Comment by xt00
2 days ago
Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but not them.. where does that end?
It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering.
Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to use that expertise?
Totally agree — if AI tools are already or nearly at the point where you can say “write a program to do X” and it does it, that’s like telling people they need to learn skills to order something at McDonald’s. The goal is for the barrier to entry to be basically zero. Oh sure today there are things like “I made a claude.md file that does this and I wrote a really clever prompt!!” But the goal is for that work to be deleted as well — where is the magic skill that is / will be needed?
I use coding agents every day for non-trivial projects. But I can definitely say that a prompt of the form "Write a program that does X" will earn you a git rollback of a mess, unless what you want has been done a bazillion times before.
Peak efficiency in using coding agents is a weird balancing act at this point in the development of coding agents: being too incremental and detailed is inefficient, but if you let it rip on a task with multiple sub tasks you have to be ready for the coding agent to get utterly lost while providing you with only hints at what made it to lose its way. It's like an inexperienced intern with a high opinion of its competency.
LLMs trained for coding are most productive when pushed to their limits, but that's where they start to fall down.
> so which one is it..
Both? The messaging from the last 30+ years has already been that the only way to be successful is to develop your own capital, not to get a job. He's saying that learning how to use AI will be essential in developing the next generation capital.
> run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich...
I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
This is what Amazon did for many physical products. It just takes time.
Wholesale vs retail. I think the highest value, biggest markets will have products straight from the AI labs (ie legal review) but there's a lot of "last mile" type stuff that it's probably not as economical for anthropic to care about but maybe for some other company.
Why wouldn't it be economical?
Following the logic their agents should be able to find and make money with niche businesses cheaper than human entrepreneurs.
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So they're going to provide service for every product under the sun? I ain't paying for no enterprise product without service.
if they were selling crack cocaine, he would say “young people need to learn how to use Crack Cocaine to be successful”.
There's nothing to learn, just some CEOs trying to get you hooked on their product and a bunch of hucksters trying to be the number one "AI thought leader"