Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be nice if the skillset I happened to hone turned out to be the one field that stays lucrative for my entire career. I just don't think the market owes me or people in my field a job, and if we get displaced and have to learn new roles, we'll be in good company with most other humans alive in our generation.
This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).
I mean, that very well could be the case. It often is the case with any kind of automation. There's a plausible claim that things will turn out fine, and another plausible claim that it could be a disaster for the profession. But whether or not it's a disaster for professional developers is separable from whether (a) it's a disaster for, like, society, and (b) whether or not it fundamentally is an important new fact about the world --- like, whether we're OK with it or not, it does appear likely that a huge swathe of professional software development work is fully automatable.
It doesn't seem like it, but there are other people in the world besides programmers and venture capitalists. They will benefit from AI, many already are. Some professionals are not.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
CEOs will often have unfavorable characteristics. From startups to billion dollar corporations I've experienced far fewer "genuine" CEOs than narcissistic assholes. The latter are so prevalent because they take the valuation of the company as one of their primary drivers. This means that, for them, removing any obstacle (customers included) is the path they will traverse.
I think the problems with "successful" CEOs don't paint the complete picture. Many CEOs come in after the hard work has been done and "final phase" CEOs enshittify the product and treat their partners and customers vastly differently than they did during their build phase. I experienced this first hand at Palo Alto Networks. At the time their second CEO (Mark McLaughlin) had just come into the org. Mark was one of those few genuine CEOs I experienced, probably one of the least narcissistic I've seen at that point in a young company's trajectory. However Nikesh Arora (Mark's successor) is a complete narcissistic asshole. I still talk to many in leadership there on the regular and the consistent theme is he's surely the reason PAN support and product quality has taken a dive compared to the engineering focus on product and customers back in the early 2010s.
There are a lot of papers surrounding CEOs and many look at the narcissistic angle [0][1][2]. The reality is a lot of these companies could operate just fine without a CEO. I find it hard to believe CEOs are even remotely worth their compensation packages given most of them have zero clue about the product or customs they serve anymore. This all flows back to the "shareholder value" bullshit the US economy is built on. If corporations had more restrictions in financial engineering maybe, just maybe, they'd actually try to better compete within their product/service space.
I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
Especially when you can actively choose to not use Anthropic. They think they have a moat from all of the IP they've stolen. Just wait until there's nothing more to steal and the laws eventually turn against them. And let's be honest about these companies. It is very much Dario and Sam and Sundar and Mark and Peter and Elon and... These are the choices they are making and hopefully they are held accountable both legally and within society as a whole.
No, you pretty obviously didn't understand it, at least in the sense of ASI being talked about. The whole "oh don't buy it" stops mattering. Humans are no longer the sole creators of information and intelligence. That is AI no longer has to steal, but humans will have to beg, borrow, or steal the information/products that ASI creates.
I didn't say "buy" anything. You've clearly bought into the narrative that ASI is even remotely possible with current architectures. You've chosen to ignore all of the lies that have thus far failed to come to fruition. The assumption is an insane leap from models in a loop that have no intelligence to models taking over the "sole creators of information and intelligence". Anthropic marketing is doing a phenomenal job for a large portion of those in the bubble.
Agreed. I think the Chinese labs are proving that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat in almost every aspect, especially pricing. I also think people are getting annoyed with the constant lift and shift. I've seen more folks drop Claude Code and Codex, specifically, because of the lock-in it provides the providers. I'm curious to see how people standardize on tooling adjacent and if Anthropic, Google or OAI move to block utilization akin to the games Anthropic has been playing as of late.
I think the end game is routed model usage and SLMs. I think Apple is going to prove this in the consumer space pretty handily and I'm curious how the Android ecosystem responds since the hardware is considerably lacking in model performance. I think Apple has a huge opportunity here, as much as I don't like their current ecosystem of walled garden. They did position themselves very well with ARM and custom chips for their hardware. Hopefully the broader ecosystem of ARM and Linux are able to make some headway and we see a more formalized, and broadly accepted, architecture to capitalize on.
is there an alternative to codex that “just works”? by just works i mean i can install as an app in 1 minute, and i get web search, skills, mcp servers, etc? Bonus points if it can control my chrome tabs like codex can, and if it offers remote control from my iPhone (chatgpt app) so i can kick off tasks while i’m out for a walk. Even more bonus points if i can, with 1 button click, share my chats or share the results of a session as a “site” (vercel style).
I’m sure you could put something similar together with a bunch of duct tape and 2 weeks of effort, but it won’t work nearly as nicely nor out of the box. so…what am i missing?
My company has an agreement with the big providers and while i'm pretty sure they think about how to get budget back, its an competitive advantage and normal people will not learn different model behaviours.
going to IPO is a sign of confidence , you need to report a lot of things, that private companies don't. This is an exact reason chinese labs do not rush to go public. They wish to go , but money flow that is not as good.
On the same note. if spacex is doing datacenters on earth successfully what's wrong with that? They rented cloud infra to a #2 or #3 provider in the world after < 2 years in business. It's a success, no?
> if spacex is doing datacenters on earth successfully what's wrong with that? They rented cloud infra to a #2 or #3 provider in the world after < 2 years in business. It's a success, no?
If you get hired as a staff engineer and do the work of a junior, what's wrong with that?
Clearly xAI (now part of spaceX) did not raise funds to be a data center. The margins are way different. There are plenty of recent IPOs in that area that are worth at most billions not trillions.
> going to IPO is a sign of confidence , you need to report a lot of things, that private companies don't.
This isn't going to IPO. This is rushing to IPO. It is a sign of confidence that the market or wider environment might crash soon so we need the liquidity now.
> This is an exact reason chinese labs do not rush to go public.
Maybe or maybe not. If you are referring to Chinese labs - both the Hong Kong and China stock market are way weaker than Nasdaq. It's not comparable. Check all the recent Hong Kong IPOs that have tanked.
So no, reason not to might just be: no money in it.
You’re not gonna get nuanced discussion on spacex or anything Elon related here these days. Most of this site is Reddit lite at this point including their milquetoast progressive opinions (Elon bad being one of them).
I am and I very much agree with you. Many Americans 1) have no idea how to drive with any common courtesy or respect and 2) many drive while texting or doing who knows what all while cutting lanes and impeding traffic.
I literally see these things every time I drive. And I work from home.
That's cool, but the enterprise is cheap. If you have any proximity to sales in the space you know that procurement and lawyers exist that have a full time job redlining purchase orders and agreements to the N-th degree. The enterprise will pay for something that will make them money or prevent them from losing it. But the enterprise isn't paying a premium and they know that.
Even within the Fortune 5 of the US if be surprised if any of them are paying more than $1B annually currently in total.
And then you can take the parent context into account. If they can just equip users with a slightly more expensive Mac and call their Dell rep to order a few thousand DGX Spark to handle the rest... Why would they risk their trade secrets and intimate details flowing into models that may or may not be trustworthy long term?
Most large enterprise have been burned by SaaS over the years in some way. I can't imagine there aren't architects in the large organizations that are truly weighing how to effectively use AI. And beyond that we're seeing more and more progress in SLMs and orchestration agents which become easier to run at scale on-prem.
> If you have any proximity to sales in the space you know that procurement and lawyers exist that have a full time job redlining purchase orders and agreements to the N-th degree.
Between Israel and Russia is anyone surprised that all of the memes about a certain party being infiltrated by the Russians and then also all of them being bootlickers of Israel have merit to them?
I've worked for a couple Israeli startups and what I will say is: never again. I've experienced all of the stereotypes and more, firsthand.
Well, Elon seems to take the fastest path possible to these DCs. One can envision a future where these get shut down for the severity of the pollution, not to mention being built and operated illegally [0].
Irony, maybe? Do you not get it?
If these models are so great solid_fuel then I guess it wouldn't be interesting that Anthropic's own models can make up ulterior BS as analysis.
So why don't you pound sand since that clearly went straight over your head? That would be far more useful than your asinine response.
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