of the electronics, and use it as a firepit. This is how 95% of companies are using LLMs. Except I don’t even think they figured out how to make a firepit out of it yet.
Then those companies will die, as they should. There are also companies who will fail to adapt, either because they are so anti-AI that they actively refuse to do so, or because they are luddites that weren’t well-tuned to technological changes in the first place. Those companies will also die, as they should.
What’s left are companies having measured conversations about how to make use of this new technology without ignoring the problem areas, figuring out ways to work around them, being careful of security implications, and acknowledging the importance of human review and architectural design.
This is how all bubbles and trendchasing works. Investors in the 2000s learned pretty quickly that dumping billions of dollars into every company that was even vaguely connected to the Internet is not a long-term business strategy. All topics have nuance, and everything must be consumed in moderation.
“companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively”… that sounds like a “you” problem, not a “me” problem. Git gud at running software projects, and don’t sign contracts with ones who are bad at it.
Fine, then those companies die. Fuck em.
If they’re so terrible at shipping software that they can’t even adapt to change, then they weren’t a good company to begin with, or they were so close to the edge of failure that they never had a backup plan, which is also poor planning. Nobody mourns Knights Capital.
Then you will probably fail, as smarter competition that understands how to use AI will drink your milkshake. And if you don’t trust your vendors to implement these projects, which given the amount of boneheaded idiots under said “heavy AI psychosis”, might be a good stance, then do it in-house. Learn how it works, sidestep the contract costs, save money.
The entire rest of the article is “shitty companies do nonsensical business decisions around technology that they don’t understand”. Man, where have I heard that before? MongoDB, NoSQL, “web scale”, blockchain, NFTs, Bitcoin, Metaverse, 3D tech for movies, every single trend chased by Hollywood, and of course, the Internet. As always, it’s okay to explore new technology, as long as it’s designed around understanding how it works. LEARN SHIT before you DO SHIT! Is that really that fucking hard to understand?
I’ve said this a thousand times and I will say this once more: The Internet bubble bursting did not cause the Internet to disappear. You cannot just stuff your head into the sand, cry yourself to sleep, and pretend that the big bad AI era will just disappear once this all blows over. This is not blockchain bullshit. This is real actual usable tech.
But, there’s too many dysfunctional idiots that don’t want to learn how it works and think they can just give some random LLM a massive task, push “Go!”, and it magically replace human workloads. If you give a caveman a computer, he will beat on the monitor with his club, dig out all of the electronics, and use it as a firepit. This is how 95% of companies are using LLMs. Except I don’t even think they figured out how to make a firepit out of it yet.