> Not too different from what "the cloud" did to this market from 2015 or so...
I mean for all the inefficiencies of the cloud, it solved a lot of problems. It also created a new category of problems but rarely does any particular technology arrive as a pure boon without it's own compromises. Despite it's issues and despite how hot ASS some implementations are (looking at you Azure) I think cloud infrastructure you can at least say does solve a lot of problems for a lot of firms. I can't remotely say the same for AI.
It has a lot of uses don't get me wrong, but not nearly the number being pitched currently, and I don't know that I've seen any that I truly can't live without. And at the prices that are going to need to be charged when we turn the proverbial profit lever... I mean I'm sure tons of huge software houses where shipping is all that matters, behind things like quality, maintainability, the sanity of the development team, what have you, AI code assistants will have a lot of uses and the company will (probably) pay for it. But I think it's a stretch to say it's even remotely as good a trade as Cloud infra was.
In the handful of years since we've gotten all these supposedly revolutionary tools, software quality has already taken a gut-punch, will no sign of that slowing down, quite the opposite. And that's not even going into all the AI features being crammed into everything that few, if any users want or use. In fact the obsession with shoving AI shit into Photoshop instead of fixing any of the issues that've been present in that software since ~2009 was the straw that broke the camel's back for me and I've left Adobe behind entirely, and I know for certain based on communities I'm in, I'm far from alone in that.
Take a look at the historical developments of wage participation in global income, labor productivity growth vs wage growth, and so forth. It works very well. As long as the most capable laborers are paid well enough to go along, the rest of us have little choice. Especially after citizens united basically privatized American elections.
The inflection point is whether or not everyone else can convince the "most capable laborers" who are about to be cut from the "Most Capable Laborer Club" to join the Tang Ping Rebellion before real price discovery happens on their salaries.
No one seems to get that you have to do a general strike BEFORE they lay everyone off. It's a gambit. But either you actually were all that valuable and you can get your job back if it fails, or you weren't and you finally acted in your own self interest.
So where’s the return? Outside of annualized numbers I haven’t even heard people pretend that OAI or Anthropic are profitable. If this is all about ROI there’s sure been a lot of I for as yet unrealized R.
IMO the top end goal is to allow capital to access skill without allowing skill to access capital. IF they can make these products work as advertised (big if, very very big if) the corpos can fire shitloads of low-end workers and give their middle managers access to these AI models and nothing else really has to change.
Workers lose their ability to earn a living, but OpenAI and Anthropic become the gatekeepers to effectively all productivity.
I know I sound tinfoil hat here but I don't see how else the numbers work. The only thing full-priced, profit-earning AI can possibly be cheaper than is, in my mind: as much of the workforce's salaries and cost of benefits as it can manage to offset, put together.
It's a great plan if you're a CEO who can't see beyond the next quarter's earnings call. Less so if you want things like, just pulling from a hat here, a functioning economy, a stable society, the ability for humans at large to live. But it's not like the owning class hasn't been undermining all of that for the better part of 50 years anyway.
Who (what) would all these middle managers manage? Agents? Why? If agents were so capable, they'd sure be capable of managing themselves or each other...
I mean I did word that carefully, "as much of the workforce as possible." So yes entirely possible that the middle managers get automated out too.
I genuinely don't get what the endgame here is, just AI's talking to AI's everywhere and somehow they think everything just keeps on making money I guess? But then again our current crop of oligarchs are pretty mediocre all around, so calling any of this a "plan" at all feels a stretch. Just cut costs every quarter, make the products worse, fire everyone who knows anything and sail off into the sunset making more money than any human being can actually spend in the process.
We can't discuss the finance of private companies so we have to wait for their IPO, acquisition by some public company, or bankruptcy to find out more.
The story written in the public numbers, from corporations or government statistics, is one of rise in factor productivity, rise in capital returns, and decline in wage participation in overall income.
I'm merely observing that it seems to be the latest chapter in the development of the capitalistic corporation.
I mean for all the inefficiencies of the cloud, it solved a lot of problems. It also created a new category of problems but rarely does any particular technology arrive as a pure boon without it's own compromises. Despite it's issues and despite how hot ASS some implementations are (looking at you Azure) I think cloud infrastructure you can at least say does solve a lot of problems for a lot of firms. I can't remotely say the same for AI.
It has a lot of uses don't get me wrong, but not nearly the number being pitched currently, and I don't know that I've seen any that I truly can't live without. And at the prices that are going to need to be charged when we turn the proverbial profit lever... I mean I'm sure tons of huge software houses where shipping is all that matters, behind things like quality, maintainability, the sanity of the development team, what have you, AI code assistants will have a lot of uses and the company will (probably) pay for it. But I think it's a stretch to say it's even remotely as good a trade as Cloud infra was.
In the handful of years since we've gotten all these supposedly revolutionary tools, software quality has already taken a gut-punch, will no sign of that slowing down, quite the opposite. And that's not even going into all the AI features being crammed into everything that few, if any users want or use. In fact the obsession with shoving AI shit into Photoshop instead of fixing any of the issues that've been present in that software since ~2009 was the straw that broke the camel's back for me and I've left Adobe behind entirely, and I know for certain based on communities I'm in, I'm far from alone in that.