This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
They'll happily burn mountains of profits on that stuff, but not on decent wages or health insurance.
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.
It's a game to them that doesn't take into consideration any human element.
It's like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don't really give a shit. It's all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
I've started using AI on my CTOs request. ChaptGPT business licence. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I'm not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
There are still employers bitching about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.
it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don't get the experience to be quick with it.
Yea
Vibe coding is for us armatures, who want the occasional hello world
I use it for programing home assistant, since I just can't get my head around the YAML.
My experience with AI so far is that I have to waste more time fine tuning my prompt to get what I want and still end up with some obvious issues that I have to manually fix and the only way I would know about these issues is my prior experience which I will stop gaining if I start depending on AI too much, plus it creates unrealistic expectations from employers on execution time, it's the worst thing that has happened to the tech industry, I hate my career now and just want to switch to any boring but stable low paying job if I don't have to worry about going through months for a job hunt
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….
Sounds like we all just wamt to retire as goat farmers. Just like before. The more things change....they say
I'll take no shit for $500, Alex.
With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?
Does this mean they'll invest the money in paying workers? No... they're just have to double down.
"Ruh-roh, Raggy!"
It's okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn't be too bad!
Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time
That was always one of the main goals. They'd rather light a mountain of cash on fire than give anyone a thriving wage
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.
But it's okay, because MY company is AHEAD OF THE CURVE on those 95% losses
How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?
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...
It won't be like the dot com bubble. The AI bubble is far more corporate investment with far fewer entities having money thrown at them.
Yeah, most individuals don't have money to invest in techbros' latest boondoggle.
Which means we'll be paying for their bailouts instead.
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.
hello, welcome to taco bell, i am your new ai order specialist. would you like to try a combo of the new dorito blast mtw dew crunchwrap?
spoken at a rate of 5 words a minute to every single person in the drive thru. the old people have no idea how to order with a computer using key words.
Yeah. No shit. wtf did they think was gonna generate returns? They wanna run ads in the middle if responses?
I'm not sure they were expecting returns. Just afraid that if other companies had AI, they might lose business to them. Except of course a lot of people (or at least I) avoid anything with AI and mistrust its results.
The link in the article to the MIT report doesn't directly link to any report. I wouldn't trust this article until the report is accessible and verifiable.
30-40 billion USD in total worldwide over three years seems very little compared to the massive expenditures by the AI companies to build the things?
Nice
