Same reason as forcing people back into the office even though it’s the solution to a number of serious issues affecting society:
Investors/banks have tons of money in these markets and are incentivizing/forces companies to adopt these policies to prop up the markets, whether it is in their interest or not.
I usually ignore these kind of trends. Just meet any required deadlines etc but don’t engage too much. The vast majority will just disappear.
Specifically as a software developer I cannot see a good outcome from engaging with this trend either. It’s going to go one of two ways.
1: It pans out sooner rather than later that AI wasn’t the panacea they thought it was, and it either is forgotten about, or becomes a set of realized tools we use, but don’t rely on.
2: They believe it can replace us all, and so they replace us all with freshly graduated vibe “programmers” and I don’t have a job anyway.
I don’t really see an upside to engaging with this in any kind of long term plan.
2. It’s about breaking the power of tech workers by reducing them from highly skilled specialists to interchangeable low-status workers whose job is to clean up botshit until it compiles. (Given that the machine does the real work and they’re just tidying up the output it generates when prompted, they naturally don’t merit high wages or indulgent perks, even if getting 30,000 lines of code regurgitated from the mashed-up contents of Github and Stack Overflow working is more cognitively tasking than writing that code from scratch would have been.)
It doesn’t matter what they claim if they simply can’t get the people to babysit the AI codebase or the AIs for less money than the original ones who didn’t have to deal with AIs and their output used to cost.
As a pretty senior dev who spent a lot of my career as a contractor mainly coming in to unfuck code-bases seriously fucked up by a couple of cycles under less experienced people, if I was pitched work to unfuck AI work I would demand a premium for my services purelly because of it being far more more fucked up in far harder to follow ways than the work done by less experience humans (who at least are consistent in the mistakes they make and follow a specific pattern in how they work) even without any moral considerations (on principle I would probably just not take a contract with a company that had used AI like that).
I mean, I can see their strategy work for junior devs, but that kind of reducing the power of specialized workers was already being done against junior devs using “outsourcing”.
My prediction is that it’s just the latest buzzword on the pile of buzzwords and by 2028 a new one will pop up and the only time you hear “AI” will be in the line of “Hey, remember when everyone was talking about AI?”
Before AI it was “The Cloud”. Before the cloud it was “Virtualization”. They’re saying all the same things about AI that they said about the cloud and virtualization…
I guess the real money is inventing the new buzzword that sales people can say will make your business faster, more agile, and more efficient. :)
Everytime I see this kind of hype pop up I think back to when there was this great announcement from Silicon Valley about a “revolution in transportation” and it turned out to be the Segway.
Before AI it was “The Cloud”. Before the cloud it was “Virtualization”. They’re saying all the same things about AI that they said about the cloud and virtualization…
So you’re saying AI will make a measurable (arguably net positive) impact and forever change the way we do things in our day to day, just becoming a standard toolset offered by many providers? Because I’d argue that’s what virtualization was, as well as the cloud to a lesser extent. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to be convinced on virtualization being a bad thing (not as much the cloud tho, that has some solid negative arguments).
If you’re trying to shit talk AI, you’d be better off comparing it to block chain than cloud/virtualization, since the latter two are an integral part of a large amount of the work we do, and the former is mainly for illicit drugs/activities and stealing money.
agreed, virtualization was one of the best things to happen in IT since the dawn of the internet. i can’t even imagine how much less efficient and reliable datacenters and the entire internet would be without it. Not at all comparable to AI.
i actually work for a company that does very little virtualization now and it’s fucking awful.
I think the comparison is apt, it’s not that LLM is useless, it’s just that, currently, it’s insanely overhyped. Just like the .com had irrational companies that evaporated but underlying tech was useful. Just like in-house servers were considered to be dead with everything being cloud hosted, now there’s recognition of a trade off. Just like there was pressure to ship everything as an ‘.ova’ and nowadays that’s not really done as much.
An appropriately used level of LLM might even be nice, but when it’s fuel for the grifters, it is going to be obnoxious.
Virtualization as a ‘platform’ was a bit overhyped, hence my ‘.ova’ comment. There was a push for a lot of applications to exclusively ship as a whole virtual machine, to create OS variants dedicated to the purpose of running single applications. For a lot of applications it was supremely awkward, because app developers ended up having to ‘own’ things they didn’t want to own, like the customer network configuration.
Virtualization as a utility has of course persisted, but it’s much more rare for a vendor to declare their ‘runtime’ to be vmware than it once was. Virtualization existed in IBM for a long time, vmware made it broadly more available and flexible in the PC space, and then around mind 2000s things started to go a bit crazy with ‘virtualization is the runtime’.
Now mind you, compared to dot-com or ‘big data’ it was trivial, but it was all a bit silly for a time there.
I think it’s a real shame because all three of those things you mention are useful. The problem is that once they become a buzzword, then everything needs to be done using that buzzword.
Cloud has been misused to hell and back, and I have no doubt AI will too.
“The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.”
https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg#t=13s
I see the same push where I work and I cannot get a good answer to the most basic question:
“Why?”
“We want more people using AI.”
“Why?”
“. . .”
[sigh] Because of course they do. Those people couldn’t find their own arses even if they used both hands.
Same reason as forcing people back into the office even though it’s the solution to a number of serious issues affecting society:
Investors/banks have tons of money in these markets and are incentivizing/forces companies to adopt these policies to prop up the markets, whether it is in their interest or not.
Oh, yeah, we have that too… we want people in the office because collaboration! Synergy! etc. etc.
“How does that work if you want everyone using AI?”
“. . .”
Oooo hot take time: I’d rather work in an office again than be forced to use LLMs.
I’d rather use the AI than go back to the office. The AI doesn’t care if I’m wearing any pants.
I’d rather correct LLM hallucinations than some of the crap front line tech support tells people. :)
I usually ignore these kind of trends. Just meet any required deadlines etc but don’t engage too much. The vast majority will just disappear.
Specifically as a software developer I cannot see a good outcome from engaging with this trend either. It’s going to go one of two ways.
1: It pans out sooner rather than later that AI wasn’t the panacea they thought it was, and it either is forgotten about, or becomes a set of realized tools we use, but don’t rely on.
2: They believe it can replace us all, and so they replace us all with freshly graduated vibe “programmers” and I don’t have a job anyway.
I don’t really see an upside to engaging with this in any kind of long term plan.
2. It’s about breaking the power of tech workers by reducing them from highly skilled specialists to interchangeable low-status workers whose job is to clean up botshit until it compiles. (Given that the machine does the real work and they’re just tidying up the output it generates when prompted, they naturally don’t merit high wages or indulgent perks, even if getting 30,000 lines of code regurgitated from the mashed-up contents of Github and Stack Overflow working is more cognitively tasking than writing that code from scratch would have been.)
It doesn’t matter what they claim if they simply can’t get the people to babysit the AI codebase or the AIs for less money than the original ones who didn’t have to deal with AIs and their output used to cost.
As a pretty senior dev who spent a lot of my career as a contractor mainly coming in to unfuck code-bases seriously fucked up by a couple of cycles under less experienced people, if I was pitched work to unfuck AI work I would demand a premium for my services purelly because of it being far more more fucked up in far harder to follow ways than the work done by less experience humans (who at least are consistent in the mistakes they make and follow a specific pattern in how they work) even without any moral considerations (on principle I would probably just not take a contract with a company that had used AI like that).
I mean, I can see their strategy work for junior devs, but that kind of reducing the power of specialized workers was already being done against junior devs using “outsourcing”.
My prediction is that it’s just the latest buzzword on the pile of buzzwords and by 2028 a new one will pop up and the only time you hear “AI” will be in the line of “Hey, remember when everyone was talking about AI?”
Before AI it was “The Cloud”. Before the cloud it was “Virtualization”. They’re saying all the same things about AI that they said about the cloud and virtualization…
I guess the real money is inventing the new buzzword that sales people can say will make your business faster, more agile, and more efficient. :)
Everytime I see this kind of hype pop up I think back to when there was this great announcement from Silicon Valley about a “revolution in transportation” and it turned out to be the Segway.
“People will be designing cities around this!”
It could have had an impact if it hadn’t been $5,000…
And, BTW, not even the coolest thing Kamen designed…
https://youtu.be/GdwVz90l9ZI
So you’re saying AI will make a measurable (arguably net positive) impact and forever change the way we do things in our day to day, just becoming a standard toolset offered by many providers? Because I’d argue that’s what virtualization was, as well as the cloud to a lesser extent. Hell, I’d be hard pressed to be convinced on virtualization being a bad thing (not as much the cloud tho, that has some solid negative arguments).
If you’re trying to shit talk AI, you’d be better off comparing it to block chain than cloud/virtualization, since the latter two are an integral part of a large amount of the work we do, and the former is mainly for illicit drugs/activities and stealing money.
agreed, virtualization was one of the best things to happen in IT since the dawn of the internet. i can’t even imagine how much less efficient and reliable datacenters and the entire internet would be without it. Not at all comparable to AI.
i actually work for a company that does very little virtualization now and it’s fucking awful.
I think the comparison is apt, it’s not that LLM is useless, it’s just that, currently, it’s insanely overhyped. Just like the .com had irrational companies that evaporated but underlying tech was useful. Just like in-house servers were considered to be dead with everything being cloud hosted, now there’s recognition of a trade off. Just like there was pressure to ship everything as an ‘.ova’ and nowadays that’s not really done as much.
An appropriately used level of LLM might even be nice, but when it’s fuel for the grifters, it is going to be obnoxious.
LLMs may be overhyped, but the point is virtualization was not.
Virtualization as a ‘platform’ was a bit overhyped, hence my ‘.ova’ comment. There was a push for a lot of applications to exclusively ship as a whole virtual machine, to create OS variants dedicated to the purpose of running single applications. For a lot of applications it was supremely awkward, because app developers ended up having to ‘own’ things they didn’t want to own, like the customer network configuration.
Virtualization as a utility has of course persisted, but it’s much more rare for a vendor to declare their ‘runtime’ to be vmware than it once was. Virtualization existed in IBM for a long time, vmware made it broadly more available and flexible in the PC space, and then around mind 2000s things started to go a bit crazy with ‘virtualization is the runtime’.
Now mind you, compared to dot-com or ‘big data’ it was trivial, but it was all a bit silly for a time there.
The Cloud is still a thing though. As is virtualization
And AI (LLMs, media generation, machine learning) are going to stay a thing as well.
Yeah, there’s generally a kernel of value wrapped up in all sorts of bullshit.
Some with the .com boom, obviously here we are with internet as a critical infrastructure, but 1999 ‘internet’ was a mess of overhype.
Yeah, but nobody talks about them solving/causing all the problems. :)
I think it’s a real shame because all three of those things you mention are useful. The problem is that once they become a buzzword, then everything needs to be done using that buzzword.
Cloud has been misused to hell and back, and I have no doubt AI will too.
“AI-powered cloud software virtualization”
I think the next buzzword teed up is “quantum”
Looking forward to the infinitely scalable quantum AI blockchain cloud virtualization E2E P2P VPN micro-services!
Get this person a golden parachute, stat
🤢
Yeah, it’s already happening…