My proof-in-pudding test is still the fact that we haven't seen gigantic mass firings at tech companies, nor a massive acceleration on quality or breadth (not quantity!) of development.
Microsoft has been going heavy on AI for 1y+ now. But then they replace their cruddy native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. If tests and dev only has marginal cost now, why aren't they going all in on writing extremely performant, almost completely bug-free native applications everywhere?
And this repeats itself across all big tech or AI hype companies. They all have these supposed earth-shattering gains in productivity but then.. there hasn't been anything to show for that in years? Despite that whole subsect of tech plus big tech dropping trillions of dollars on it?
And then there is also the really uncomfortable question for all tech CEOs and managers: LLMs are better at 'fuzzy' things like writing specs or documentation than they are at writing code. And LLMs are supposedly godlike. Leadership is a fuzzy thing. At some point the chickens will come to roost and tech companies with LLM CEOs / managers and human developers or even completely LLM'd will outperform human-led / managed companies. The capital class will jeer about that for a while, but the cost for tokens will continue to drop to near zero. At that point, they're out of leverage too.
> Someone in power doesn’t get to choose - the board of directors do. Who’s job is to act in the best interest of shareholders.
Alas, shareholder value is a great ideal, but it tends to be honoured in practice rather less strictly.
As you can also see when sudden competition leads to rounds of efficiency improvements, cost cutting and product enhancements: even without competition, a penny saved is a penny earned for shareholders. But only when fierce competition threatens to put managers' jobs at risk, do they really kick into overdrive.
Since the majority shareholder(s) can decide to replace the board of directors, it’s not the board of directors who holds the (ultimate) power, it’s the majority shareholder(s).
Your proof-in-pudding test seems to assume that AI is binary -- either it accelerates everyone's development 100x ("let's rewrite every app into bug-free native applications") or nothing ("there hasn't been anything to show for that in years"). I posit reality is somewhere in between the two.
Considering that "AI will replace nearly all devs" and "AI will give 100x boost" and such we were promised, it makes sense to question this.
After almost all hyped technology is also "somewere between the two" extremes of not doing what it promises at all and doing it. The question is which edge it's closer to.
LLM’s are capable of searching information spaces and generating some outputs that one can use to do their job.
But it’s not taking anyone’s job, ever. People are not bots, a lot of the work they do is tacit and goes well beyond the capabilities and abilities of llm’s.
Many tech firms are essentially mature and are currently using too much labour. This will lead to a natural cycle of lay offs if they cannot figure out projects to allocate the surplus labour. This is normal and healthy - only a deluded economist believes in ‘perfect’ stuff.
> LLMs are better at 'fuzzy' things like writing specs or documentation than they are at writing code.
At least for writing specs, this is clearly not true. I am a startup founder/engineer who has written a lot of code, but I've written less and less code over the last couple of years and very little now. Even much of the code review can be delegated to frontier models now (if you know which ones to use for which purpose).
I still need to guide the models to write and revise specs a great deal. Current frontier LLMs are great at verifiable things (quite obvious to those who know how they're trained), including finding most bugs. They are still much less competent than expert humans at understanding many 'softer' aspects of business and user requirements.
> Microsoft has been going heavy on AI for 1y+ now. But then they replace their cruddy native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one.
This.
Also, Microsoft is going heavy on AI but it's primarily chatbot gimmicks they call copilot agents, and they need to deeply integrate it with all their business products and have customers grant access to all their communications and business data to give something for the chatbot to work with. They go on and on in their AI your with their example on how a company can work on agents alone, and they tell everyone their job is obsoleted by agents, but they don't seem to dogfood any of their products.
> My proof-in-pudding test is still the fact that we haven't seen gigantic mass firings at tech companies
This assumes that companies will announce such mass firings (yeah, I'm aware of WARN Act); when in reality they will steadily let go of people for various reasons (including "performance").
From my (tech heavy) social circle, I have noticed an uptick in the number of people suddenly becoming unemployed.
For Jevons paradox to be a win-win, you need these 3 statements to be true:
1)Workers get more productive thanks to AI.
2)Higher worker productivity translates into lower prices.
3)Most importantly, consumer demand needs to explode in reaction to lower prices. And we're finding out in real-time that the demand is inelastic.
Around 1900, 40% of American workers worked in agriculture. Today, it's < 2%.
Which is similar to what we see with coding: The increase in demand has not exploded enough to offset the job-killing of each farmer being able to produce more food.
Microsoft has been going heavy on AI for 1y+ now. But then they replace their cruddy native Windows Copilot application with an Electron one. If tests and dev only has marginal cost now, why aren't they going all in on writing extremely performant, almost completely bug-free native applications everywhere?
And this repeats itself across all big tech or AI hype companies. They all have these supposed earth-shattering gains in productivity but then.. there hasn't been anything to show for that in years? Despite that whole subsect of tech plus big tech dropping trillions of dollars on it?
And then there is also the really uncomfortable question for all tech CEOs and managers: LLMs are better at 'fuzzy' things like writing specs or documentation than they are at writing code. And LLMs are supposedly godlike. Leadership is a fuzzy thing. At some point the chickens will come to roost and tech companies with LLM CEOs / managers and human developers or even completely LLM'd will outperform human-led / managed companies. The capital class will jeer about that for a while, but the cost for tokens will continue to drop to near zero. At that point, they're out of leverage too.