The AI revolution has achieved something truly unprecedented: billions in spending, endless executive keynotes, and no measurable payoff for most businesses. Apparently the killer app was convincing CEOs to transfer their budgets to seven tech companies: »Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493.«
AI only feels like it boosts productivity because it kicks the can down the road and makes it somebody else’s job to clean it up.
You saved time generating your work email? Now I spend time translating what it’s actually supposed to say because half of it is irrelevant garbage.
You saved time generating your event poster? Now I spend time recreating it (because you’ve anchored on that version), or painstakingly editing out all the incorrect notation.
You saved time generating your logo? No there’s no way to ‘clean it up’, the anatomy and structure makes no physical sense. So I have to recreate it from scratch anyway.
You saved time automating this spreadsheet? It’s not arranged in an importable format and now i have to spend time breaking down all the arbitrarily merged cells so I can even use it. My computer freezes twice under the load of processing excess garbage data.
You only think AI saves time because it’s wasting somebody else’s.
It’s a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who’s kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.
The spreadsheet one hurts. I’m currently going over a colleague’s fancy spreadsheet and have decided that only an AI can edit it in the future, because the formulas are written in a way that need to be interacted with from a script or command-line tool and nobody’s going to do that.
Outside Nvidia. The shovel users are not making money.
It’s also a joke how poorly most companies are adopting AI. For many companies there have been meaningful improvements in software over the last few years that have been ignored completely and suddenly these same companies want to step over a bunch of stairs at once (insert meme) and do AI-buzzword-everything.
It doesn’t work like that
The metal fab company i work for is still using software from the 80’s. The same with our state unemployment office lol.
I don’t know.
I know Dev teams right now that have gone full AI slop programming and their PMs and Customers see it as insane productivity to the point that they have so much work coming in they can’t stop using AI now.
Do they agree the codebase is in utter shambles? Yes. Do they think it’s fixable? Yes. Do they think they have the time to fix it? Nope.
They’re all just buying time waiting for it to break. The sad part is some of them are sipping the AI koolaid so hard they say they’ll just let the AI fix it when it breaks.
I mean literally just yesterday one of the senior devs was bragging in the cube next to me that he just did 3 months of work in 5 minutes with AI.
Most of these AI sippers are old dudes who are one foot into retirement and instead of coding they want to yap about their golf club set all day.
As a younger dev and a person who loves to code it makes my heart hurt listening to the AI slop bragging.
As a programmer nearing retirement, I’m not adding to the slop problem myself, but I am absolutely looking forward to leaving the field for someone else to clean up.
I am hoping to tidy one small corner of it for an outrageous pay-out, on my way out of the field.
record numbers of “how do i connect to localhost from my friend’s laptop” and useless dashboards your devs were too busy to make, tho
Professional grifter finds new grift not sufficiently contributing to grift counter.
Yea no shit. How could anyone have foreseen this!?
No shit it has trouble coding a simple html site how is AI replacing anyone.
Big tech isn’t exactly winning either. Over $194 billion spent with mere millions in ROI thus far.
It’s a difficult, trend, but it’s why we need everyone to get on board and use AI. If we lose millions on every billion we spend, we need to make it up in volume.
(This is - hopefully obvious - satire.)
Let’s not forget the endgame of decimating home computing.
No more computers for peasants.
We can do too much with them.
I’d argue that most tech companies aren’t actually seeing benefit matching what they’ve wasted ineffectively
Yeah I don’t even know if the company I work for has actually gotten more benefit than it’s cost us. The bill is significant, for one thing. For another we have a whole group of people developing AI tools for internal use now. They aren’t cheap. Of course there’s some benefit but is it net positive? No idea. Is it hugely positive? Fuck no.
Definitely not the panacea it’s being peddled as. I have yet to see the expectation pan out that I can work less and do the things I enjoy more. (Keep in mind I loved what I did for work so it didn’t used to seem like work. Now it does)
Inside the tech industry, the company with the biggest payoff in this is NVIDIA. With another smaller payoff for AMD. That’s about it.
It’s like a gold rush for fool’s gold. The only ones making money are the guys selling shovels.
Don’t forget all the short term gains the rest of us are getting with tech debt!
Productivity isn’t where most businesses are going to strike pay dirt. They’re going to get their value in processing information and in prototyping ideas/products/solutions before actually physically making them.
So the article may be absolutely true and completely missing the point.
*having an illusion of information processing and producing tons of shitty prototypes. Yeah, sure, get their value, right
that’s more about how most businesses use llms, less about what they are actually good/bad at
I’m with you on two key points:
- Prototyping is amazing, and provides real and dramatic benefits.
- Generative AI is an amazing protyping tool.
But the value proposition falls to pieces if we compare the costs and impacts of LLM prototypes and paper prototypes.
Before LLMs were invented, there waa strong data showing that paper prototypes are insanely compelling, even when compared with easy cheap rapid prototyping software.
LLM prototypes just aren’t a pragmatic option. (By the data, so far.)
Productivity is a collective achievement. AI in its current form increases individual output (not necessarily good output) without any way to support consensus, alignment, understanding, etc. Without AI supported collaboration, AI supported individual productivity makes everything go very fast in every direction. Like an explosion.
well said
