Comment by ardeaver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardeaver | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt that AI's main contribution to eliminating jobs is giving CEOs the ability to do layoffs while trying to both separate themselves from the current economic uncertainty and imply that they are an AI company.

Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.

In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.

As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.

> Talking about AI is cheap.

AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.

Energy is minor part of the cost. Now helium is something else

I assume TSMC is not only helium consumer so in reduced supply situation they’ll pay more and someone else will end up without helium.

>AI is about to get a lot more expensive as Taiwan (TSMC) and other South East Asian chip manufacturers don't get their Natural Gas or the Natural Gas they need becomes really expensive.

Also, before the war Trump got GCC countries to promise they will invest $ 2 billion into AI. Now those money will probably not come anymore.

Also, the power will get more expensive, so running AI data centers will be more expensive.

Not sure about GCC countries not paying. Vassals don't really get a say in anything. As for oil and gas deliveries, that is where "force majeure" can be activated.

I'd be interested to see if the actual cost of AI will actually have any impact on how often CEOs end up talking about it. In my experience, there's a certain level of assessment that goes into whether or not a line item on your expenses is considered a problem or an investment. If you can still hand wave your way into convincing investors that $200K in AI credits replaces 3 $200K/year software engineers, even though it used to be $100K for the same amount of credits, you might be fine. At some point, some part of that equation will likely fall out of favor with investors or the math will no longer work out, and maybe it's the cost of natural gas or helium.

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