I still have yet to see it adequately replace any human labor

Then you haven’t been using the right models or trying.

Let’s say for a moment that AI really is as capable as AI bros want you to believe it is. Having used some AI models at my work (network engineer), I’m not so convinced, but I’ll put that aside for a moment.

The pinch of the AI vise is going to be the cost. All the AI companies are running at loss to try and capture the market, and they’ll need to charge a lot more for access to AI once a winner is determined.

Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access to an AI agent? Because that’s looking like what they’ll have to do in order to turn these companies profitable.

Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access

That’s really the crux of the matter. Regardless of if it’s fit for purpose to replace paid labour, is it actually financially viable in any way to replace humans with an AI model that works but costs several times more than a human work force while not being able to be held legally accountable.

If this future AI agent solves the task at a fraction of the time, it can still be financially viable at several times the cost.

Riiiiight…..

That only makes sense if money is made on the output. What you’re basically saying is X Toy Company will make more money if they make more toys. What you’re forgetting is that there has to be a demand for those toys. So X Toy Company can’t replace workers with AI unless there’s more demand for the toys than there is currently able to be fulfilled and there’s no evidence for that across all sectors of the economy.

exactly, depending on the case it’s a possibility and not a guarantee, which is why I also wrote it can be, not it will be.

I’ve already seen it replace people in various roles successfully. It’s getting better – will it replace everyone? No, but it will be disruptive and it seems foolish to not acknowledge what is obvious - jobs will be affected.

You literally said “replace all human labor” though.

Haha I’m not a AI Stan. I am the only one it seems truly worried about never having a job again.

Their investor pitch is this technology replaces all human labor. That’s their framing not mine.

Jobs have already been affected, yes. Not “adequately” done in lieu of a human, though.

And it still takes a human to steer the things.

My honest problem with AI is the hallucinations.

They’ve been shown to be a mathematical inevitability, and that means everything they ever make must be fully reviewed.

And that’s antithetical to everything I’ve known about computers in my career.

The entire reason why computers are so useful and reliable is because, until now, they always produce the same outputs given the same inputs.

One of the AI agents I’ve interacted with was in a GPS monitoring system for fleet vehicles. I was a supervisor of technicians, and I got a report that a company truck with license plate [X] ran a stop sign.

They replaced their standard search function with an AI bot, so I asked it which vehicle in the fleet had license plate [X]. And it confidently responded with a vehicle that didn’t have that license plate.

A standard search function, comparing an input to database values for vehicles wouldn’t have that problem. And that’s why I’m so sure this is a bubble and not a major technological market disruption.

Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now

They lost $20B on $50B revenue. That means they only need to double the price to make up the loss and have a profit.

That’s still a ton when you consider how much professional users are spending.

I’m fairly certain these numbers are made up. Additionally, I’m betting those numbers include investment dollars, as opposed to paid revenue.

They’re playing all kinds of games with the numbers right now. They’re trying to IPO so hiding costs under other headings outside the core business. Don’t trust what they openly state. It’s far worse.

Maybe but you have to work with the data you have, not the data you want to see.

Imagining that the enemy is on the brink of collapse isn’t a good mind set when you are fighting something. It encourages laziness.

The data is there, but it’s not in what those companies say. It’s in the books of the companies they have relationships with.

I do agree with your second statement though.

The data is there, but it’s not in what those companies say.

You can’t argue from the premise of conspiracy. Are they exaggerating? Maybe? But you absolutely cannot state with confidence that you know a huge secret hidden from all Wall Street analysts.

$20B loss on $50B revenue are the numbers that Wall Street thinks is correct. That’s the data you have to go off of without unsupported conspiracies.

even better is the open weight, free models you can tailor to specific needs, which directly undercuts these massive “ai” companies.

So if/when those hikes happen, those self hosted models are going to look a lot more appetizing too

Inference keeps getting cheaper. “Good enough” is a pretty low bar.

Our company built an “AI” system that literally only searches our other shitty system and gives a usable interface. It is not AI and im sick of every database interface being called AI.

LLM at least makes sense from a nomenclature perspective.

10 years ago it was “smart thermostats” “smart x” just because they could connect to the internet.

This is the same gilded bullshit these companies always spin.

All the AI companies are running at loss

That is if you include training. Look at deepseek for an idea of inference costs. At that level AI coding is sustainable (but not worth $2tn).

Why wouldn’t you include training? Training is vital to their product.

Is it? It’s vital to the tech giants marketing and trillion dollar valuation. But I don’t think it’s vital to most of their clients anymore.

If you want it’s “knowledge” to be up to date, the training never ends.

In theory the “reasoning” part doesn’t need a knowledge update.

Cost/benefit maybe the knowledge update only needs something every 5 years.

Basically I can see a world where inference is provided and consumed at cost. I can’t see one where customers are willing to cough up billions for a slight increase in the knowledge base.

5 years ago we were mid-pandemic. That’s a big knowledge gap.

I’m comparing the whole of human knowledge to 5 years of additional facts. Most useful things are known. An llm doesn’t need to know the current US president to invent a biscuit recipe.

I pay zero, not even electricity because it’s being generated in this building, for my agent. It’s running entirely on my computer and it’s decent enough. The LLM subscription companies are eventually going to fail because everyone and their dog is going to be able to run their own models.

Not of they can’t buy computers any more.

I’m wondering if we’ll get a rise in old school tech due to high cost of ram, CPUs and gpus.

Windows will struggle if that’s the case.Linux will be fine.

I think you’re probably a couple of orders of magnitude too low.

Get help.

“come on bro you’re just holding it wrong”

I don’t use it but my wife uses it for spreadsheet equations. She has to verifiy and test every answer but then so would anything written by an intern.

So yeah, AI is killing jobs, not in an individual sense, but in aggregate like spreadsheet software did 50 years ago when before that all work was done by hand.

That’s just making one person do the job of more than one. I call bs.

That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.

Capitalism has been doing that long before LLM’S.

That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.

How do you call bs on one person doing the work that used to take two? It was one person and an intern.

Every company had a secretary pool 60 years ago before word processors allowed people to type by themselves without an extra support person.

aka ‘Productivity increase’

Productivity has increased for decades without much of it going to wage increases. Instead, it’s gone to the companies/shareholders

People could have always learned to type, that part didn’t change much with the switch to computers. I think they just liked having secretaries around back in the day and were willing to pay for it.

Typing quickly on a mechanical typewriter is a skill not easily mastered. It’s not just the typing, it is the extreme accuracy needed. There’s no backspace and no cut and paste. A letter covered in white out isn’t acceptable.

I have a few mechanical typewriters I got into as a hobby, it’s not that hard. This is where I’m just like, skill issue. People didn’t want to type, they just liked having secretaries around and were willing to pay for it. Back in the 70’s and earlier they literally thought typing was “women’s work” like sewing because it required high levels of manual dexterity that big tough men were obviously incapable of.

This is where I’m just like, skill issue.

Well that’s everything. If you are an expert you can do it quickly and accurately. Everyone else needs to take more time and will make mistakes. Word Processing software means a single typo doesn’t ruin ten minutes of typing. It enabled regular people without skill to type well enough to do the work themselves.

We’ve started to lean into it at work and I am not exaggerating when I say that I’m probably doing three people’s job right now by utilizing it.

It’s terrifying and amazing and I’m just not sure how far this is going to go.

Now these jobs were not scheduled for anybody. It’s not like jobs were lost. But they are jobs that are never going to be taken by new people. Because those openings don’t exist anymore.

Sad as it is.

Good luck debugging when something goes bad down the line.

I mean that seriously, I wish you luck.

Honestly, this whole “AI software development will make code less maintainable” stance is not an AI problem, it’s a human problem. When you use agents to generate code, you still need to review it, test it and so on. Granted, some devs let their agents manage every step in the pipeline without supervision, but this is as dumb as letting a team of 4 juniors work without supervision. If you have real experience in software development, you will take the time required to validate the code created by your agents and still be able to deploy 5-10 times faster.

Also it’s not like all pre-ai codebases were masterpieces, easily maintainable with no tech debt.

AI doesn’t have a monopoly on slop, humans are perfectly capable of that. AI can just write more of it, quicker

But your job hasn’t been replaced

I have seen it taken a serious hit at call centers.

“Adequately” I still stand by my assertion

Does your understanding of adequately matter to ex call center employees?

And what about the artists who had their jobs absorbed by AI?

As someone who has attempted to communicate with an AI call center, that tech seems pretty far from prime time

Level 1 support was never a satisfactory experience, the employees there never were allowed to say anything beyond some things that fit into a LLM context.

“It hasn’t affected me so that means it’s the same for everyone else” idiocy level thinking.

a product that replaces all human labor

you’re in too deep in the tech bros’ propaganda dude, wake up

I read that as the sales pitch, not their actual opinion.

Lmao replaces all human labor? ChatGPT can’t change my tires. It can’t even write decent code without direct supervision

It’s a lot better at writing code than most people think.

That’s says more about how bad the average developer is tbh.

I use it everyday. It needs oversight every single time I use it… It isn’t replacing developers any time soon. Code monkeys maybe.

It doesn’t matter if it works, if investors think it does that is enough for them to throw money at it.

until they run out of money

When the investors are Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon. Then they have some deep pockets

True, very deep, and for a while they had nothing to really spend on, which is why, say it with me! Markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent

But it’s still not infinite

Not if more investors keep throwing more money at it. It only stops when investors are no longer willing to fund continued expenses and they are unable to fund it themselves. At which point if they are spending a lot more than they are earning which appears to be the case currently, they would have to increase income and/or decrease expenses. So expect more and more push to become profitable as investor money becomes harder to find.