This is a very good point. So many times I would refactor entire parts of the code base just because it’s getting too complicated and an easier solution was possible. AI is do often just let’s drill down all these variables, whatever
I’m not really convinced by any of this, in fact it seems most of the predictions were pretty correct and that Meta and Alphabet are having big issues is a shared opinion by multiple observers and pretty much every employee they have.
If they were doing so well why the layoffs? Why the tightening both in salaries and perks and work life balance? Why so many choices disrupting morale for their employees?
Help me understand where Meta and Alphabet's issues are. They seem to be doing quite well on paper -- nothing anomalous in terms of profitability or scaling recently. Layoffs are to be expected when AI can increase productivity.
The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent.
That said, Alphabet and Meta are borrowing against their future advertising profits to fund their AI boondoggles. If the advertising businesses keep growing then they’re somewhat insulated from their own missteps but the reliability of the advertising business depends on companies having money to spend on advertising.
The metaverse was mostly self-contained and the failure had zero consequence for the broader economy. AI on the other hand, every major fund is investing everything into AI companies. Every advertiser is using subsidized AI tools to generate hyper specific adverts. If this all goes south, who knows how advertising spend will be impacted.
Google specifically are backstopping billions in data centre build out costs. They’ve committed to spending, like, all of their cash to data centres. If the market gets nervous and funding disappears, Google are deep in the hole.
Anthropic “invested” $50bn in data centers to be built by Fluidstack who raised a billion dollars from Situational Awareness who used their Anthropic ownership to raise money to fund these investments. Google are backstopping much of the Fluidstack build out, i.e: if Fluidstack goes out of business then Google is on the hook for $10bn+ in costs. And Google’s Anthropic investment makes up like $100bn on the balance sheet. So, Anthropic fails to live up to expectations and fails to pay Fluidstack who can’t pay their suppliers which puts Google on the hook to hand over tens of billions in cash while at the same time their biggest investment is going down the pan.
The top line numbers don’t really do justice to the scale of the risk. You need to look at the long term commitments they’re making.
I’ve seen this before. The result is a revolving door of temporary work. Because soon companies will be “you already put 6 months in, we don’t have enough signal work 6 more months” and at the year mark they swap you for a new candidate.
And before you say that this is inefficient consider that despite being terrible for morale and efficiency (proven in un’etica studies) companies still maintain the bottom 10% out or up or out policies.
Companies always love their power on their employee over efficiency.
Musk cutting the headcount and everything working fine is a myth he perpetrated. In reality things started to go badly almost immediately, big advertisers left.
He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.
I worked in a company that did that. They couldn't rehire the senior after the junior burned with a bug 700k in 20 min by touching a part of the codebase no one had context for anymore.
In the 70 and 80s ppl kept their lifestyle by having their spouse starting to work.
In the 90s and 2000s it was with credit cards. In the 2010s it was apps offering artificially deflated prices to corner markets. And now it’s gambling and buying burritos w Klara.
I think tech ceo got a little bit too excited and their mask fell off and started saying “oh yeah, you don’t like it? Too bad nothing you can do about it”. You’ll see them quickly backpedal to woke 1.0 when it turns out they were a bit too quick about it.
I don’t think the public hates ai. I think AI needs a lot of money so it loudly only pursued the light-bendingly rich by leveraging the only two emotions they have:
1) greed: you will be able to fire all your employees
2) fear: if you don’t buy it someone else will and that is too dangerous for you
Of course normal people found this incredibly off putting.
