3 ms·

>> But these people are itching to eliminate the cost of maintaining a dev team, and it shows in the level of wishful thinking they display. And this is the pr

>> But these people are itching to eliminate the cost of maintaining a dev team, and it shows in the level of wishful thinking they display. And this is the promise of AI, to eliminate jobs. If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. I understand some people try to claim AI might make net more jobs (someday), but I just don't think that is what CEOs are going for.

nicoburns 2y ago
> If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. They might not have to. If the results are bad enough then their companies might straight-up fail. I'd be willing to bet that at least one company has already failed due to betting too heavily on LLMs. That isn't to say that LLMs have no uses. But just that CEOs willing something to work isn't sufficient to make it work.
- Yoric 2y ago
  Yes, but don't forget that higher-ups also control, to a large extent, the narrative. Whether laying off developers to replace them with LLMs was good for the company is largely uncorrelated to whether the person in charge of the operation will get promoted for having successfully saved all this money for the company. Pre-LLM, that's how Boeing destroyed itself. By creating value for the shareholders.
subw00f 2y ago
It makes sense—we all know how capitalism works. But the thing is, how can you not apply the law of diminishing returns here? The models are getting marginally better with a significant increase in investment, except for DeepSeek’s latest developments, which are impressive but mostly for cost reasons—not because we’ve achieved anything remotely close to AGI. If your experienced employees, who are giving an honest try to all these tools, are telling you it’s not a silver bullet, maybe you should hold your horses a little and try to take advantage of reality—which is actually better—rather than forcing some pipe dream down your bottom line’s throat while negating any productivity gains by demotivating them with your bullshit or misdirecting their efforts into finding a problem for a given solution.

nicoburns 2y ago

> If CEOs invest heavily in this, they won't back down because no one wants to be wrong. They might not have to. If the results are bad enough then their companies might straight-up fail. I'd be willing to bet that at least one company has already failed due to betting too heavily on LLMs. That isn't to say that LLMs have no uses. But just that CEOs willing something to work isn't sufficient to make it work.

Yoric 2y ago
Yes, but don't forget that higher-ups also control, to a large extent, the narrative. Whether laying off developers to replace them with LLMs was good for the company is largely uncorrelated to whether the person in charge of the operation will get promoted for having successfully saved all this money for the company. Pre-LLM, that's how Boeing destroyed itself. By creating value for the shareholders.

subw00f 2y ago

It makes sense—we all know how capitalism works. But the thing is, how can you not apply the law of diminishing returns here? The models are getting marginally better with a significant increase in investment, except for DeepSeek’s latest developments, which are impressive but mostly for cost reasons—not because we’ve achieved anything remotely close to AGI. If your experienced employees, who are giving an honest try to all these tools, are telling you it’s not a silver bullet, maybe you should hold your horses a little and try to take advantage of reality—which is actually better—rather than forcing some pipe dream down your bottom line’s throat while negating any productivity gains by demotivating them with your bullshit or misdirecting their efforts into finding a problem for a given solution.