The AI Big Crunch Is Starting

medium.com

16 points·benrothke··6 comments

I keep hearing managers earn the big bucks, because they take responsibility. Now, reading from the article:

"Robert Half reached a similar conclusion. Nearly one-third of hiring managers admitted eliminating positions because of AI, only to hire people back when reality intervened."

Wow, nearly one third of manager who took the decision to fire are going to "take responsibility" any second now? That's a lot.

Any second now ...

Yeah, this is what I think of whenever someone tells me that AI is going to unlock the power of human judgement in an engineering organization. The first thing they did was enable managers exercising bad judgement to fire the people who would allegedly use this tool to exercise their own good judgement.

I keep having this nagging idea in the back of my head: "it's a LOT easier to have an LLM replace management in a company, even all the way up the CEO, than it is to replace engineers, or the cleaning lady, plumber, cashier, ..., literally anyone outside of management. A LOT easier"

As long as I can start reading my e-mails on a bargain-priced GB300 machine under my desk, I'll be fine. I missed the chance of getting a bargain-bin Symbolics on the previous AI winter, but, maybe this time, I can get my hands on some fine hardware.

AI just isn't that good. It also is very expensive, and losing so much money that we know the cost has to increase substantially. The current model is DOA. I'm not sure in what form the usable part of the tech will survive the scam it's powering currently.

As to ‘AI just isn't that good’, it is, in fact, really good. But that doesn’t mean it’s really good for everything, or even most things. That is the huge difference.

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