This started literally two weeks ago and a couple of days ago I talked to one of the admin people who wanted an update on the progress I'd made with sanding off some of the rough edges of the very rough implementation that the managing partner had put in place (he bought a Mac Mini, put OpenClaw on it, then gave it admin access to a whole pile of stuff!) I said I needed a couple more days. "Okay," she said, "but I need this quickly, because we're firing people next week."
They have literally gone from no agentic AI, to discovering OpenClaw, to firing people, in a two-week time span.
When economists say that the predicted job losses as a result of AI have not yet shown up in the data, I'm genuinely befuddled. Either we don't have long to wait to start seeing them, or there's something wrong with the data, because you can't tell me what I just described above is an isolated phenomenon.
I also have to say: I've always enjoyed working with this client, but this experience has been a huge turnoff on a number of different levels.
They had to hire a bunch of them back less than two months later. The speed-ups were approximately nil and making the editors edit AI slop all day long had them all close to quitting.
They didn't even wait to see if there were any actual benefits, they just blindly fired a bunch of people based on marketing lies. I can only assume they're the same sorts who fall for Nigerian Prince scams.
Most humans are not intrinsically intelligent: they are regurgitators and mimickers of others. Very few think independently and are capable of original thought.
Come at me with the down voting.. I dont care. History will show Im correct.
Shareholders only care about short term gains, CEOs have no skin in the game, everyone else under wants to keep their job. None of these are aligned towards "make the nest proudct and satisfy customers".
Personally I believe the stock market is incredibly, incredibly shaky. Investors are now in full-fear mode, it doesn't matter what news Nvidia etc print - if customers of OAI and others, are not seeing a meaningful INCREMENTAL increase in revenue generation or increase in cost-reduction (aside from white-washing it with lay-offs from insane hiring in the past).
RE. stupidity - it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.
Wanna know how stupid it is? Someone I know who works at Blackrock as a portfolio manager pretty high up is all of a sudden being forced to learn how to code and use LLMs to code. Yes you heard me right - this behaviour is expanding out of the software engineering profession.
Its absolutely nuts.
Nintendo also has similar vibes. I see shareholder calls asking about AI usage and their answers come down to something like "we're not ruling it out, but we'll only use it when a situation presents itself". They tend to be pretty good at pushing back against their shareholders. Having a proper war chest instead of constantly funding on debt probably helps.
> it is stupidity for the most part. Without the stupidity in quantity of demand, there is no market for LLMs from enterprise et al.
Stupidity implies incompetence and lack of intent. Greed is incredibly intentional. There's always a bit of stupidity with greed (we even call such an algorithmic approach the "greedy method" after all), but I think they are important distinctions.
I'll admit your blackrock example is plain stupidity, though. I know part of the end-goal is for "idea guys" to be able to make their ideas without pesky employees, but I don't think too many really think they can achieve that today.
I’d have guessed the most annoying part would be that you’re assisting them in a hare brained scheme to terminate some people’s employment.
I bet we could replace nearly all the CEOs in the country with chatgpt controlling a [email protected] email and nobody would notice.
But think of how much profits will improve by not paying $tens of millions to employ a CEO!
Funny enough, I got laid off last month, yes I’m a tech guy, now they apparently regret it because they are now scrambling to find a replacement to do the tech tasks!
TBH, I’m happy I got laid off because I’m finally building something I wanted to use.