Comment by this_user
1 day ago
The point of this was always to explore what is possible with AI as quickly as possible. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of waste, but the 5-10% of employees who are truly thinking about it and discovering novel applications are what you are truly after. Because right now, you effectively have a giant, as of yet poorly explored space of potential uses.
Anyone who can find the actually valuable portions of the space early has a potentially huge competitive advantage. Even if the result of the experiment is the negative that AI is actually mostly not that useful, that is still extremely useful information in a time of great uncertainty regarding outcomes.
The bottom line is that this approach may be expensive, but if you have the money to burn, it's far from the worst strategy if you are trying to position yourself correctly for the future.
> The point of this was always to explore what is possible with AI as quickly as possible.
If that was the intent, the messaging at many companies failed to communicate that. The message was "increase this metric", not "explore this space".
What’s the huge advantage though? Adopting workflows that give big productivity gains is relatively easy even for big corporations. It’s only an advantage if you can keep it secret.
OTOH maybe we’re in for a future of patenting prompts.
The thing I don't get though, is that most people just don't have that much work they need to do. I can use AI to pretty easily get my work done just via the regular chat interfaces. But because of the tokenmaxxing metrics that leadership tracks, I end up just having the AI deliberate for hours on random things just so that I can boost my token numbers. I think tokenmaxxing for the end goal you described is only realistic when the engineers are truly buried under a backlog of work.
Not being buried under a backlog of work is one aspect, and the other is that the sheer _urgency_ of these efforts makes it look like companies like Uber could be displaced in a year or two by someone who gets lucky with AI use.
Which absolutely isn’t the case. Even if someone would manage to overtake a market leader on tech merit alone, within 1-2 years, thanks to AI, markets don’t swing on such short notices. The fake urgency is absolutely psychotic.
Ha the real stars of Uber aren't the programmers. It is the lawyers.
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