I wonder for a health insurance company. Everything we do is on a time delay. Stupidly, we are just now getting into AI even after seeing the blowback on other companies doing it.
Me and IT don’t get along.
It’s been incredible watching my company try to resolve the AI pricing situation, while desperately forcing everyone to use it even more.
- We’re paying 100k a month for AI, but deterministic n8n automations have to be carefully monitored so they “don’t cost too much”
- A project that feeds entire ticket JSONs into Opus 5.5 is an “incredible innovation that everyone should use,” but two minutes later, “please be mindful of token costs and don’t use it when not necessary”
- Everyone is forced into using Claude, but running airgapped local models forbidden
It’s ridiculous
Not to mention that tokens at the moment are heavily subsidized.
What’s your tally of FTEs who are wholly dedicated to developing internal AI tools for the company now? We’re at a couple dozen at least and one of them is a new fucking VP. That shit ain’t cheap either.
Are we finally hitting the trough of disillusionment with AI?
That would be amazing!
Character.ai filing for bankruptcy after adopting it so quick and feeding it to a loyal customer base is probably a sign the bubble is bursting.
Literally, they were one of the biggest and most successful AI resellers and they couldn’t stay afloat. Successful as in “people used their product a ton for free” though I think.
these companies get so much funding from investors they forget they have to make money and not just spend it on giving people free AI products.
I would just like to say that whole situation has been a lot of jumping up and down on the let’s hate AI trampoline.
There is so much more nuance to what happened there, and people want to take it as the first domino. That is a bad analysis.
Don’t kid yourself. I have a background in both statistical learning and programming, but because I’m not a fucking moron I’ve considered the entire AI boom a mass mental illness of idiocy and incompetence… but this will play out just like outsourcing.
Outsourcing was initially sold as THE solution and performed by the vast majority of business and political leadership — who are incompetent morons seeking nothing but quarterly KPI/cost improvements — which resulted in massive failures, bankrupcies, onshoring etc etc… But was ultimately refined and mastered to the point where most jobs could be offshored again.
Remember; Detroit manufacturing never recovered. 99% of manufacturing offshoring was ultimately successful on a multi-decade timeline. 15 years ago I worked in a business park that employed over 10k people for a single corporation. My role there was specifically onshored from a failed offshoring. Today, all of those “service-based” jobs have now been automated or offshored, and the business park is a ghost town that will most likely be demolished and replaced with a data center.
AI will fail short term due to the gross incompetence of political and business leadership, but most human jobs will be automated away over the next 2-3 decades regardless. They only have to be cheaper than humans. They do not have to be “better”. Tge fact that this will destroy capitalism and revert to fuedalism is irrelevent. Once we wire these models into robots and have them learning through interaction with the real world (which is cataclysmically psychotic), the automation of all human labor could take place within a single decade.
Don’t worry, though. We fundamentally can not control AI, so even if the fascists use it to mass murder billions, the most likely scenario is that they all die at the hands of their creation in the VERY near future.
Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.
Weird, middle managers are among the few things more worthless and wasteful than AI in the job space.
I think a lot of these companies let go of team leads and just decided they could do without. They had the biggest salaries and likely no respect from the higher ups. In my experience with big projects this position is extremely important because it keeps the team on task and they are able to coordinate with other team leads. If you just have a handful of junior employees, they may be doing work, but it’s not actually moving the project forward. Often time these leads are still doing code review or even writing code (or the equivalent work product in their division), so it’s not like they’re just in meetings all day. They actually know and do the work, but they’re able to keep the group organized. I’m guessing those are the positions they’re rehiring.
The hyperlinked article in that section goes into a little more detail, but I’m guessing based off what I’ve been hearing from the industry.
Why are we writing articles on what the biggest megacorps are doing with the technology? Meta is one of the most braindead corporations I’ve ever seen, wasting billions and billions of dollars on failed tech after failed tech. Microsoft can’t stop pushing their shitty Copilot, which isn’t even on anybody’s LLM radar. Anything Elon Musk leads consistently makes dumbass decisions that scare us all.
If anything, it just shows how stupid these megacorps are.
Firms from Microsoft to McKinsey are limiting usage for employees, as the flood of new tools and rapacious consumption weighs on bottom lines. Others, such as Palantir, Booz Allen Hamilton and Nvidia, are restricting employee use over growing concerns about the security of their organizations’ data with AI companies, Reuters reported.
You don’t say!
C-suite leaders say when it comes to AI, there’s a sense that “we’re driving the truck and building it at the same time, and that’s a problem,” said Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management. “If we could all rewind … we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way.”
If only somebody would have told them!
Worth mentioning here:
https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
Mark Ma, University of Pittsburgh professor and researcher on the AI layoff study, said leaders are focused on short-term performance, “which is why they tried to rush ahead by investing in AI and laying off workers”.
But companies’ share prices tend to dip after they announce AI-related layoffs, he noted, suggesting that “the stock market also does not think these will work out.”
