this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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They're throwing billions upon billions into a technology with extremely limited use cases and a novelty, at best. My god, even drones fared better in the long run.
I mean it's pretty clear they're desperate to cut human workers out of the picture so they don't have to pay employees that need things like emotional support, food, and sleep.
They want a workslave that never demands better conditions, that's it. That's the play. Period.
If this is their way of making AI, with brute forcing the technology without innovation, AI will probably cost more for these companies to maintain infrastructure than just hiring people. These AI companies are already not making a lot of money for how much they cost to maintain. And unless they charge companies millions of dollars just to be able to use their services they will never make a profit. And since companies are trying to use AI to replace the millions they spend on employees it seems kinda pointless if they aren't willing to prioritize efficiency.
It's basically the same argument they have with people. They don't wanna treat people like actual humans because it costs too much, yet letting them love happy lives makes them more efficient workers. Whereas now they don't want to spend money to make AI more efficient, yet increasing efficiency would make them less expensive to run. It's the never ending cycle of cutting corners only to eventually make less money than you would have if you did things the right way.
Absolutely. It's maddening that I've had to go from "maybe we should make society better somewhat" in my twenties to "if we're gonna do capitalism, can we do it how it actually works instead of doing it stupid?" in my forties.
The oligarchs running these companies have suffered a psychotic break. What the cause exactly is I don't know, but the game theyre playing is a lot less about profits now. They care about control and power over people.
I theorize it has to do with desperation over what they see as an inevitable collapse of the United States and they are hedging their bets on holding onto the reigns of power for as long as possible until they can fuck off to their respective bunkers while the rest of humanity eats itself.
Then, when things settle they can peak their heads out of their hidie holes and start their new Utopian civilization or whatever.
Whatever's going on, profits are not the focus right now. They are grasping at ways to control the masses...and failing pretty miserably I might add...though something tells me that scarcely matters to them.
Which they are intentionally trying to cause, rather that deal with their addiction to wealth and power.
And the tragedy of the whole situation is that they can‘t win because if every worker is replaced by an algorithm or a robot then who‘s going to buy your products? Nobody has money because nobody has a job. And so the economy will shift to producing war machines that fight each other for territory to build more war machine factories until you can’t expand anymore for one reason or another. Then the entire system will collapse like the Roman Empire and we start from scratch.
As seen in the retro-documentary Z!
Why would you need anyone to buy your products when you can just enjoy them yourself?
Because there's always a bigger fish out there to get you. Or that's what trillionaires will tell themselves when they wage a robotic war. This system isn't made to last the way it's progressing right now.
It's been like three years, and small local models keep getting more capable. Photorealistic video rendering is already here. Writing code from high-level goals largely works. A whole lot of "computers will never do [blank]" went out the window.
These are from models designed for denoising and autocomplete. It's ridiculous that they work at all. 'What's the next word?' should not be the right question for recalling trivia, translating foreign languages, or answering riddles, yet this gimmick manages a sloppy approximation of whatever you want.
Right now is the worst it will ever be again.
The underlying technology could be trained for literally any goal with examples provided. A better question will inevitably perform deeper witchcraft. Meanwhile: more data and more parameters have not fixed goofy models. Everything they're capable of keeps appearing in tiny versions that will run on a laptop. Which means better models can be trained for mundane quantities of money, on consumer hardware, with experimental differences. It's gonna get fuckin' weird.
Bad results are still results.
You can say it doesn't do things well, but there's not much you can say it doesn't do.
Nah, generative ai is pretty remarkably useful for software development. I've written dozens of product updates with tools like claudecode and cursorai, dismissing it as a novelty is reductive and straight up incorrect
I weep for your customers
As an experienced software dev I'm convinced my software quality has improved by using AI. More time for thinking and less time for execution means I can make more iterations of the design and don't have to skip as many nice-to-haves or unit tests on account of limited time. It's not like I don't go through every code line multiple times anyway, I don't just blindly accept code. As a bonus I can ask the AI to review the code and produce documentation. By the time I'm done there's little left of what was originally generated.
Then your software quality was extreme shit before. It's still shit, but an improvement. So, yay "AI", I guess?
That seems like just wishful thinking on your part, or maybe you haven't learned how to use these tools properly.
Na, the tools suck. I'm not using a rubber hammer to get woodscrews into concrete and I'm not using "AI" for something that requires a brain. I've looked at "AI" suggestions for coding and it was >95% garbage. If "AI" makes someone a better coder it tells more about that someone than "AI".
Then try writing the code yourself and ask ChatGPT's o3-mini-high to critique your code (be sure to explain the context).
Or ask it to produce unit tests - even if they're not perfect from the get go I promise you will save time by having a starting skeleton.
Another thing I often use it for is ad hoc transformations. For example I wanted to generate constants for all the SQLSTATE codes in the PostgreSQL documentation. I just pasted the table directly from the documentation and got symbolic constants with the appropriate values and with documentation comments.
If a bot can develop your software better than you then you're a shit software dev
That's not what is happening. The bot writes code and then I tell it what to change until it's close enough, then I make the final touches myself. It's like having a junior programmer do the grunt work for you.
As an experienced software dev, I know better than to waste my time writing boilerplate that can be vomited up by an LLM, since somebody else has already written it and I should just use that instead.
They're all pretty fired up at the update velocity tbh 🤷
Yeah, nothing pleases us more than constant, buggy updates.
Unit tests and good architecture are still foundational requirements, so far no bug reports with any of these updates. In fact a huge chunk of these ai updates were addressing bugs. Not sure why you're so mad at what you imagine is happening and making so many broad assumptions!
Don't be an ass and realize that ai is a great tool for a lot of people. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
It's not hard to comprehend. It's that we literally have jackasses like Sam Altman arguing that if they can't commit copyright violations at an industrial scale and pace that their business model falls apart. Yet, we're still nailing regular people for piracy on an individual scale. As always individuals pay the price and are treated like criminals, but as long as you commit crime big enough and fast enough on an industrial scale, we shake our heads, go "wow" and treat you like a fucking hero.
If the benefits of this technology were evenly distributed the argument might have a leg to stand on, but it is never evenly distributed. It is always used as a way to pay professionals less for work that is "just okay."
When a business buys the tools to use generative AI and they shitcan employees to afford it they have effectively used those employees labor against them to replace them with something lesser. Their labor was exploited to replace them. The people who actually deserve the bonus of generative AI are losing or being expected to be ten times more productive instead of being allowed to cool their heels because they worked hard enough to have this doohickey work for them. No, it's always "line must go up, rich must get richer, fuck the laborers."
I'll stop being an ass about it when people stop burning employees out who already work hard or straight up fire them and replace them with this bullshit when their labor is what allowed the business to afford this bullshit to begin with. No manager or CEO can do all this labor on their own, but they get the fruits of all the labor their employees do as though they did do it all on their own, and it is fucked up.
I don't have a problem with technology that makes our lives easier. I don't have a problem with copyright violations (copyright as it exists is broken. It still needs to exist, just not in its current form).
What I have a problem with is businesses using this as an excuse to work their employees like slaves or replacing the employees that allowed them to afford these tools with these tools.
When everyone who worked hard to afford this stuff gets a paid vacation for helping to afford the tools and then comes back to an easier workload because the tools help that much, I'll stop being a fucking ass about it.
Like I said elsewhere, the bottom line is business owners want a slave that doesn't need things like sleep, food, emotional support, and never pushes back against being abused. I'm tired of people pretending like it's not what businesses want. I'm tired of people pretending this does anything except make already overworked employees bust even more ass.
Your comment is on capitalism, not scaling ai or ai being used with effect.
If you can't see how the two are inextricably tied together, I don't know what to tell you.
This reeks of "keep politics out of our video games" kind of shit. They're not actually separate issues.
Nah bro, you were in an argument about wether or not AI can be a useful tool only to then pivot to a meta argument about ethics (which I agree with btw). But something can be a useful tool and unethical at the same time so your line of argument is nonsense.
What's hard for you to comprehend about my comment?
You are insulting a person, because they said ai helps them.
They really did that themselves.
You hate ai or not, maybe you just found one more excuse to be an asshole online, don't know, don't care, bye.
You seem to enjoy continuing to engage.
😂
As someone starting a small business, it has helped tremendously. I use a lot of image generation.
If that didn’t exist, I’d either has to use crappy looking clip art or pay a designer which I literally can’t afford.
Now my projects actually look good. It makes my first projects look like a highschooler did them last minute.
There are many other uses, but I rely on it daily. My business can exist without it, but the quality of my product is significantly better and the cost to create it is much lower.
Your product is other people's work thrown in a blender.
Congrats.
Yeah he should be using real art like stock photos and shitty clip art
If their business can't afford to pay someone qualified to do the work, the business shouldn't exist.
I can stand by this for an established business. But we live in a capitalist society where you need money to make money. Until that changes, your ability to pay for work doesn't have any bearing on the value of your new business venture.
Wait til you realize that's just what art literally is...
You're confusing ai art with actual art, like rendered from illustration and paintings
it's as much "real" art as photography, taking a relatively finite number of decisions and finding something that looks "good".
Really good photography is actually pretty hard and the best photographers are in high demand.
It involves a ton of settings for the camera, frequently post processing to balance out anything that wasn't perfect during the shoot. Plus there is a ton of blocking, lighting, and if doing portraits and other planned shoots there is a lot of directing involved in getting the subjects to be in the right positions/showing the right emotions, etc. Even shooting nature requires a massive amount of planning and work beyond a few camera settings.
Hell, even stock photos tend to be a lot of work to set up!
If you think that someone taking a photo in focus with adequate lighting and posted it to instagram is the same as professional photography, then you have no idea what is involved.
it could also be me being bitter about how schools don't ever offer the raw image files after you pay for the photo. If some asshole wants to ruin the image with post processing they should at least be forced to give the raw to the client.
I don't think any designer does work without heavily relying on ai. I bet that's not the only profession.