that came after Uber told employees to use AI as much as possible and Uber’s CTO said the company had blown its entire AI budget in four months
Further evidence that most CEO’s and SLT’s are just confident, lucky, and born wealthy; not competent, smarter, or much better than average.
Also they are addicted to sycophancy. Now that they have a convincing yes man in their pockets they are uniquely vulnerable to AI psychosis.
This is 100% the thesis I’ve been shopping personally… Many Boomers and Xers in executive positions had a “magical millennial” that they quietly kept as a secret “AI” to split/edit PDFs, set up an Airtable base, add columns to a google doc, etc. There was a tacit, silent agreement in this symbiotic relationship for the bulk of the last 20 years - you’ll make sure I don’t look completely incompetent in tech matters and I’ll backchannel on your behalf to senior leaders and people who “matter” to help you advance.
Gen AI essentially allows the laziest input, gives a half competent output that “feels” fine and has the bonus of telling the boomer/Xer that they are actually amazingly capable, and could have done this themselves all along even, but they rightly delegated the task to their magical millennial, and now to the AI of choice.
So they fired all the magical millennials, because they knew too much about the before times. Now that they are fucked without a life raft, costs soar and they will cling for dear life because they will be exposed otherwise.
Edit: through a twist of fate, the iPad kids grew up technically incapable and relied on the magical millenials as well. They could only offer praise and loyalty really, or a boomer, Xer recruited them in and talked the MM up as a “wiz” to seek out. Anyway, now that the MM are gone, the Zoomers and gen Alpha kids only have one strength remaining, the old people have no idea what they are doing or how to quantify their success, outside of “use more AI”. So the fragile balance remains for now, with a vulnerable, hollow center where the magical millennials used to live.
I’m surrounded by this shit, and it seems to come from all generations. My boss, who is my age, called me because her computer was frozen and she wanted me to fix it. “I was like, turn it off and on again, this is the first, most basic rule of troubleshooting.” Meanwhile the boomer next to me is having me do shit like attach files to a fucking email.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
What you’re saying indicates you’re one of those people that don’t understand how many gaps other people are filling in for you. You’re talking about splitting PDFs, who do you think designed the PDF format? Or the http protocol that you use to open that google doc?
Honestly the issue I see happening lately is that because iPads (and now AI) made things too easy for the young people they don’t actually know how things work at the low level, not interested in learning it, and often react with “this is too complicated, make it easier for me!”
I said it was my own thesis, built from a decade plus in the trenches. If you read what I’d stated again, you’ll see that the implication was not purely generational, but boomers/Xers with power who drove the change. You also over emphasis technicality here as I was purposefully discussing the more mundane, beginner to intermediate level daily tasks that the millenials were fulfilling here. The millennials in this group are typically in rightful awe of the old timers talents to build on the foundational level, and also envy their circumstance of walking into a more open sandbox and with more stakes to claim in the early days.
So basically, the above preceding doesn’t really concern you unless you found your way to VP level or really to the csuite especially, and even then, always exceptions. That understood , I won’t spend more time debating exceptions to the general rule, as I see it. I respect my elders, as long as they are decent people struggling to do better within these inherently broken systems.
I don’t know why you think it’s a generational thing. There has always technical people that filled in the gaps that the more extroverted management types didn’t care about. How do you think things worked when millennials were still in diapers?
Uh… Unless you worked at the forefront of technology where more people probably WERE qualified, by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume. If PowerPoint and PDF were people, they are themselves millennials and gen z (ish) respectively.
Now, when millennials were about 10 you’ve got a decent point ;).
by and large these things worked on paper/transparencies I would presume.
You have to presume because you weren’t involved in helping the people who were used to doing everything on paper learn how to turn on a computer. Do you think people in the past were super qualified and just magically knew how to use a computer in the past? Nobody ever needed help loading a file on a floppy disk and printing it to paper so they can present it to their boss?
There have always been clueless bosses and tech people that had to make things work. If you go back further, why do you think they all had secretaries typing things up?
I’m a Millennial and work in IT. We aren’t magical. There’s competent and incompetent people in all age groups. I wouldn’t even say we had better starting conditions overall because being good with tech was seen as cringe nerd stuff when I grew up.
I think your theory is mostly right though, just along the lines of competent/incompetent. So many people constantly choose what they believe the path of least resistance with tech, even if it actually isn’t. Don’t spend one or two minutes to learn how to save to PDF in Word, instead google “word to pdf” and upload whatever sensitive data you have in that DOCX to some shady website.
The funny thing is that even with this massive overspending, AI companies aren’t profitable. They need these companies to spend 10x the amount per token, and 10x the number of tokens. Probably 10x the number of customers too.
Burning energy, draining water, spending massive cash so they can lose money on a product that doesn’t even do its job. How the hell has the bubble not popped yet…
The Stock market is literally just vibes. As long as everyone believes, it will somehow be profitable in the future, the line will keep ging up
and building more and more datacenters, replacing AI chips faster and faster, the more people use it, which of course is wasting a ton of money.
- Replace workforce with AI because it’s easy to be lazy with AI.
- Remaining workforce uses AI to be lazy.
- SurprisedPikachu.webp
Ew, webp. Chatgpt, convert that shit for me
Reminds me of companies getting their cloud computing bills.
“We need cloud computing!!!”
5 minutes later: “Ok a monolith is good enough”
Both of those statements hurt my soul, damn, why do you have to do that to me. On a Friday no less
It’s friday and your boss wants to move everything over to a blockchain. He says it will only take an hour tops.
Its top priority because it’s part of our new AI strategy. Make sure it’s well documented for your weekly report you will have to deliver to the c suite.
Did they think everyone was gonna be creating return value based products for the company to make a fortune on?
Instead they making posters and having crazy convos.
It’s like someone has just discovered salt and every restaurant has it. Each thinks they are unique and gonna be the GOAT.
If my boss would mandate the use of LLMs I would definitely abuse it to rack up the bill.
I already am.
I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.
Well if you’re measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!
I like to race the ai on most tasks and find myself winning on anything of substance. Sure SOME mundane tasks can be done but does it out weight the energy and infrastructure costs as well as reputation and morale.
Even after all that you STILL need a human double checking and inputting the information.
Eat shit you greedy corporate assholes, i hope all of your companies are damaged beyond recovery, you useless fucking tools.
When you tell the people to mash the easy button and then they do exactly what you wanted. They created the monster.
These stupid companies are getting everything they deserve and I’m loving it.
Nah. The bailouts will only be two or three tomes what they squander.
Indeed, they won’t pay for these mistakes, we will.
“They’re too big to fail” etc., with another round of bailouts for our poor, beleaguered corporations.
It’s impossible to bail out Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, etc
And Accenture itself reportedly started requiring senior staff to start using AI or risk losing out on promotions.
Every time companies urge employees to use AI and then regret the cost. The fuck is wrong with people? Why are they pushing it so hard? Does Sam give them hand jobs if they use the most?
I don’t understand this need to pressure staff into using something and threatening punishment if not. Are they worried that their employees are not efficient enough? Pay them the token prices on top of their salary and see how stuff changes.
The fuck is wrong with people?
That’s the corporate hive mind, all afraid of missing out of a great productivity tool. And they think that because media these days just copies what the richest people say and hype it up because the rich these days only speak to yes-men.
and then regret the cost
Reality doesn’t need to obey yes-men.
This is actually very common across businesses. My company actually has our bonuses tied to AI adoption, so we have dashboards showing people’s AI usage. Other major companies have done the same, which lead to the practice of “token maxxing” where people were using AI to make more AI calls to boost their numbers up.
Amazon did this and regretted it, canning their leaderboards.
It’s crazy to me that this is considered normal. Please use this product that will eventually replace you, kill the planet, and make some douchebag rich.
Edit: mobile typos
LLMs as a technology are incredibly powerful tools that have so many useful applications. The issue is trying to turn them into this all powerful omnitool that could do everything, and then shoving that product up everyone’s ass at every turn.
There was always bound to be a correction to this bubble, because the current model is unsustainable. You can only keep making unreasonable moves for so long before everything starts to crumble and you’re forced to scale back.
Yeah AGI is a mistake. Maybe someday, but what we need know is token efficient LLMs that are designed for for more specific tasks.
There’s a lot of data that it could be helpful for analyzing, but if there’s customer data in there that you can’t share with a third party? Can’t use any of these tools. An appliance in your company’s server room with a bunch of GPUs that’s optimized for data analysis, that’s something I’d be interested in. But with the price of GPUs right now, that’s unlikely to happen.
So the bubble needs to burst before LLMs are truly useful.
You know, if we were taught to use something like LaTeX, this wouldn’t be an issue because of BEAMER
That wouldn’t fix the issue though. The problem seems to be that most people only put out a PDF file when sharing slides, and never end up sharing the source file (the
.pptxor.texfile).This is likely because PDF became the “file that everyone can open”, just in their web browser. It’s the next best thing to a web page for non-techie consumption. Yes, there’s no reason people can’t open pptx in most cases, but I bet various endpoint protection and just not understanding how to even pick the right program to open the file steps in.
The stuff just like Firefox automatically downloading files but opening pdf by default is small but can make all the difference.
I’ll take typst any day over latex lol
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Ew no way. Best way to make document structure portable, or to move prose or visuals between contexts. It’s also exceptional if you want to automatically generate documentation with code or services that generate graphics.
ALSO you can version control it with git which is a good enough reason in and of itself unless you can use markdown for your purposes instead.
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I’m a neovim guy myself, so mostly I’m in markdown. Most of the latex stuff is for document production and it’s easy as keeping a skeleton file with the includes set up on a letter heading. If I have something that NEEDS to be printed and markdown wont do it, I’m definitely using latex not libre. I’m not sure I can even use any kind of writing tool without vim bindings anymore anyway.
Really? Been a minute since I have done a presentation, but:
Pandoc PDF to Markdown.
Markdown to paste into your favorite HTML presentation tool.
Nobody is stupid enough to still use Powerpoint right? Right?
Or the ‘modern workflow’ version of tell the AI you want to convert the PDF, so it burns a bunch of tokens installing pandoc and converting it for you!
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides
Sounds the people they hired to do the shit work don’t actually want to do that type of work. I, for one, am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
