Less money for middle class and more money for investors owning Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic.
Make no mistake about what's happening, that's wealth transfer from the bottom to the top.
And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.
"works" is a bit too strong
and it still cant make anything good out of that slop.
Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.
I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.
I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).
My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.
Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.
Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.
But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.
Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.
Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.
One of the problems the anti-AI crowd have with protrsting this use case is that they don't seem to appreciate that the enshittification happened long before AI.
Actual Software Engineers make up about 5% of the profession, the other 95% have been turning out slop that they don't even understand themselves for years. In that environment, an AI that does the same but at least doesn't complain when asked to do rework doesn't seem so bad.
we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers
🤮
The MBAs have won.
JFC, this marketing speak makes me wanna slap someone. I’m not sure how you can so many words and so little.
AI is shockingly good at doing just that.
I guarantee a human did not write this.
I guarantee you, managers, sales teams and PR firms have been writing copy like this since the first company was started. Unfortunately, LLM is just reducing the amount of typing a human has to do.
Don't you worry about blank, let me worry about blank.
What did they win? If that works, they were right and deserved to get their way. If it doesn't, thousands more jobs will disappear as they figure out how they ended up in this metaphorical smoking crater.
If you like spoilers, its going to be the latter.
Every company that fires people for AI is going to regret it so much in the long run...
They've already had a spate of serious, unprecedented outages affecting half the internet.
So I guess that means the only place to go from there is to double down, eh?
the long run...
But....line go up for next quarter right?
Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done
Meanwhile the employees:
This is like measuring a carpenter’s work output by how much they use their hammer, not how much gets actually built. I hope every company that does this sorta bullshit goes belly up.
Using their hammer would be the tools they use to actually code. This is more like measuring a carpenter’s work by how often they get advice from the workers at Home Depot.
If the company is only measuring token usage and not actual output, it's more like measuring a carpenter's work based on how many hammers they buy.
Yes.
But I do like that, by this measure, I have attained mastery of plumbing, woodworking, landscaping, and have become a master gardener.
They say you achieve mastery of a skill by spending 10,000 hours receiving advice from Hank over in Home & Garden.
Me when I find a skill trainer in Skyrim
It strikes me that it's probably because of all the visibity it offers them into what people are doing and drives them to interact with the chatbot instead of each other. Not everything is about having productive workers. A lot of it is about finding people who are compliant suck ups who won't question the boss no matter what and eliminating anyone with a half a brain cell and an ounce of class solidarity.
Having AI do your commits is a great way to game the system. Gives the added benefit of making it look like the AI wrote it for you as well.
"we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers"
God, I hate corpo-speak so much.
I recently had to listen to our glorious CEO (who totally isn't a nepo failson) about the company being bought out (so yeah I'm getting fired within 2 years for sure) and it was just him furiously jacking off, thinking he sounded smart with all of his ivy corpo speak.
At a certain point I was like "you know, maybe violence IS the answer"
A bit ironic they offer a service to keep away AI bots from scanning websites, but say AI use is making them so productive they have to lay people off.
So AI bad or good? Getting whiplashed here.
keep away AI bots from scanning websites
Specifically: Scrapers operated by individuals rather than big, important companies. On one hand, this significantly cuts down on the volume of scraping. On the other, it restricts control of the AI market to a select class of people who are important enough to get by the bot protection.
The root problem, obviously, is that the "AI market" is generally directed at that select class.
AI bad or good?
AI good. Non-rich people bad.
The main selling point of that feature is to charge for access to scraping websites.
They don't care that your website gets scraped, they care about getting paid when someone does it.
I’ve recently found it ironic that cloudfire classifies me as human based on how I sort AI generated images, presumably as judged by AI.
That tracks. Cloudflare was probably overdue to make a good solid run at grabbing defeat out of the jaws of success.
Edit: Hijacking this to answer the question on some of our minds:
"What was the name of that open source alternative I was able to ignore while CloudFlare was actually doing their job?"
It's Anubis
34% YoY revenue growth but that isn’t enough! We want your salary also! Raaaaawr
Everyone needs to stop twiddling their thumbs and organize their workplaces.
So much greed.
No wonder most of us give a fuck about our company. Why should I care if I am nothing more than a number that is unfortunately not a robot.
Working could be to just create something good and do so in a community with like minded people. And if it earns enough money to pay everyone's comfortable life needs then that is enough.
That they constantly force growth is just the most toxic bullshit imaginable.
Yes. We need more worker owned cooperatives.
Brave move after recent years
Ah yes, the elimination of jobs is always good for society.
Jokes on them I’ve been training ai to seize the means of production
ugh I host my domains with them, but probably high time I switched away :/
edit: and done! switched to a local host :)
Useless company with useless services from silicon wankers.
The halting problem is your friend. Have one agent review the work of another agent and then have trade places in an endless loop.
Perpeetum token machine
so i have to boycott Cloudflare now?
but imma wait until more Sources cover this, i dont want to rely soly on the register.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
