The "you'll be left behind" nonsense makes me laugh. Left behind from what exactly? Lol

I told my boss this:

• Right now the AI race has a lot of similarities to the dotcom bubble. The subject is packed with risky loans based on huge debts. Those huge debts are expecting to be paid as AI becomes profitable, but AI companies are largely loosing money.
• All those loans and infrastructure create the burden of sunk costs leading to a desperate need to succeed.
• The people feeling that desperation are the same people who own the largest marketing, news, and social media networks in the world.
• As a result, there’s a lot of hype around AI. A lot of “kool-aid,” and everyone wants you to drink it. If you drink the kool-aid, that means you’re also bought into the problem. You also need it to succeed, thus making their problem into your problem.

I explained to him that mature, professional use of AI is going to wind up following a similar path to data engineering. It’ll start with bullshit standards, “prompt engineers” and the like, but eventually SE disciplines are going to define who makes best use of AI. You’re going to have niche use cases for daemon AIs, local LLMs, and remote models. You’ll have stronger frameworks around session management, context management, agent permissions, …

It’s not going to be like this forever, “dump all your shit into our web upload and let the AI figure everything out in one go.” It’s going to become more fragmented, bounded, dare I say deterministic… orchestratable.

Then I told my boss, it would be better if he could frame his excitement around these future use cases… so we can skip the kool-aid stage and get right into the good stuff.

He agreed, until about a week passed. Then it was AI hype again.

yep. these mba types have gutted half of id, and are changing id - ID - to unreal engine projects.

fucking hell

Except this time they'll have a hard time blaming the devs and other workers.

I mean they'll sneak around it, but maybe just maybe the blame will not be distributed? Lol who am I kidding.

Yeah. It certainly pays off sometimes. Amazon did it. It just, y'know, also crashes and burns sometimes, and I'm not sanguine about the way this is shifting its investment money from venture capitalists to, y'know, passive index fund investors.

Openai had 2025 6billion in revenue and 20 billion costs on compute. So just to run the models to get 6billion they need to pay 20billion r&d and marketing etc get on top of that

No, my understanding is that they're bringing in revenue on token generation, but it's exceeded by the costs of token generation (running data centers, so, electricity and cooling). They definitely want to make a profit on token generation, but they're afraid that raising costs that high too quickly would drive customers to switch to other providers. So they've reduced the amount they're subsidizing token costs, but not switched over to making a profit.

I can't find a good citation for this, though, so it's possible I'm mistaken. They also have huge costs associated with buying new GPUs and building new datacenters, so they're operating at a massive loss either way, and it's a little hard to find articles which tease apart the two aspects.

In any case, operating at a massive loss for the first few years is practically standard operating procedure in silicon valley at this point, and sometimes it eventually leads to a profitable, even wildly profitable, business (e.g. Amazon). But it does require a steady stream of investors and a steadily increasing market valuation. That's...we'll have to see what happens on that front.

Maybe but it’s like crack for CEOs

Who knows but you got a cool username! Genuinely

In theory, completely rewriting legacy software with AI could be a great thing - doing so every 3 or 4 years, allowing newer and better AI to tackle the task, optimizing for every development made in technology or standards.

However, this still requires human minds to define, guide, and verify these projects. AI opens up possibilities for better development, but executives seem determined to fritter away such potential by axing the human element.

It is like a certain story...

Another payment option is not tackling it at all and just "paying the interest" by having a larger engineering team to wrangle the beast than you would otherwise have needed.

They will have to trash a bunch of it and rewrite entire modules and components from scratch.

I’ve seen as AI keeps iterating over enhancements and bug fixes, the spaghetti code gets worse and worse over time. At some point only the AI understands its own code, as it is too much garbled nonsense for a human to trace through. Eventually that becomes too much garbage for the ai to trace through. And then that’s where you end up.

The idea that this can be some kind of non-deterministic abstraction layer between pseudo code and actual code is absurd.