Comment by jorvi
8 hours ago
My proof-in-pudding test is still the fact that we haven't seen gigantic mass firings at tech companies, nor a massive acceleration on quality or breadth (not quantity!) of development.
Microsoft has been going heavy on AI for 1y+ now. But then they replace their cruddy native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. If tests and dev only has marginal cost now, why aren't they going all in on writing extremely performant, almost completely bug-free native applications everywhere?
And this repeats itself across all big tech or AI hype companies. They all have these supposed earth-shattering gains in productivity but then.. there hasn't been anything to show for that in years? Despite that whole subsect of tech plus big tech dropping trillions of dollars on it?
And then there is also the really uncomfortable question for all tech CEOs and managers: LLMs are better at 'fuzzy' things like writing specs or documentation than they are at writing code. And LLMs are supposedly godlike. Leadership is a fuzzy thing. At some point the chickens will come to roost and tech companies with LLM CEOs / managers and human developers or even completely LLM'd will outperform human-led / managed companies. The capital class will jeer about that for a while, but the cost for tokens will continue to drop to near zero. At that point, they're out of leverage too.
> LLMs are better at 'fuzzy' things like writing specs or documentation than they are at writing code.
At least for writing specs, this is clearly not true. I am a startup founder/engineer who has written a lot of code, but I've written less and less code over the last couple of years and very little now. Even much of the code review can be delegated to frontier models now (if you know which ones to use for which purpose).
I still need to guide the models to write and revise specs a great deal. Current frontier LLMs are great at verifiable things (quite obvious to those who know how they're trained), including finding most bugs. They are still much less competent than expert humans at understanding many 'softer' aspects of business and user requirements.
Your proof-in-pudding test seems to assume that AI is binary -- either it accelerates everyone's development 100x ("let's rewrite every app into bug-free native applications") or nothing ("there hasn't been anything to show for that in years"). I posit reality is somewhere in between the two.
LLM’s are capable of searching information spaces and generating some outputs that one can use to do their job.
But it’s not taking anyone’s job, ever. People are not bots, a lot of the work they do is tacit and goes well beyond the capabilities and abilities of llm’s.
Many tech firms are essentially mature and are currently using too much labour. This will lead to a natural cycle of lay offs if they cannot figure out projects to allocate the surplus labour. This is normal and healthy - only a deluded economist believes in ‘perfect’ stuff.
"it’s not taking anyone’s job, ever"
It has already and that doesn't mean new jobs haven't been created or that those new jobs went to those who lost their jobs.
In this entire thread of conversation, I never said that LLMs would take people's jobs, and that is not something I believe.
Leadership is also a very human thing. I think most people would balk at the idea of being led by an LLM.
One of the main functions of leaders (should be) is to assume responsibility for decisions and outcomes. A computer cant do that.
And finally why should someone in power choose to replace themselves?
Someone in power doesn’t get to choose - the board of directors do. Who’s job is to act in the best interest of shareholders.
Firms tend to follow peers in an industry - once one blinks the rest follow.
> Someone in power doesn’t get to choose - the board of directors do. Who’s job is to act in the best interest of shareholders.
Alas, shareholder value is a great ideal, but it tends to be honoured in practice rather less strictly.
As you can also see when sudden competition leads to rounds of efficiency improvements, cost cutting and product enhancements: even without competition, a penny saved is a penny earned for shareholders. But only when fierce competition threatens to put managers' jobs at risk, do they really kick into overdrive.
> Someone in power doesn’t get to choose - the board of directors do
Since the board of directors can decide to replace the CEO, it's not the CEO who holds the (ultimate) power, it's the board of directors.
The board of directors are also people in power - why not replace them with an LLM as well if it works so well for CEOs?
> Microsoft has been going heavy on AI for 1y+ now. But then they replace their cruddy native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one.
This.
Also, Microsoft is going heavy on AI but it's primarily chatbot gimmicks they call copilot agents, and they need to deeply integrate it with all their business products and have customers grant access to all their communications and business data to give something for the chatbot to work with. They go on and on in their AI your with their example on how a company can work on agents alone, and they tell everyone their job is obsoleted by agents, but they don't seem to dogfood any of their products.
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