My company has pushed engineering all-in for AI in the last few months

Our stock price has also gone down 70% in the last few months

Naturally, we're pivoting our platform to put AI front and center

The beatings will continue until moral improves

AI isn’t going away, but it’s also clear the much promised impacts aren’t there and aren’t coming anytime soon. A bit like the claims a few years back that we’d all have self driving cars by now.

The most likely outcome is an AI bubble correction that will be somewhat painful and wipe out many/most AI startups, followed by AI settling into day to day in a way that’s useful and found in many places, but not world-as-we-know-it-ending like the AI bros predict.

WE do have self driving cars with Waymo data showing it is clearly better than human drivers in certain markets like Phoenix. It is human regulations, laws and the general societal unease that is preventing a total rapid change. In fact a Robotaxis only urban area which is continuously mapped might be feasible today and probably could even reduce the no of cars needed for the population making it accessible to many more.

AI has the same problem. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but that folks just aren’t all that interested in adopting it at scale. Tech makes this “build it and they will come” error a lot. The tech is quite good, but it’s all the non tech aspects of this that are why it’s not getting impact at scale.

depends if post-correction it is worth anyone's money to keep training new frontier models. It could be that it isn't, so we are left with models that were trained in the bubble, but are now increasingly out of date, or (open?) models that are trained much more cheaply somehow with consequent lack of utility.

This article is underlining the stark contrast between the viewpoints of “AI Enthusiasts” and everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are.

I imagine I’m far from alone in that search and when you pair that with the constant marketing and glowing “analysis” from some of the enthusiasts about how this technology is “solving coding” or “changing the face of security” or even leading to AGI it starts to tickle that part of my brain where I keep blockchain, NFTs and copper bracelets.

So TLDR the tech is good but the hype-slaves and their masters are killing it with overpromising and under delivering.

Not the OP, but there are likely many tens/hundreds of thousands of people using AI daily because their management requires it. Management tracks AI usage by employee and uses it as a KPI. You want to keep your job, you use AI. You want a bonus, you use AI a lot.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-work-use-performance-reviews-...

> Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are.

So why are you using the tools? Personal curiosity? Workplace mandate?

I've made measurably more and faster progress on both professional and personal projects since adopting these tools. Sometimes assisted is less productive than unassisted, but the net gain is pretty obvious to me.

I don’t like the tools personally, and find the reversion of any sort of interface to a chat interface a huge loss to UI - but for the love of all things holy why are using them if they don’t provide any benefit?

> Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are

I'm really struggling to understand why you would use them that much if you aren't sure they are more productive. Is it just a more enjoyable workflow for you?

I ask because I find AI assisted workflows extremely painful. Constantly pulling me out of flow, like driving in gridlock traffic.

Then why the layoffs???

Partially a contracting real economy following overhiring early in the decade, partially trying to discipline labor, partially a pretty profound disconnect from both market pressures and concrete metrics that comes from a business model more centered around stock value and funding raises than revenue per se

We've been moving to faith-based markets for decades - markets where belief and hope almost entirely replace quantifiable economic activity.

Outsourcing to India and the Philippines

There’s alway a bit of that going on, but ironically if AI does result in mass labor replacement India and the Philippines are likely going to be ground zero where workforces get wiped out first. They’re ripe with the kind of things that AI is, in theory, getting very good at.

Because there was bloat and AI was a good scape goat.

To juice the next quarter. Extreme short-term thinking has become the norm at every business I've worked at and every business I'm aware of, so upper management has no issue cutting teams right down to the bone.

It's why software has become far more unstable. There's nobody around to actually maintain it.

Typical bad management decisions that came home to roost. It’s a lot easier to say “AI productivity improvements” than for the CEO to say “I’m cleaning up terrible performance on my part and a lot of bad business decisions.”

they’re holding it wrong.

They should have asked AI CEOs

Did the hype cycle not have an impact on employment with the various layoffs? Or is this and admission that the layoffs were for other reasons and were just attributed to AI?

I’m not surprised about productivity though. Efficiency gains are limited by the actual bottlenecks. And truthfully, I think people are deluding themselves a bit about how effective vibe coding is and how much faster they are actually moving when you consider developers still need to form an understanding of the codebase and its systems.

Outside of coding, is there really a use case for LLMs that has the potential to make big efficiency gains? Idk.

I've found the best way for me to wield it is the tool to build tools. I would have never in a million years been able to code. But I've used it to replace things I was paying hefty monthly subscriptions for....

So I'm not actually being more productive, but I've cut my costs significantly to do the same things I could do before.