The only thing more hilarious than these articles is how funny it will be when the companies either close because they can't possibly solve "Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile" as a problem set or they don't make enough money to justify the $1B valuation (and rising!).
The writers of this article don't even bother doing any introspection into these claims or ideas. Is it important to know that programmers have been using AI for the last 50 years? I'm sure it isn't.
It's even worse among start-ups. My VC friends tell me than almost every. Single. Venture they see has ai/ml bolted onto it, often with no real purpose.
You mean an industry with so much inertia and hesitancy they still run mission critical systems on tech from the early 2000s?
You think they’re dumb enough to risk throwing barely functional AI in there on the chance it’ll save a few bucks when it’s overwhelmingly more likely to cost 100x more in failures and repairs?
I'm seeing this a lot. It's a great example of how the older non-FAANG large companies are going to just keep making it harder to actually be effective. Good oppurtunity for startups who are competing with them though as the AI tools get better and these companies can't or won't adopt them.
I'm even worried about my AI project because these larger companies just have so much more in terms of resources. Unless I find some novel methodology that's difficult to replicate without its explicit capability my product is dead in the water.
They are now pouring money into AI hype to build the ultimate support service which I bet will be shitty as hell too because of obvious "cost cutting" and detachement from reality.
I think you’re assuming these big companies are serious about AI itself and not just joining in on a trend. They would much rather spend huge amounts of money on chips than hire a competent researcher who might tell them that they didn’t really need to waste so much money.
AI has given a lot of people a lot of cover to kill projects which are going nowhere. Rather than "this was a terrible idea, we've wasted a bunch of money" they get to say "AI is transformational, we have to allocate resources to it and hence we are cutting X, Y, Z".
In fact - FAANG companies have the resources to make horribly inefficient processes work (in human time or computer time) - I suspect many of the AI powered things are examples of this - and a smaller company will die trying to get it to work.
- The risks (technical, legal) of using AI generated code are not worth assuming.
- They pay a lot of talent a lot of money. Efficiency isn't that important to them. Heck, over-employing talent to prevent them from working for start ups that might compete may be worth it to them.
I agree with you. Programmers at these AI companies basically create a wealth concentration mechanism that diverts the money resulting from the value of our work into their pockets.
Some companies would be happy to pay that AI to develop their b$ software, because once in a position to abuse you customers, why not abuse them with less costs.
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