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This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

• thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  Confirmation bias, maybe? 15B is like 1.5% of a trillion dollars currently being invested in AI..
• manquer 1y ago
  A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training. Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that. Any compute investment is largely local . Internet and Electricity is expensive and erratic, there is red tape, loads of import duties, there are dozens of cheaper places for cheap data centers. All this to say it is not the kind of outsourcing you think it is. —- There is a some amount of high tech outsourcing happening, those are driven by challenges in getting even a business visa in last 5 years. those numbers are quite small in aggregate won’t be news worthy. India simply does not have that kind of high quality talent pool . The education system is both expensive and very poor. There is shortage of qualified teachers, even bigger shortage of good ones. Students and parents just want to get a “degree” /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to learn.
  • alecco 1y ago
    > A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . Then why are they giving one year of free accounts for developers to the whole country? Remember they have about one million CS graduates every year. Do you see the scale of costs?
    • manquer 1y ago
      A lot of IT work that gets done in India is low skill things that could be automated even before AI codegen tools. These jobs are particularly vulnerable to AI productivity gains . The thesis here is that current gen tools should enable 2 people do the work of 10 and LLM models get paid the budget of 2-3 devs. The outsourcing org comes out ahead with spending only 70% as before (salary of remaining devs will naturally increase) —— India is by far the largest market for this. 1yr free is for same reason any VC funded company discounts their product or gives it free first, or Microsoft famously rather have you use their software pirated than not at all. This is only to get adoption, if your workers only know how to code with Claude or Codex then you are going to buy those tools as a company Nobody is going back once you get them to change. OpenAI et al hope to capture 30% value of the IT outsourcing sector while making to cheaper by 30%. There is no free lunch. —— The number of CS “grads” are not a useful metric for India. The industry shifted to hiring other engineering streams to any grads with aptitude to learn a long while back. The vast majority of them don’t have any programming skills, don’t have critical thinking skills, are poor at communication. They are unemployable. Don’t take it from me, NASSCOM says this too. The degrees are largely from mills that charge up to $80k-$100k (med degrees go even higher) promising jobs but don’t teach much.
• HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs. Not that I believe Trump actually cares about US jobs, let alone thinks strategically about the importance of a strong software sector, but you might expect him to at least do another mafia-style shakedown of the companies outsourcing jobs. Heck, you might think he'd even care about all the lost tax revenue, by having developer salaries going to India rather than staying here.
  • jdlshore 1y ago
    Check out the HIRE Act.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
      Interesting - thanks!
    • rs186 1y ago
      Looks like it's being pushed by a Republican senator without obvious support from the other side. I'm sure Google, Meta and hundreds of other companies will pay big $$ to make sure nothing comes out of it.
      • HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
        No need for any industry push-back apparently - Trump seems to be in process of TACOing out of his H-1B changes, now saying that US doesn't have enough talented people. Maybe more people would pursue tech careers and higher education if there were more and better paying jobs here ... but there appear to be plenty of people here already with the expertise and looking for jobs. 600 former Meta AI employees for a start, not to mention countless highly experienced people not able to find work due to age discrimination (incl. companies giving the job to a cheaper foreigner).
  • sumedh 1y ago
    > I'm a bit surprised that Trump isn't going after outsourcing in the same way he went after H-1Bs. They might use it for the next elections, all the white collar jobs are going out of US, they will bring it back if you elect them again.
• alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  > a lot of people speculate they named an Indian Accenture guy to move as much as possible to India Having dealt with A LOT of Accenture “devs”, how do I leverage the barn and then some to short Google!