I’ll admit I’m experiencing a degree of pleasure in thinking about how nervous Anthropic and OpenAI must be with their IPOs supposedly coming up.
OpenAI already explicitly postponed their IPO somehow hoping for a better climate to IPO in…
A certainly… optimistic expectation.
NASDAQ just crested a new high this month, before stumbling last week.
If the death of the tech industry is on the horizon, I can’t see it.
DJIA crested a new high September 3rd 1929 before stumbling 3% the next week.
If death of the market was on the horizon, they couldn’t see it.
The slide being attributable to some "I told you so"s coming to pass may bode ill for the bigger "told you so"s that come due in a few months.
But the market doesn’t act rationally, both going up and going down, so who knows.
DJIA crested a new high September 3rd 1929 before stumbling 3% the next week.
And over a century later, what has become of it?
If someone bought $100 of stock in 1929, how much would it be worth today?
$100 of Krueger and Toll? $0
$100 of the entire DJIA on September 3, 1929 adjusted annually: $13,633
If you’d invested in January of 1929: $16,913
If you’d invested in January of 1920: $72,275
January of 1930: $31,708
It’s never gone to $0
This has strayed quite a bit from the assertion that there can’t be enduring problems in the current crop of AI investment because it was at a high a while back.
But to continue, if you invested in the makeup of the DJIA in 1929 and left it in those companies, you would not be having a particularly good time.
If you kept refreshing the investment in the companies deemed to be the ‘good’ ones over time, then yes, your investment fared well, but that says nothing about the enduring value of the companies that made up the index in 1929. This is the current topic. It’s also wild to be this dismissive of the Great Depression as nothing to worry about because, eventually, we decided on a new set of lines that could go up.
So “line goes up” by definition is not really an endorsement that all companies lines go up, we shift the criteria over time to make sure that we measure whatever works in that moment.
They’re already billionaires many times over. Hard to feel nervous with that kind of wealth in your pocket
Based on the current valuations of their companies. They will likely remain 0.1%ers, but it will still hurt.
Place your bets
Place your bets
Management spent two years demanding everyone use AI, then discovered everyone was using AI. Now they’re shocked the office is a conveyor belt of hallucinated PowerPoints reviewed by other bots. The real productivity breakthrough will be executives learning that buying subscriptions isn’t a business strategy.
I just wish my company would start hiring again. I have been using the AI out of necessity, because we are short-staffed in certain areas. I’ve asked several times, directly, how much my AI use is costing and nobody is in a position to know. It’s certainly helped in some areas but I want to build a case that hiring a college grad or two can help more…
January: We’re going AI native, please use AI as much as possible.
March: Everyone needs to attend workshops on how to maximize AI productivity.
July: Some models are only available for special (properly justified) cases. Speak to your manager. Turns out that some people did everything (even commits) with top cost models.
August: Ok, we’re setting some limits on token usage, due to some people spending 1000% over the average.
September: we are creating additional frameworks and limits to AI use.
It took a bit of time for the actual AI cost/benefit to reach the top management and put some hard numbers in contrast with the hype machine, but it’s happening.
My company is at the July stage. Who knew giving people unrestricted access to Claude enterpise with no training would blow through budgets in days
Still in March over here. My management is pushing hard for us to start doing shit in copilot, and I’m humoring them, but I’m looking at current news with a very Ralph Wiggum “I’m in danger” mindset
Keep spending that shit left and right!
Do we work at the same company??
I think this was the standard management reaction across all the companies that embraced AI as if it was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
- Tell your employees to use AI without enough training.
- Tell them to keep doing it without enough money.
- Profit!
Ernst and Young say 36% of companies using AI have experienced catastrophic incidents.
Hopefully some of them go bankrupt. That would be a stellar way to get rid of some bad management.
they cut our copilot budget to 19€ per person (you can request more. but of course it’s a hassle)
they still insist AI the future and more AI is better. they are just now shifting the blame to employees: “you need to think more about how you use it”, “you cannot just throw tokens at a problem”, etc
two months ago I got an email from a manager asking me why my AI spending was so low.
Wait, we’re not tokenmaxing anymore? So when the AI salesman said to make a leaderboard of people spening the hardest, it was to line their own pockets with cash? Huh. Color me surprised.
So next, you’ll tell me that it costs more to have an LLM produce the same quality of code as a senior developer.
But you better keep that output high. In hindsight this was so obviously gonna happen
At our company, 12 months ago they said everyone wasn’t using enough AI. They even made a leaderboard to see who was using the most tokens in the business and encouraged more and more.
A couple of months ago, everyone’s AI spend was restricted to $100/month without warning. Entire workflows broken overnight because people had built theirs around Claude skills that used stupid amounts of tokens.
Now they’re starting layoffs. Go figure.
now they are laying of staff? What, did they blow their whole budget out?
They were burning over $250k every single day. So yeah, gotta pay the reaper I guess.
Can’t wait to see this exact headline another 50 times but none of the companies in question facing any consequences for their actions, profit driven society is so fucking stupid.
This just in, Management are complete morons. Film at 11.
This. You’d almost think people are dumb enough to blame bad management decisions on software.
I tried AI-everything (apart from code review of course). But it’s just too hard. Letting the AI do bigger things results in subtle, hard to find, but devastating design fails and errors. It’s fractal. No matter what layer I look at, it’s always sort-of working but also bugged in subtle and sometimes hard-to-fix ways.
So I don’t do that. Instead I use the AI as an assistant while I still do most of the actual work. I downgraded my account too because I never reached the limits for a while.Ding ding ding. It’s fucking GREAT for eliminating the menial bullshit like scaffolding, data cleanup, sifting through overly verbose documentation… Anything that requires abstract thought still needs to be done by a human.
I’d love more of the msm to pick up these articles.
I need to convince my family this current state of AI is just smoke, mirrors and debt, but i need a normie-credible source to anchor it.
Does anyone know of one? Guardian would do.
Angry or yawning?
This really is just like every other management trend. They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work. AI can really help with a lot of mundane tasks that everyone dreads doing. And it can really help at finding information in an ocean of docs and pages. But… you have to invest in training people jow to use it, building the internal tools to make it effective, and in getting the garbage out of your existing docs. It can also be used for coding of course, but the ecosystem needed to do that well requires even more investment in basics. The fact that tech writers who know how to work with and document for AI aren’t being hired by the bundle tells you how wrong soo many companies are about their approach. Bonus points, if used well, AI doesn’t have to be obscenely expensive. At least until they start charging what it actually costs.
They take something that can have a positive impact and then try to apply it in all the wrong places without investing in making it work.
That sounds like when a company I used to work for first found out about Agile…
And like every company that hears about agile these days.
It’s weird - competent management wouldn’t require employees to fly helicopters to work without flight training, but many managers somehow think, “Everybody use AI now,” makes sense.
Remember when chatgpt first went viral and everyone said that “prompt engineer will be the new career path”. So, how’s that going?
The machines are prompting themselves.
