Comment by nostrademons
4 days ago
Different sets of people, and different audiences. The CEO / corporate executive crowd loves AI. Why? Because they can use it to replace workers. The general public / ordinary employee crowd hates AI. Why? Because they are the ones being replaced.
The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budgets that they can direct toward AI tools.
This is also why people might want to remain anonymous when doing an AI experiment. This lets them crow about it in private to an audience of founders, executives, VCs, etc. who might open their wallets, while protecting themselves from reputational damage amongst the general public.
This is an unnecessarily cynical view.
People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.
I have been in dozens of meetings over the past year where directors have told me to use AI to enable us to fire 100% of our contract staff.
I have been in meetings where my director has said that AI will enable us to shrink the team by 50%.
Every single one of my friends who do knowledge work has been told that AI is likely to make their job obsolete in the next few years, often by their bosses.
We have mortgages to pay and children to feed.
People are afraid because they need to work to eat. People who don't need to work to eat are less likely to be afraid.
I have yet to meet anyone except managers be excited about LLM's or generative AI.
And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.
You don' have to look past this very forum, most people here seem to be very positive about gen AI, when it comes to software development specifically.
Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
3 replies →
I don't know what is your bubble, but I'm a regular programmer and I'm absolutely excited even if a little uncomfortable. I know a lot of people who are the same.
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