LLMs are the first technology I've experienced where there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP. Most other technologies in my career, like VCS or static analysis or whatever else were championed by colleagues or peers.
Something similar was going on with cloud a few years ago. The story was if you get cloud you can get rid of those expensive infrastructure people and it will all be so much more reliable. So the big boss gets a cloud strategy and foists it on those lower down. There's also pressure to be an on-trend boss. If all the other boss' are getting into it, then you need to as well.
The bosses have seen pay and benefits go up and up and up. They've seen people jump between companies, taking institutional knowledge with them. They need the job market to crater so they can re-exert control in the relationship. LLMs are fucking catnip to this belief system. "You mean I do need to deal with those people that I have to hire and train and pay? I hate those guys! Awesome!"
As a person who has worked at different layers of corporate structures I find this statement mildly offending and mostly inaccurate. In terms of emotions expressed by those reported to, I've witnessed many, such as various feelings of satisfaction and control, to an air of superiority and at times even contempt. But hate was quite unusual and would more often go the other way around, together with envy.
They are an enterprise SaaS company in SV. Where they have machine learning software that they have been selling for more than a decade, it’s all been rebranded as AI. That’s fair enough from a sales perspective, I guess. What’s odd is that their C-suite and SVPs are pressuring everyone to use LLMs everywhere, for pretty much everything, and none of them seem to understand why it’s only that level of employee that’s seeing any benefit or expressing any interest. My spouse has reported that the running joke across the company is that the executives have jobs that can be done by LLMs, but no one else does. The ICs could not be less interested, and even if they were, legal promulgated a policy against actually putting anything confidential into any LLM other than Copilot in Azure, which the whole workforce reportedly only really uses for summarizing the increasing number of meetings that are perceived as a waste of IC time. A lot of those meetings are “let’s use AI”.
It’s absolutely insane.
Copilot gets the legal nod because Microsoft already has a very, very long history of being trusted with essentially all of an organizations most sensitive information, they have a lot to work with there when it comes to convincing execs that they can safely handle sensitive data in the cloud. (Im am not convinced of that personally).
If you keep leaving the barn door open, eventually your staying power won’t be enough. On the other hand, I’ve stopped thinking to myself “this must be the big one” when it comes to their more egregious recent failures.
> I believe that the infrastructure available to self-host at an enterprise level will start growing rapidly due to this trust problem.
I thought it would go in this direction more rapidly. With the way even the hyperscalers have had trouble securing enough GPUs for existing demand, I’m left wondering if regardless of technical merits, the bubble is going to burst because of basic real world logistical challenges. I’ve actually heard it said in hushed tones that (paraphrased) “the money isn’t the problem. There just aren’t enough GPUs.”
For awhile I’ve assumed that coprocessors or leveraging GPUs at the local level will be the only viable course long-term for widespread adoption. Most actual need for AI/ML technologies aren’t “consume the whole Internet” scale.
But oh yeah, it makes “the line” go up and to the right.
That's all probably going to happen at the next phase of AI, but it's just not where the current slate of LLMs are. We've hit a wall in terms of utility. LLMs kind of suck for everything but search and code tab auto-suggest.
Generative images and video, on the other hand, are 100% going to disrupt incumbents. Everyone from Adobe to Disney and Netflix are scrambling and trying to figure out how this tech changes the economics of production. I'm talking to production studios that are already underbidding each other by an order of magnitude. It's a bloodbath.
If I get more productive, I don't get paid more. If I get less productive, I get told I'm not using it correctly. Worst case: I help train the LLM to eventually take my job.
there's a lot of top-down pressure to adopt it ASAP
And if you manage somehow to replace all your devs with AI, be worried about your business because the bar to compete has been lowered.
While this isn't a completely unprecedented situation, it's definitely much less common than just having to use the Big Corporate version of a tech stack rather than an open source version of same just because it came bundled with the package your CEO got sold.
Unless society puts preventative measures in place, people will lose jobs and consumers will get screwed. The increased exploitation will exacerbate the wealth gap, further intensify societal conflict, and lead to chaos. But don't worry, LLMs will flood the internet with narratives praising the state of affairs so that people can feel somewhat better about all of this.
It's probably because there is little or no known long term consequences of using AI. In management circles AI is the magic solution to all problems.
Hence its safe to push onto users.
Some engineers went from useful to useless almost overnight. Someone who is stubbornly stuck in their ways and refuses to use AI tools, and yet spends days failing to achieve what Claude Code can do in a few requests, well... what's going to happen to them? All of a sudden there's no work they can do, because the easy problems got solved by the AI.
So it ends up being the manager's job, either find something that this person can do, train them up to use modern technology, or fire them.