4 ms·

CEO openly says AI will cause the loss of “millions of jobs”. My advice, figure out how to get the CEO fired and tell him he was right.

seanhunter 3y ago
Honestly by the sounds of it the quality of decision-making won't be notably different between the current CEO running things and things just being decided stochastically by ChatGPT. Anyone as old as me remembers the sudden transition in the MBA mindset between "lol you nerds are so cute with your 'web'" where business people thought the internet was just where you got your old college email to "OMG WE NEED A WEBPAGE NOW" and suddenly every business _had_ to have a web page (most of which didn't do anything) so they could say they had an "internet strategy". The same mindset shift is apparent with respect to AI. Every executive currently has their LinkedIn feed dominated by posts from influencers like "20 essential ChatGPT prompts to redefine your marketing strategy!", "50 prompts you need to know to survive in M&A" etc. so they are suddenly scrambling to put the AI magic sauce on everything so they can say to their investors and board they have an "AI strategy". "This too shall pass" as the Persian saying goes. There's no doubt that the sudden increase in capability of some of the leading AI is going to bring about a step change in lots of areas, and I think things like huggingface being a center for open collaboration and sharing of models etc are genuinely radical and transformative in the same way that when the open source movement took off it generated a tremendous amount of collaboration and innovation. However traversing the gap between"I type things into ChatGPT and treat it as my outsourced roomful of monkeys'" and "thoughtful application of AI to some problem domain" requires people who actually have some quite specialised skills and are in quite high demand. I don't see that gap closing for a while tbh.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Also, there’s the recurrent cycle of AI Summer and Winter. Each time, someone figures out a new piece of the AI puzzle, we get new tools that are useful but don’t deliver on the big hype, AI funding drops as we run out of ways to skin the new cat, we’re left with some useful tools that the world acclimates to until the cycle repeats. Maybe the massive growth in computing resources speed up the seasons now, or have prolonged this one, but I don’t think we’re on the exponential part of the curve to AGI yet.
intelVISA 3y ago
Once every business can one line invoke an LLM to sufficiently create apps, assuming we reach that stage (possible), isn't that going to kill 90% of VC B2B SaaS especially the YC style round robin of funding each other without generating actual value? Think the CEO's SWEs are the least of his concerns.
- jzombie 3y ago
  Theoretically, if we get to the point where a quality app could actually be generated entirely this way, then someone will inevitably ask it to create an app that recursively asks it to create more apps, thus eliminating the need for anyone to even ask it to create an app at all.
  - bathtub365 3y ago
    And whoever runs the API will be laughing all the way to the bank.
  - polynomial 3y ago
    Where do I sign up!

seanhunter 3y ago

Honestly by the sounds of it the quality of decision-making won't be notably different between the current CEO running things and things just being decided stochastically by ChatGPT. Anyone as old as me remembers the sudden transition in the MBA mindset between "lol you nerds are so cute with your 'web'" where business people thought the internet was just where you got your old college email to "OMG WE NEED A WEBPAGE NOW" and suddenly every business _had_ to have a web page (most of which didn't do anything) so they could say they had an "internet strategy". The same mindset shift is apparent with respect to AI. Every executive currently has their LinkedIn feed dominated by posts from influencers like "20 essential ChatGPT prompts to redefine your marketing strategy!", "50 prompts you need to know to survive in M&A" etc. so they are suddenly scrambling to put the AI magic sauce on everything so they can say to their investors and board they have an "AI strategy". "This too shall pass" as the Persian saying goes. There's no doubt that the sudden increase in capability of some of the leading AI is going to bring about a step change in lots of areas, and I think things like huggingface being a center for open collaboration and sharing of models etc are genuinely radical and transformative in the same way that when the open source movement took off it generated a tremendous amount of collaboration and innovation. However traversing the gap between"I type things into ChatGPT and treat it as my outsourced roomful of monkeys'" and "thoughtful application of AI to some problem domain" requires people who actually have some quite specialised skills and are in quite high demand. I don't see that gap closing for a while tbh.

tnecniv 3y ago
Also, there’s the recurrent cycle of AI Summer and Winter. Each time, someone figures out a new piece of the AI puzzle, we get new tools that are useful but don’t deliver on the big hype, AI funding drops as we run out of ways to skin the new cat, we’re left with some useful tools that the world acclimates to until the cycle repeats. Maybe the massive growth in computing resources speed up the seasons now, or have prolonged this one, but I don’t think we’re on the exponential part of the curve to AGI yet.

intelVISA 3y ago

Once every business can one line invoke an LLM to sufficiently create apps, assuming we reach that stage (possible), isn't that going to kill 90% of VC B2B SaaS especially the YC style round robin of funding each other without generating actual value? Think the CEO's SWEs are the least of his concerns.

jzombie 3y ago
Theoretically, if we get to the point where a quality app could actually be generated entirely this way, then someone will inevitably ask it to create an app that recursively asks it to create more apps, thus eliminating the need for anyone to even ask it to create an app at all.
- bathtub365 3y ago
  And whoever runs the API will be laughing all the way to the bank.
- polynomial 3y ago
  Where do I sign up!