It's really insane what is happening. My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss mandated that managers replace 50% of the staff with AI within a year. And, she's scrambling trying to figure out if any of the tools actually work and annoying her team because she keeps pushing AI on them. Unsurprisingly it's only slowed things down and put her in a terrible position.
Brutal. But probably all too common. One of my clients has very suddenly gone all-in on agentic AI and they're in this crazy hurry. (Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.)
This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."
They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.
When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.
I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.
> Probably the most annoying part is they want to automate stuff that I built a POC for using GPT-4o, two years ago - at the time they saw no use for it, but now they're all-in on the hype.
I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.
For a non-tech case of this, my wife worked at a place that fired like 80% of their writers in anticipation of huge speed-ups they expected from LLMs, a couple years ago.
They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.
They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.
I don't even think it's stupidity. It's simple greed and an extreme case of Goodhart's lawsl. Shareholders want to hear AI, so CEOs will burn the rest of the company to satisfy that. The company doesn't matter; they will get paid handsomely for destroying it.
Shareholders only care about short term gains, CEOs have no skin in the game, everyone else under wants to keep their job. None of these are aligned towards "make the nest proudct and satisfy customers".
The counter point to this is Apple who have not invested barely a dime in LLMs. Their stock price has not been crushed at all, quite the opposite in fact. They focus on the good stuff. Perhaps that's the luxury of living off the vision and leadership of someone who died many years ago.
Personally I believe the stock market is incredibly, incredibly shaky. Investors are now in full-fear mode, it doesn't matter what news Nvidia etc print - if customers of OAI and others, are not seeing a meaningful INCREMENTAL increase in revenue generation or increase in cost-reduction (aside from white-washing it with lay-offs from insane hiring in the past).
RE. stupidity - it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.
Wanna know how stupid it is? Someone I know who works at Blackrock as a portfolio manager pretty high up is all of a sudden being forced to learn how to code and use LLMs to code. Yes you heard me right - this behaviour is expanding out of the software engineering profession.
Yeah, Apple always seems to go its own way. I wonder if it truly is a matter of a strong visionary (be it Cook or Jobs's legacy being upheld) or if shareholders simply come in with different mentality.
Nintendo also has similar vibes. I see shareholder calls asking about AI usage and their answers come down to something like "we're not ruling it out, but we'll only use it when a situation presents itself". They tend to be pretty good at pushing back against their shareholders. Having a proper war chest instead of constantly funding on debt probably helps.
> it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.
Stupidity implies incompetence and lack of intent. Greed is incredibly intentional. There's always a bit of stupidity with greed (we even call such an algorithmic approach the "greedy method" after all), but I think they are important distinctions.
I'll admit your blackrock example is plain stupidity, though. I know part of the end-goal is for "idea guys" to be able to make their ideas without pesky employees, but I don't think too many really think they can achieve that today.
Maybe what they really want her to do is get rid of 50% of her staff and the AI is just an excuse? In that case she should focus on "who can we do without?" rather than "how can we replace people with AI?"
The assumption that those managers have is that it’s easy to replace tech guys because AI is advancing, and a crap like that nonsense.
Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!
TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.
To be clear I'd be very much in favor of scientific studies and their data having to be publicly available.
But on any controversial area, which is most of the areas anyone cares about, there will be 2+ sides of the issue and any vetting body will be compromised to some degree for one of those sides.
That's the rub, isn't it... who watches the watchmen? In times past, journalism at least had the veil of impartiality, but modern journalism is far more of an editorial activist activity than simply answering the 6 W's of a given story.
I'm not sure it was ever actually much better... and it may just be my pessimistic Gen X nature. But I've personally seen too many misrepresentations about too many studies where the body and available data in fact don't match the headlines or the numbers themselves are deceptive in a way that is much less significant than represented.
200% the risk of X... when in sample A of 10000, 1 had X, and in sample b of the same size, 2 had X... while it's a real relative stat, the absolute values are all but meaningless in context.
Yellow journalism existed generations before you and I. The institution was always sullied by the worst and has always contained some of the most dogged pestering fact finders.
It’s not even clear that journalists of the 1960s-1980s were as impartial or brutally honest as we remember. That is most likely a halo effect from having a few highly trusted very visible personalities (eg. Walter Cronkite), but even they were slow to realize (by a decade) how much of a morass the Vietnam War was.
It was always about independence, not impartiality. Instead of having a big boss on the top issuing correct opinions, reputable news outlets gave their reporters a lot of freedom in their work. Each reporter had their own biases, and the variation within each outlet was usually greater than the variation between outlets.
Ya, I want it even bigger. All commercial claims should be accessible for your own determination. Fastest, biggest, longest, widest, shortest, most liked, doctor recommended, any empirical claim must have the data used and calculations to make the claim available for examination. Data storage is so cheap now. I don't see it as a dent to anyone's profit.
I'm not religious myself, and I have plenty of concerns about anything faith based mingling with the government, but I don't see how building affordable houses on church property has anything to do with military leaders telling their soldiers they're warriors for God.
I'm trying to follow this but unclear of the root of the problem. Is it beacause building roads in L.A. is inherantly more expensive than elsewhere? I thought one of the selling points of cities was scale: costs are spread over more people. But, it sounds like road building is cheaper per resident in my small city. Sounds more like a corruption problem.
I'm suggesting that this isn't the actual answer. The thread started with the premise that the city doesn't have enough revenue, and that the way to increase that revenue is to bring in more people who pay more tax. Next, bringing in more people requires more housing, so that requires incentives for developers to displace people residing in SFH so that the can replace those with high density housing. There's a big problem: more people require more services beyond fancy curb cuts, like police, fire, water, electricity, schools, hospitals, etc. That cost that is spread also grows proportionally with the number of people, and you can't ignore that.
On the cost of building roads: there are cement and asphalt plants right in LA city proper, and also in weho and inglewood, among others in the county. LA has a price problem, not a cost problem.
There are more specters, too, which are bound to be political fights. For one, when you dig up a road, there are numerous places that will require displacing very large homeless camps. Now, credit where it's due, LA has shown that it is able to do that sometimes, like around Echo Park, which is the junction of several major thoroughfares like glendale blvd and the 101. Still, these are non-trivial projects that take years.
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