bjornsing

Good point. I’m a Europoor who got carried away with envy.

> The highly skilled will continue to get hired but the median worker out of San Francisco is being replaced

What does highly skilled even mean nowadays / with Claude Code?

You have 4 million dollars. Be happy about that.

  Location: Stockholm / Malmö, Sweden
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Engineering-physicist with 20+ years of experience in software engineering, mostly in leadership roles. Track record spans founder/CEO of a VC-backed wireless networking startup (architected and led the development of a radio access system later licensed to Ericsson Networks), Head of Data & Analytics at a digital primary care scale-up (built the data science team from scratch + hands-on work in Python with libraries like PyMC3 and TensorFlow), Engineering Manager for Sinch's central data platform (25 reports, drove a data-mesh reorg), most recently fractional CTO for two healthtech startups taking them from prototype to production (architecture, hiring, process + hands-on work in Terraform).

Good at understanding "the big picture", e.g. business and customer needs. Comfortable from board level to codebase. Good judge of engineering talent. Can do 0-to-1 technical org build-out, architecture reviews, or steady state engineering management. Open to IC roles if interesting and challenging. Interim, part-time roles and full-time employment all of interest. I have a Swedish company through which I can invoice pretty much anywhere in the world.

> Note I don’t share all the doom and gloom of some folks in the math community but it is a valid point that people who might otherwise have gone into the field may choose not to anymore.

Isn’t that only natural? I probably would have stayed in physics and not gone into software if AI had been around 25 years ago. People gravitate to areas where their innate abilities are appreciated and can make a difference.

People keep saying that. But they can still vote.

> Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability.

That boundary tends to become more and more fuzzy as you grow in your career. I think that’s where the feeling comes from. When you’re a software engineer it’s easy to know if you’ve failed or not. When you’re a CTO it’s often a matter of perspective and depends on what will happen in the future.

That would be a very interesting experiment indeed. But unfortunately the volume of training data from before 1920 is probably insufficient for pre-training an LLM large enough to come up with QM.

It proved Navier-Stokes. Call it what you will.

I think AI will turn out to be quite different from those earlier advances in tooling, in that AI replaces thought itself. So next time it probably won’t be a human physicist that does the intellectually challenging work of constructing quantum mechanics from measurements of individual quanta. It will most likely be an AI.

> Questions are "good questions" because they are good questions to humans.

This is what reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF) is for.

I think the causal relationship is often the reverse: When things are going well your limiting constraints move from outside the company (e.g. long sales cycles) to inside (e.g. engineering, operations). That feels a lot more intense because founders / board / investors are focused internally and driving up intensity, as that is the limiting factor for company success. When it’s not going so well the intensity stays more in the board room.

If OpenAI jumped off the bandwagon and started 100 companies they’d be competing with everyone with an Anthropic subscription. Sure, they would get cheaper tokens, but would that be enough to win against the rest of the world? Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.

But your code was probably written by a human. This proof was generated by an LLM. Is it surprising then that it’s easier for an LLM to read than for a human?

I find it overly harsh too. I think the reaction is much more about the devaluation of innate ability, and skills / knowledge built over a lifetime. If another mathematician had solved it then you can refocus on another problem and get another chance. Now that an LLM has done it it’s very unlikely you’ll ever solve another open problem.

Very true. For mathematicians this is about ego / identity. For software engineers it’s about employability.

Doesn’t sound too disruptive yet, except for juniors and those who have invested in very specific skills e.g. performance. But this happened in two years. What’s going to happen over the coming two years?

One data point I’d be interested to know more about is if they’ve scaled back their hiring due to AI productivity gains, or if they’re just doing more engineering for the same money. As I see it that’s the big question for those of us who have to work for a living.

> that is a political decision

But not necessarily an explicit one. It may turn out to be the natural path forward and the political decision is then to not do anything to prevent it.

My point is that any such metric may turn out to have been wildly off in a post-ASI world. Ten years ago or even today it may have seemed fine to educate a large part of the population for ”elite” jobs, but after ASI that may instead be looked at as a massive overproduction of ”elites”.

Turchin doesn’t restrict his ”elite” to graduates of elite universities.

Something more dramatic than the fall of the Roman Empire then? I doubt it. But we definitely have a potent cocktail on our hands.

The scariest ingredient as I see it is AI. Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.

For a research role at Anthropic perhaps, not for the roles I’m typically hiring for.

If you work in a nursing home it can pay your bills. Is it so far fetched that that kind of work might see a much needed status lift post-ASI?

If you’re one of the 500 then it is, yes.

I’ve done some hiring lately as well and we got a ridiculous number of applications, like 500+ for a run-of-the-mill developer job.

I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years and I’ve never seen it like this. Sure there are job openings, but sooo many applicants it seems.

(This is Sweden, YMMV.)

I’m not sure I’m following… because as I understand it NLP is basically solved now (with transformer LLMs). No?

I’d be okay with UBI and hobby intellectual work for the rest of my life. But I’m not a mathematician. Many of them probably have more of their identities tied up with their cognitive abilities and social standing.

Go apply for some jobs. You’ll quickly come to the realization that something has changed.

And this is only the beginning.

You have kids. You have to go on for them.