Discussion

Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else

simonw: I was talking recently to someone who teaches AI-adjacent courses at a US university (not in a computer science department) and they said that enrollment in their class is lower than expected, which they think is likely due to the severity of the AI backlash among students on campus.

mitthrowaway2: What kind of AI-adjacent?If it's fundamentals of ML, I'm surprised to hear that.If it's "how to use ChatGPT for creative writing" then I'm not surprised. Why would someone take a class from a teacher who has had only just as much experience with these tools as their students have?

nacozarina: a person can have full faith in the potential value of ai science and simultaneously have zero faith in the current crop of business stewards of that science.no one is questioning the underlying model mathematics, they are questioning deceptive & reckless stewards.

hcmgr: The tone deafness of the tech community is so unbearable. Either too on the spectrum, too ambitious (the world is fine cause I’m getting mine), or too isolated from non-tech people, to realise most people despise what they’re creating.There’s also a lack of willingness to ‘bring along’ the public. It’s just “make the god thing; ask for permission later”.

ike2792: This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.

therobots927: What the tech elite fail to understand is that we are at historic levels of wealth and income inequality. Access to healthcare is determined by one’s employment which makes what I’m about to explain a matter of life and death.It doesn’t matter if you think it’s all going to work out and AI will bring an unprecedented era of abundance. That is not the current state.The current state is: Nearly all productivity growth since 1980 has gone to shareholders, not workers: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/Now what do you think happens when we dramatically expand productivity with AI? Well, we’re already seeing unprecedented layoffs in tech. And it’s easy to draw the conclusion that unless something structural changes all of the productivity gains from AI will go to investors not workers. Leaving said workers without access to healthcare or housing.And of course let’s not forget that the tech elite in question supported Trump in the last election - someone who has done everything in his power to reduce healthcare access among the low income / unemployed population. This isn’t fucking rocket science guys.

taurath: For mine it’s worse because we have new leadership who believes in it to a far larger extent than it can deliver. Now a massive amount of our workforce is building up proofs of concepts and spitting out tons of effectively useless output to look good because of how strongly they’ve signaled it’s good for careers here to fully embrace it. It’s a massive mess and there’s nobody to clean it up, and the voices advocating for rigor or good engineering practices are being sidelined. It’s full out mania.

SunshineTheCat: Giant leaps in innovation almost always have a reaction like this.It's new, people fear it. Sometimes justified, usually not.People greatly feared the car because of the number of horse-related jobs it would displace.President Benjamin Harrison and First Lady Caroline Harrison feared electricity so much they refused to operate light switches to avoid being shocked. They had staff turn lights on/off for them.Looking back at these we might laugh.We're largely in the same boat now.It's possible AI will destroy us all, but judging from history, the irrational reactions to something new isn't exactly unprecedented.

marginalia_nu: Many innovations are also on the refuse pile of history. Indoor gas lighting[1] is one. People were quite justifiably skeptical of electricity, when its relatively short-lived predecessor frequently killed people in explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning, etc.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_lighting

jjulius: >... with Gen Z reportedly leading the way...The kids are alright.

phainopepla2: They've been saying that since the Boomers were kids, look where that led us

rootusrootus: I'm biased, but I think Gen X turned out okay ;-).

cynicalsecurity: Paraphrasing the classic, it's not AI that people are unhappy with, it's their life around AI. The world generally appears to have become a harsher and more dangerous place - even though it hasn't. But people and especially tabloid press like finding scapegoats and participating in mass hysteria. The anti-AI hysteria is going to go away soon while AI isn't. It's just another tool, like cars or factories. Granted, it brings some danger, but at the same time it brings overwhelmingly more good.

FloorEgg: How can the AI be lacking in results and also at the same time responsible for layoffs and slowing of hiring?Wouldn't it be one or the other?

joaohaas: I think most people oustide the area do not care and do not know about who's on top, and the negative perception is much more related to how the tech will enable users to misuse it (replacing phone lines/support, AI art, things losing quality, etc) than about the companies themselves.

Normal_gaussian: I think there is a lot of truth to what you say, particularly when it comes to caring rather than parroting; however as part of my personal and civil life I interact with a lot of non-tech people in non-tech capacities, and a surprising number of them raise unprompted complaints about people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Musk I understand everyone knowing about; between Tesla, SpaceX, the Thai boys football team, a very public inclination to raise his hand, and a position in the US government he is meaningfully famous. However how Sam Altman has managed to get his name out there in the wrong way very quickly to a bunch of Brits I don't know.

grebc: Underwhelmed is the absolute correct word to use here.Absolutely everyone raves about this but other than a few basic computer related tasks I’ve not seen compelling use cases that justify the billions being lit on fire trying to pursue it.My cynical take is the crypto bro’s needed something to do with their useless GPU’s after the crash and found the perfect answer in LLM’s.

Wissenschafter: When did Hacker news start becoming a luddite, bad takes everywhere I look, feels like everyone is '50 year old burnt out guy' that has no idea what is going on vibe?I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google.You won't be 'underwhelmed' long.

mortalapeman: As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.

belval: This is poor reporting, almost needs a checklist:[X] Tweets and instagram comments presented as "what society is thinking"[X] Ties Luigi Mangione and the California warehouse fire to Gen Z discontent (about AI?).[X] Statistics being used to support the title with little to no regards to continuity: "those respondents who said that AI makes them “nervous” grew from 50% to 52% during the same period" => percentage was 52% in 2023, 50% in 2024 and 52% in 2025, seems mostly flat to me, with the real jump being in 2022-2023 with 39%.

JumpCrisscross: They cite a report and a Gallup poll. That’s not just tweets.

belval: I didn't say it was devoid of substance, the poll part is actually interesting (and worth discussing!) it's just that it actually appears *after* the sloppy tweets and "someone pretended to shoot at Sam Altman's house" screenshot as if that was somehow relevant.

partyficial: Early stages of any major disruptive technology will have hype due to get-rich-quick folks. Dot-com boom & bust of 2000 is similar. But the underlying technology (internet) defined our lives forever.I don't know why people are comparing the Day-1 of one technology with the Day-1000 of another. Yes, AI is useless in many fields - NOW. But you can't imagine doing any work without in a couple years.Like the kids used to ask - 'How did they build Google without Google?'Now their kids will ask - 'How did they build chatGPT without chatGPT'?

pesus: Blindly dismissing everyone not impressed by the AI hype only serves to further delegitimize the AI hype.

19skitsch: Agree… OP said “not CS” so doesn’t seem surprising. If we’re going by anecdotes, AI classes in the CS dept have risen in popularity in the past few years.

jandrese: Always fun to see the article happen live in the comments section.

plemer: Not if the actual vs stated reasons for the layoffs have nothing to do with AI.

ua709: Is it just me or is there a growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone…

mmargenot: AI applications that would help normal people in a significant way are pretty lacking, so I'm not surprised. So much conversation about AI products is cycles of "this tech will change everything" without material backup outside of coding agents.

Aachen: How much of the workforce is organising and other information dissemination or transformation?I'm more on the skeptical side than the evangelist, but I can see how large parts of such things could theoretically be shifted away from humans. Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking.... AI is a whole lot of hot air when considering the "second 80%" of the work involved in any of these tasks, but that's still a lot of jobs that may make little sense to start studying these years, until you have some idea how the field will develop or if there's a giant surplus of, say, French-native Spanish language experts. At least for those for whom a given study is not a real passion and they might as well choose something else

tedsanders: > Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle.According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again. What data source are you looking at?[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

layer8: The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.

daveguy: Quite a convenient excuse, isn't it? I hope no one figures out that AI is still just kinda meh.

Macha: Flat at 60% of pre-covid hiring while the number of graduates continue to increase and there's still a backlog of people who were laid off. That's not a particularly optimism inducing hiring market.

woah: There's this weird unspoken assumption in a lot of these HN posts that any layoffs or lack of hiring is due to companies shirking on providing the cushy jobs they owe software engineers. Actually, they hire engineers to get stuff done. If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.

hilariously: This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?"Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world.Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.

daveguy: One of the most hilarious AI-vangelical posts I've seen recently is from Steve Yegg through simonw....> The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too... [0]Ummmm... Steve. You think Google might be able to figure out a super huge awesome new thing from 1 out of 5 of their staff members. Or, given this is a consistent curve across the industry (even in Google)... Maybe AI is only about a fifth as cool and helpful as you think it is?[0] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/13/steve-yegge/#atom-ever...

galvatron9k: I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.

thepasch: This AI rollout has been fundamentally rushed and fucked from the very beginning and I think the people who are responsible for doing it this way have done more irreparable damage to society than any single group of humans in the entire history of the species, and I mean it.It’s always only ever about how the new model is faster, better, smarter. Or how the tech will be bringing ruin to the job market and someone should probably do something about that some time soon. Zero efforts to create any sort of educational content - how it even works, how to vet its output, how to have an eye for confabulation, how to use it as thinking enhancement rather than replacement, to keep in mind that it’s trained to please and will literally generate anything to cause users to click the thumbs up button. Nope, it’s just “ModelGPClaude can make mistakes! Better be careful!”And then everyone’s surprised when an utterly improvident handling of 4o kicks off the biggest concentrated wave of AI psychosis seen yet. Because, surprise! When you give people a model that’s trained to anthropomorphize itself, people who have no idea about any of this tech and have no access to education about any of it might believe it’s more than it is! Boy, who’d’ve thunk; isn’t the world complex?!This was a symptom of this exact same disease. I have far less worry about the tech and far more worry about how the disconnected venture capital caste is inflicting it upon us.

mghackerlady: I feel like the junior problem contributes more heavily than people might think. The people on top see juniors as replaceable since they view them as cheap menial labor, whereas most seniors at least acknowledge the human element as part of the benefit

bayindirh: Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday.They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows.Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.

latchkey: Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.

taurath: They understand, they’re the ones on the top of the ladder pushing everyone else off.

hn_throwaway_99: Your statement is a bit contradictory. That is, the article about "the growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else" pretty clearly states that "everyone else" is scared about job losses and the extreme inequality they see advanced AI causing. This is in line with your second to last sentence.But the first part of your comment is basically saying "AI insiders think the tech is super awesome and powerful, while other engineers think it doesn't stand up to the hype." Well, if the AI is indeed not as good a tech as its boosters are saying, well, this would be great news for everyone scared about job losses and widening inequality if AI turned out to be a nothing burger.

abcde666777: I'm also biased, but I think millenials turned out okay ;).

troupo: > You won't be 'underwhelmed' long."Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for two years now.Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1].So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists.[1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.

janalsncm: When Block laid off 40% of their staff Jack Dorsey said it was because of AI. Whether or not you believe him is a different question.

markus_zhang: Regardless, I think we are going to see an acceleration of AI research.I just wish my wife is more serious about camping and learning survival skills. I think Shit is going to hit the fan in the next 5-10 years but she thinks that’s crazy. Oh well maybe I am crazy.

V__: You replace half of a team with AI. Salary cost go immediately down, but team output can keep up for some time. You don't see the technical debt, the security issues and the prompt injection which will result in wrong invoices being sent. In six months suddenly there will be a big problem, but this quarter a lot of shareholders are happy about the cost-cutting. You may even be promoted by the time shit hits the fan, and it won't even be your problem anymore.On the other hand there probably also is a general correction in the market after the covid hiring spree.

gaigalas: https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/ai_index_report_2026.p...> The United States reported the lowest trust in its own government to regulate AI responsibly of any country surveyed, at 31%.It seems US citizens are really against the current administration, just using the fact that AI investment is intrinsecally connected to it to voice their opposition.> Country-level expectations follow similar patterns to the earlier sentiment trends. Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, and India all expected AI to create more jobs than it eliminates, with shares above 60%. The United States and Canada sat at the opposite end, where 67% and 68% of respondents expected AI to eliminate jobs and disrupt industries.Globally, the disconnect is not growing. It's really just an U.S. problem (spilling to neighbouring Canada too).So, no luddites in sight, again. It's just a public perception over a polemic topic being leveraged for ideological reasons sinking AI on US only.

tayo42: He went all in on block chain, so it would be consistent with previous hyped tech. In this case I would believe him.

advael: AI continues to be a stupidly vague term, and the example I keep going back to is present in this articleMeaningful advances in medical diagnosis are not coming from chatbot companies. Some are coming from machine learning methods. Perhaps measuring public sentiment about such a vagary is not a very productive way to quantify anythingThat said, I continue to also be frustrated with people using the abstract concept of a new technology as a substitute for the institutions that use that technology to exert power in the world and what they do with that power, which is - as many in the comments already point out - is what the vast majority of people are actually mad about, and right to be

booleandilemma: [delayed]

taurath: 2 things - it’s not day 1 for AI, and it’s also not dot-com (which dropped the nasdaq 80% btw). It’s the entire American economy right now. When it can’t deliver anything approaching its hype, just like all the data centers that can’t deliver on power, the profit margins that can’t deliver, and the promises of massive 500% revenue increases this fiscal year… sorry, I was raised in a cult and know what the fuck I’m seeing, sadly among a lot of otherwise intelligent people here.I expect I’ll be using LLMs now and in the future, but the public is far more right about the companies and the people running them than the tech “insiders” here.

CobrastanJorji: I think people are really underestimating how poorly today's tweens think of AI. "That looks like chatgpt" is an insult. Kids avoid things because they heard somewhere that AI might have been involved and have a sense that means it is bad or immoral or illegal or cheating in some nebulous way, and it's reinforced by their teachers telling them that using AI for homework is cheating.I think this next generation is going to come up fundamentally believing that AI is generally a bad thing, and it's going to surprise older people.

booleandilemma: [delayed]

peyton: I feel like this will change as people move around. It’s definitely a skill.

0x3f: > Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.

maplethorpe: In case you're wondering who they mean by "AI experts", I checked the Pew poll:> Note: “AI experts” refer to individuals whose work or research relates to AI. The AI experts surveyed are those who were authors or presenters at an AI-related conference in 2023 or 2024 and live in the U.S. Expert views are only representative of those who responded.

tayo42: > Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gearsThis is how companies see all of us though, for all ic levels

bayindirh: For today's fast and loose companies that's true, but not all companies are greedy and grind people for money.Yes, they're not the norm, many of them are not glamorous, but it's not all black and white.

slopinthebag: If "AI" was just free local and open models running on consumer hardware, fewer people would have an issue with it. Which highlights that the issue is with the hyper scalers, the rhetoric, the corporations, the marketing, etc etc.We are ever so close to nearing the point where 90% of our AI usage can go through providers of open models, who all compete with each other to drive down prices and prevent rug pulls, leaving Dario and Sam holding empty bags.

janalsncm: Fewer, sure, but maybe less than you suggest. Plenty of harms are just as easy under a regime of open models only. Job losses, spamming, scraping the internet, data centers, scams, hacking etc are all possible with open weight models now.

gcheong: "Make something people want" seems so quaint now.

MaysonL: “Make people want something, and sell it to them”.

bigbuppo: Yeah but drugs are illegal.

JohnMakin: Plenty of people see it - but, to a hiring team, a junior is an extremely risky investment. They demand a high cost relative to when they can start contributing actual value, may not work out, or may hop ship the moment they become competent. It is rational for a business to want to eliminate this risk. It's possible that everyone is acting rationally here, knowing it will lead to a result that is not favorable down the line - because the immediate benefit is too great to consider the latter.In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. And that risk may be overblown - people are still hiring some juniors, it's not like it has stopped entirely - so future seniors will likely just be worth more than they are currently. To some, that may be worth the risk, especially if you believe AI will continue to get stronger.I am not saying I agree with this decision making, more pointing out the thought process. We have had to have similar discussions where I am but are still hiring juniors, FYI. That's basically all we're hiring right now, actually, because the market for strong juniors is very good right now.

globalnode: and what happens in half a generation or so when those seniors start retiring? the only way software production will meet demand is if the fewer seniors out there are propped up by way more competent ai than we have now. that also means the work will fundamentally change from being massively nerdy to moderately nerdy with the ability to work with ai. many of the people in the computer industry now just wont be attracted to that type of work.. what will they do? become physicists or mathematicians? and what type of person is tomorrows senior software developer?

slopinthebag: Nah, the issue is more who controls access to these tools. People (rightfully) don't like billionaires or the elite ruling class very much. Without all the hype and investments it wouldn't be seen as such a big deal - just a neat technology.

Jcampuzano2: It is clear AI has value in the pursuit further knowledge.It is also clear AI will bring even worse poverty levels and skew the wealth disparity even further.The latter isn't the fault of AI itself, its the fault of the humans who will control it.

noosphr: In the 80s, 90s and 00s that's what they thought about coding.Then when the salaries got good every pretended to have been a nerd and really into everything nerd.

gerdesj: I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ...I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them.What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs?Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail.So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun.Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.

ofjcihen: Been saying this for a bit but the things I’ve seen associated with AI seem to be the things that it’s pretty mid at. Coding, automated actions etc. I wholeheartedly believe adoption and perception would be better if the things it was amazing at were pushed more.Take log review for example. Whether it’s admin or security LLMs are incredible at reading awfully formatted logs and even using those to pull meaning from other logs as well. Like turn an hour long log review into a 10 minute log review type thing.

janalsncm: It is worth pointing out that we got here despite all of the “alignment” research and safetyism surrounding the models.The fundamental alignment issue is aligning the companies themselves with society, not the models with the companies. Widespread unemployment is not aligned with society, but it is aligned with Anthropic and OpenAI if it makes them rich.Therefore the only “harms” the companies will take seriously are those which also harm the company. For example reputational harms from enabling scams aren’t allowed.

troupo: There are no "AI-insiders"."AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime.[1] Yes, you read it right. They had to buy a team of actual engineers to do the job: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987

georgemcbay: > I'm biased, but I think Gen X turned out okayAs a Gen Xer myself (1973) I disagree.The widest margin of Trump voters by generation was Gen X.Gen X has largely morphed into the boomers they used to despise.

cosmic_cheese: It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.

JumpCrisscross: But then you’d expect the trend to self correct in the long run. AI actually does seem to replacing customer-service and CS jobs effectively.

cosmic_cheese: From what I've seen many efforts to replace roles such as customer service with AI are being rolled back or downscaled due to intolerably high error rates and general incapability. While these segments won't come out unscathed I don't think the actual impact will end up being as severe as feared.

zb3: People are anti AI for obvious and valid reasons, but I think we should focus on where the profit goes and not on hating the technology itself.Of course, if people are fired and only capital owners / AI experts get to earn anything then this is wrong and a revolution is obviously needed and unavoidable.But for me, the best outcome would be if it was AI that did all the jobs so people could focus on doing what they want, not that we'd go back to pre-AI era..Initially however we need to balance between full wealth redistribution and keeping the incentive to develop AI further.Of course by AI I mean really useful AI, the real part, not the marketing part.

ggregoire: > but the enthusiasm on the ground is lackingUsing claude and friends takes all the fun out of the job, so I'm not surprised engineers are not enthusiastic. It's cool for 1 month then you realize we went from solving problems and implementing algos and optimizing slow code and fixing security issues and other fun stuff, to writing prompts all day long.

rconti: Shocking that people who are in data science/ML are excited about data science/ML, and people in jobs not interested in that area are not interested in it.It's like a programmer being surprised that a worker in $random_job wants to keep doing their job, and not learn how to be a programmer instead.

bayindirh: I have a similar experience. I seldom use it to test to see its current state, and it generally (85% of the time) gives wrong answers. Then I discuss this with a couple of friends: Me: I tried $AI recently, I asked $question, it hallucinated. Them: But it sucks at that. Me: Then what's good at? It's useful if it helps me out of a ditch. Them: It depends on the domain... These guys are not evangelists or anything, but colleagues who want to reduce their workloads. If it can't help with what I need, then how can it help me at all?At the end of the day, I don't plan to use this at daily capacity, but with all the resources poured into this, it's still underwhelming.

scottyah: Tell claude what you do and ask it where it can be the most helpful. It is true that the tool has to be learned, and won't help everywhere. If you are doing web dev just to make a tool, it is purely magical. I've found it to be mostly useless in making geed helm charts.

bayindirh: > In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line.I mean, writing the code which makes mon^H^H^H^H provides value for minimum cost is the ultimate goal of a software company, but any competent CS grad or anyone with basic algorithms knowledge knows that greedy algorithms can't solve all problems. Sometimes the company needs to look ahead, try, fail and backtrack.Nerdy analogies aside, self-sabotaging whole sector with greedy shortsightedness is a pretty monumental misstep. It's painful yet unbelievably hilarious at the same time. Pure dark comedy.

antonvs: The problem is that it's systemic. The entire system rewards the short term thinking, so that even people with some awareness of what's happening tend to contribute to it all. People are fantastically good at finding reasons to work at places like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Palantir, X, etc. And once they're there, they similarly figure out how to justify the actions they're taking.

RajT88: A friend of mine has copilot integrated with his storage appliance that all the business docs are hosted on for his firm. He says it's amazing.My company uses Sharepoint, and can digest all of the documents I have access to on that, one drive, teams, outlooks, etc. across my tenant. Most of the time, it's pretty useless.There must be some reason for these two disparate experiences. It's the same product offering. I couldn't tell you.

ofjcihen: Reminds me of a bounty I received recently. Someone essentially exposed a bedrock agent that had access to the companies internal documents to the internet unauthenticated. They actually had the reports and notes for other bug bounties that had been reported to them as well.

goekjclo: Free open models are still capable of flooding art communities with slop images, which is worth sympathy, and is not included in your "Which highlights that the issue is with the hyper scalers, the rhetoric, the corporations, the marketing, etc etc".

jazzcomputer: My partner was working at an event and a co-worker had prepared a poster using AI - a teenage kid at the event pointed out how the poster "has AI smudges".Gotta love that - the teenage AI scold.

JumpCrisscross: I believe that too. Broadly, I’m agreeing with the parent comment—AI can’t be causing long-run layoffs and be worthless.

nicce: None of the previous innovations haven’t similarly replaced the human itself.

wewtyflakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_loom#Social_and_economic...

meander_water: Industrial Revolution? We're still here.

adamddev1: I don't know how many times I've seen some Google AI summary or ChatGPT with references that, when I checked, did not say what what the AI summary said. If a high school student falsified references in a paper like this, they would get a bad or failing grade. This is bad, not acceptable, the teacher would say.But we have been sold to use these constantly falsified AI summaries as the go-to source of "truth" by all levels of society. We're trading truth for an illusion of short-term gains. This will not have good consequences.

skippyboxedhero: The use-cases for data science and other engineers are different. AI is not uniformly good at all kinds of development.There is an issue with execs pushing it though. You have people at the top of the company with little to no idea how people work attempting to micromanage tool usage. It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use.No-one is getting fired because of AI. The start of this year is the start of companies beginning to use AI. The reason layoffs are happening is because of the massive overhiring after Covid.

ryandrake: > overhiring after CovidHow long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? This is starting to feel like the politician blaming his predecessor even though he's been in office for years. In the year 2033, Company X lays off another 10,000, just as it did each year since 2023, again blaming massive over-hiring during COVID, ten years ago.

bdangubic: > How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse?I am with you but if you look what happened after COVID it is a big line going waaaaay up. COVID was a significant event and there is no way around it, no? the OPs comment is invalid because we below the pre-COVID (by miles) but COVID should be taken into account (everyone seems to use it to further some agenda by looking at just one particular aspect of what happened post-COVID)

sumeno: More like where the bread will come from if nobody learns how to bake it and the knowledge of how to bake it is lost.

bayindirh: I generally use them for researching things which I was unable to find anywhere else. For example, for Gemini I have two extreme examples:I asked for a concept in Tango music, with a long prompt explaining what I'm looking for. It brought me back a single, Spanish YouTube Video explaining it perfectly alongside its slightly wrong summary, but the video was spot on, and I got what I needed.Then I asked for something else about a musical instrument, again with a very detailed prompt, and it gave me a very confident answer suggesting that mine is broken and needs to be serviced. After an e-mail to the maker of the said instrument, giving the same model number (and providing a serial) and asking the same question, I got a reply saying that it's supposed to that and it's perfectly fine, it turned out that Gemini hallucinated pretty wildly.For programming I don't use AI at all. I have a habit of reading library references and writing code directly by RTFM'ing the official docs of what I'm working with. It provides more depth, and I do nail the correct usage in less time.

fg137: Meanwhile Stanford's CS336 (Language Modeling from Scratch) requires an application for enrollment.https://web.archive.org/web/20260316042004/https://cs336.sta...Students don't enroll in a class for various reasons, but most likely because it's useless (or at least people perceive it as useless). At top universities, even notoriously challenging courses have a decent class size.

0x3f: This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others.But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.

scottyah: It's the same as the sad drunk man talking bad about the King at a dirty bar. It makes them feel better to compare or say they're better in some way.

apical_dendrite: When I get a message from a co-worker that seems to have been written by an LLM, I am incredibly turned off and instantly think less of the person. It can be easy to spot: key words bolded, acknowledging that I'm right, longer and with a different tone than their typical messages, with neat bullet points.It feels a little disrespectful. It feels a little pointless (why am I bothering talking to you if I can get the same result from the AI). I have no idea whether you've given the problem any actual thought, or if you're just copy-pasting an answer. I have no idea if you actually believe what you're telling me (or if you've even read it or understand it).

fwip: [delayed]

epgui: This article seems to be using the word “expert” quite imprecisely.

unclad5968: That is crazy. Why would the next 5-10 years be so insane you'd be forced to survive in the wilderness?

markus_zhang: Thinking about AI-induced(or perceived)-layoffs that triggers another depression which then triggers riots in the city, or something like a future war triggering oil going up crazily which in turn triggering the shortage of fertilizer and every other oil products, which further triggers China to put a stop on exporting some key chemical products, which then triggers more shortages and then what not, I think it’s a perfect sane possibility to live in the wilderness for at least a couple of weeks.Oh the second one is happening right now.

grebc: It’s always been this way. It’s an online community.

Wissenschafter: It's literally unbearable now. I don't know how the place that once used to be exciting and deep in the know; is now old-man-yells-at-clouds ignorant of what is happening. It's actually really sad. /g/ and /r/accelerate seem like the last bastions of actual intelligent people discussing these things.

skippyboxedhero: I think that identifies an issue that is going to cause a real problem for the US in the future. The society is deeply politicised and polarised to the extent that essentially inanimate objects are regarded as having deep political and social significance. When there is political change, it is going to sweep back in the other direction.It also seems like people on all sides within the AI debate have been fanning those flames thinking is will work in the short-term...and it won't. Big tech played that game in many countries in the early 2010s and it didn't end well.

gaigalas: It must be noted that the U.S. does allow inanimate object makers to fund politicians and such practices are widespread.If all is well, then it's all good: no need to blame anyone, campaings get funded, etc. If one major crisis occours though, the country self-immolates by design.

twoodfin: Corporate contributions to Federal politicians and candidates are illegal in the US.The New York Times is allowed to spend money like anyone else praising or slagging politicians, but that’s the First Amendment, not funding candidates.

mschuster91: > If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.AI works fine to get a vibe coded BS version of the app. No doubt there. But eventually, especially once scale hits your app, it will devolve into an unholy mess of low performance and (extremely) high cost if you do not have a bunch of senior talent able and willing to clean up after the AI mess.Unfortunately, our capitalist economy only rewards the metrics you mentioned... but by the time the house of cards collapses, either from financial issues stemming from the above or because the tech debt explodes, it's too late to turn the ship around.

ua709: And I've even heard rumors of software engineers that don't even write apps or write code that runs on the internet at all. They say some of them don't even use javascript or python! The horror.

crubier: I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is:A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way.But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue.I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.

therobots927: If the majority of engineers decide to rot their brains and abandon best practices, the industry will eventually implode. Stay true to your beliefs and use the bare minimum of AI to keep your job.We’re in what I would call the “dark ages” of tech. There will be a new renaissance led by those who used this as an opportunity to build skills and tools that are genuinely useful and ingenious.If you keep a long-term horizon this is the perfect opportunity to work on a solo project in stealth mode. Or build professional connections with others who see things the way you do.

teamonkey: Agreed. As a kid it felt there was so much energy to make things better, to fight the system. So depressing growing up and seeing so many peers and idols becoming the same inward-looking grey old farts they used to mock.Perhaps this is inevitable.

gaigalas: > Corporate contributions to Federal politicians and candidates are illegal in the US.And that's why the whole system is divided into two parties that both, each, funnel all their support to the presidential campaign (and then to taking over seats to guarantee more lobbying).This whole thing would fall apart without lobbying.

raducu: I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to).

woah: Did you ever ask it to do that?

Wissenschafter: "They Don't Think It Be Like It Is But It Do", is all I can think.The simple truth is, these senior devs have no idea how to use these new tools to their capabilities.It's a simple case of PEBCAK; ironic considering most of them would be the ones throwing that term around 20 years ago.

zmmmmm: My own anecdotal experience is yes, there is a real visceral hatred of AI among Gen-Z. You have to look at it through a lens where they already feel like there's been a massive amount of intergenerational theft against them - particularly with the housing market putting owning a home out of reach, along with the evaporation of the concept of a stable career. Now they are going through education learning skills that they are incessantly hearing will have no purpose and there will not be jobs for them.It's hard not to see that they have a point. If AI is so great and going to save so much money - how about starting by paying some of that forward? Suddenly when you ask the billionaires or AI tech elite to share any of the wealth they are so confident they will generate, everyone backs away fast and starts to behave like it is all a speculative venture. So which one is it?

rurp: I believe that this has happened in some cases but am very skeptical that it is widespread and generalizeable at this point. My own experience is that software engineers thinking they can easily solve a problem in a domain they know nothing about overrate their ability to do so ~99% of the time.

socialcommenter: Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...

andrekandre: > Planning someone's agenda, preparing relevant documents, arranging and coordinating things, translations (speech or text), narration, grammar checking the issue is, these things "lie" subtly and not so subtly (they make up issues, rename agendas, forget questions and change meanings all the time) and for me that is a deal-breaker for a business tool that i need ro rely on

consumer451: > Right now, as I'm writing this comment, AI = LLMs and image generation. That's it. It's as simple as thatI think agentic harnesses add a lot to LLMs, even if many are just simple loops. They are a separate thing from LLMs, are they not?I get the feeling that even if we stopped shipping new models today, new far more useful products would be getting shipped for years, just with harness improvements. Or, am I way off base here?

nprateem: I think it's pretty clear that the problems with AI are:1. Overhyped. Try writing a blog post that doesn't sound like it. Everyone is sick of reading it now.2. Affecting the wrong people. It used to be the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. But now a lot of the middle class will get poorer3. Severely damages the work hard way out. Competition will become brutal if there's almost no barrier to entry. This will drive down profit, affect hiring and will become a conveyor belt of people trying to win the business lottery. This will make moats even more essential.4. The obvious theft of creative works which destroys dreams and livelihoods.No wonder the younger generation are against it. Those of us in the middle are still just hoping at least we can get through somehow. At least we have hope.

Yokohiii: My only surprise is that the AI "elite" is surprised.

roxolotl: They’ve gotta be feigning it right? I just don’t understand how you could be so out of touch with what happens when wealth becomes this concentrated. This isn’t the first go around at this.

tensor: Wealth concentration has been happening for a century. You don't need AI for that.

rurp: There have been a lot of headlines the past couple years about companies stating they are doing layoffs or slowing hiring because of AI. I would bet the average adult pays way more attention to news headlines than FRED reports.I also don't see why everyone would dismiss the statements of large company CEOs about why they are making hiring/firing decisions, regardless of what some statistics say.

Insanity: Because the messaging of the CEOs is intentional, to both do 'damage control' and influence stock price / valuation. It's not neutral messaging.

CobrastanJorji: You know how your parents are weirdly shitty at recognizing obvious photoshops? Kids are constantly surprised that we adults can't recognize obvious AI images.

nprateem: Exactly. They grew up fucked by social media, the financial crisis and covid, can clearly see housing is unaffordable and now they won't have jobs.No wonder they're all trying to get on benefits. Fuck Maggie Thatcher for selling off the council houses.

gruez: >According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again.None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.

MidnightRider39: I thought the main value of juniors was that you grow them into seniors, not really the random scripts they write?

bdangubic: the best way I found to deal with non-believers is to have claude run code reviews on their own work. I’ll point it to an older commit and get like 3-page markdown file :) works really, really well.on one-shotting 3 minute prompt in 30 minutes though, software is a living organism and early gains can (and often result) in later pains. I do not use this type of argument as it relates to AI as the follow-up as the organism spreads its wings to production seldom makes its way to HN (if this 30 minute one-shot results in a huge security breach I doubt you would be back here with a follow-up, you will quietly handle it…)

belorn: You can get it to generate a 3-page markdown file for any random code, or its own code it just generated. If requested it will produce a seemingly plausible looking review with recommendations and possible issues.How impressed someone get from that will depend on the recipient.

MrScruff: I think it's not that difficult to see why a technology that will likely trigger widespread unemployment during a cost of living crisis, an arms race with China, along with all the alignment concerns, might not be hugely popular with the public.Maybe I'd be a bit more optimistic if someone could explain a realistic economic scenario for how we're going to transition into our utopian abundant future without a depression or a revolution.

linsomniac: Agreed, this article seems to be dancing around the point: WHY are the Gen Z hating AI? We have a political ruling class that is all too willing to throw everyone under the bus if they aren't living up to some expectation, and the political class is being driven by an economic ruling class that largely seems to have the same opinion.Gen Z would likely have a very different opinion if their basic living necessities were available to them.

apparent: If people need to be retained for many years, is the solution to give a bunch of stock that vests over many years? It would be interesting if such incentives (the need to hang onto talent that has been incubated for many years) could bring about a return to one-company careers.

andrekandre: > This AI rollout has been fundamentally rushed and fucked from the very beginning fake it till you make it has been modus operandi for tech for almost as long as i've been alive... i feel like this is the apotheosis of this kind of thinking... > Nope, it’s just “ModelGPClaude can make mistakes! Better be careful!” "use at your own risk" and "no guarantees warranted or expressed" is basically in every single eula from tech as well... its not a new trend sadly...

2pEXgD0fZ5cF: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.

gerdesj: Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly.At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware.I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!

CobrastanJorji: That was the second iteration of that. Most of the programmers were women until the mid-70s when the nerdy men kicked the women out.

rconti: It doesn't help that AI "thought leaders" can't articulate a vision by which our lives will improve rather than be made worse.It looks like:1. They take billions in investment2. They spend trillions3. They and their investors profit in the quadrillions from all the "labor saving"4. ???5. Everyone's needs are met.

scottyah: Random people cure cancer for their dog, every business can vibe code an app to make their operations more efficient, anyone can launch a business with 10% of the effort it used to take.The AI companies are only capturing like 5% of the value produced with this tech right now.

andrekandre: > Random people cure cancer for their dog this not a serious comment

neuronic: I work with LLMs extensively and daily and they are very useful. BUT dear god, absolutely nothing about them is intelligent.If you work at the edge of context you know what I mean. Even within context, if the system was truly intelligent, the way that Euclid was intelligent, why do I need /superpowers and 50 cycles to get a certain implementation right?Why is the AI not one-shotting obscure but simple business logic cases with optimal code? Whoops pattern never seen before! There is no thought to it, zero. The LLM is just shotgunning token prediction and context management until something sticks. The amount of complexity you get out of language is certainly fascinating and surprising at times but it's not intelligence - maybe part of it?Sell it as skills or whatever, but all you do every day is fancy ways of context management to guardrail the token predictor algorithm into predicting the tokens that you want.

pesus: The kids are smarter than most people give them credit for. They see their future being destroyed in real time, and AI is only accelerating it and largely being celebrated/promoted/used by the same people currently destroying their future. To them, there are few benefits beyond being able to cheat on their homework, and an enormous amount of downsides.I think it's only a matter of time before we see some more serious, organized opposition to AI (and perhaps even the internet and other technologies) by these young people.

grvdrm: > The kids are smarter than most people give them credit forWhen they aren't consumed by TikTok?

ikr678: For some kids, they see their parents get themselves in a mountain of college debt, work for 50 years and struggle to afford necessities, and decide maybe trying to be a streamer/tiktokker is worth a gamble and could set them up for life instead.

confidantlake: "Opening" doesn't mean anything. An actual job where someone is working and is being paid a salary means something.

dboreham: Not a universal view: Claude has added all the fun back into my job.

kakacik: ... but a very common one. There are always exceptions to every rule

alamortsubite: The opposite happened to me. I asked Gemini about a type of Vietnamese dance called "nhảy sạp" and it returned a good sounding summary along with a video it claimed to explain the dance and how it worked. The video was from the Knowledge Academy and titled, "What is SAP?"

vrganj: AI is a religious icon for capitalist ideologues.A silicon savior to finally free capital from the dependence on labor with all its pesky demands like sick leave or a living wage.You can see this in the literal deification going on in VC circles. AGI is the capitalist version of the Second Coming, God coming down to earth to redeem them by finally solving the contradictions in their world view.Unfortunately for them and fortunately for the rest of us, it's not all they hope it to be.

jiggawatts: I've been on this ride about three or four times over decades. Every new major wave of technology takes a surprisingly long time to be adopted, despite advantages that seem obvious to the evangelists.I had the exact same experience with, for example, rolling out fully virtualized infrastructure (VMware ESXi) when that was a new concept.The resistance was just incredible!"That's not secure!" was the most common push-back, despite all evidence being that VM-level isolation combined with VLANs was much better isolation than huge consolidated servers running dozens of apps."It's slower!" was another common complaint, pointing at the 20% overheads that were the norm at the time (before CPU hardware offload features such as nested page tables). Sure, sure, in benchmarks, but in practice putting a small VM on a big host meant that it inherited the fast network and fibre adapters and hence could burst far above the performance you'd get from a low end "pizza box" with a pair of mechanical drives in a RAID10.I see the same kind of naive, uninformed push-back against AI. And that's from people that are at least aware of it. I regularly talk to developers that have never even heard of tools like Codex, Gemini CLI, or whatever! This just hasn't percolated through the wider industry to the level that it has in Silicon Valley.Speaking of security, the scenarios are oddly similar. Sure, prompt injection is a thing, but modern LLMs are vastly "more secure" in a certain sense than traditional solutions.Consider Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy engines. Most use nothing more than simple regular expression patterns looking for things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc... Similarly, there are policy engines that look for swearwords, internal project code names being sent to third-parties, etc...All of those are trivially bypassed even by accident! Simply screenshot a spreadsheet and attach the PNG. Swear at the customer in a language other than English. Put spaces in between the characters in each s w e a r word. Whatever.None of those tricks work against a modern AI. Even if you very carefully phrase a hurtful statement while avoiding the banned word list, the AI will know that's hurtful and flag it. Even if you use an obscure language. Even if you embed it into a meme picture. It doesn't matter, it'll flag it!This is a true step change in capability.It'll take a while for people to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole way there.

suttontom: Would you trust an LLM to recognize a credit card number more reliably than a regular expression can?

mcmcmc: Is that data useful at all? Indeed postings are a poor proxy for how many people actually get hired. One of the major problems we have is that employment statistics are largely just estimates, and don’t reflect reality on the ground. Factor in the Trump admin firing most of the BLS and other agencies for not giving him the numbers he wants, and there really is no reliable data.

confidantlake: Complete crap.

grvdrm: Makes sense. I think it’s hard to argue against someone that uses the platform and others as an example of entrepreneurial pursuits. Not “all social media is bad” when to use different lens types.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r: “I’ll take a CEO’s very calculated word for something if it supports my existing worldview” is intellectually dishonest.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r: Do not with a straight face act like pre-COVID hiring levels were a Good Thing. They weren’t. They were a symptom of a broken economy that you personally happened to pretty directly benefit from.

andai: Pretty simple: The centaur of big-tech/government will pay people not to eat them. (i.e. UBI)The incentives are, how you say, aligned.The deeper issue I see is the psychological crisis for a species who believes it doesn't deserve to live if it isn't performing economically valuable activity, entering a world where it is unprofitable for it to be employed. (If I were the AI, I'd come up with some kind of fake jobs to keep the humans sane.)

woeirua: UBI ain’t gonna be enough for most white collar types to maintain their current lifestyles.

underlipton: This would have been a great revelation for decision-makers across the economy to have had about 20 years ago. Instead, they took every opportunity to turn the job market into the Hunger Games. Congrats to the people who survived the Cornucopia; the rest of us have been bleeding out for well over a decade.

archagon: Many engineers want nothing more than to eventually become managers. So this is not surprising. But your job is not what it was before.

crubier: Blame your engineering culture not AI if metrics such as Github stats, number of nitpick reviews and token usage is what is used to judge one's performance.In a sane engineering culture, actual customer-visible impact is what is measured, and AI is just a tool to improve that metric, but to improve it massively.

jiggawatts: You're not forced to use only an LLM for data loss prevention! You can combine it with regex. Heck, you can feed the output of the regex matches to the LLM and have use it as extra "context"!Similarly, I was just flipping through the SQL Server 2025 docs on vector indexes. One of their demos was a "hybrid" search that combined exact text match with semantic vector embedding proximity match.

andrekandre: > But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly. this is a nice anecdote but i think the real issue is the forcing and kpi-nization of llms top-down for nearly everythingthere are still code-quality issues, prompting issues for long-running tasks, some things are just faster and more deterministic with normal code generators or just find-and-replace etcpeople are annoyed at the force-feeding of llms/ai into everything even when its not neededsomethings can be one-shotted and some things cant, and that is fine and perfectly normal but execs don't like that because its not the new hotness

crubier: > somethings can be one-shotted and some things cantTrue but my point is that people vastly underestimate what is one-shottable.In my experience, 80% of the times an average "non-believer" SW engineer with 7 years experience says something is not one-shottable, I, with my 15 years of experience, think it is fact one-shottable. And 20% of the time, I do verify that by one-shotting it on my free time.

bambu: OpenAI spook over here

hibikir: It's not that juniors are replaceable, but that hiring them is a high variance move. Few, if any, know whether a candidate is just memorizing leetcode and is going to be a dud, costing you effort before they get a PIP, or you are hiring a very talented individual that will be contributing in 2 weeks . With seniors, you risk less, just because the track record makes the very worst candidates unlikely.

archagon: I think it's much better for society for companies to overhire than underhire, especially when they can easily afford it.

spoonyvoid7: This is an idealistic view and makes hiring seem like charity.There will always be steep corrections when they overhire driven by economic cycles or otherwise (and we're living through an otherwise).

archagon: Thing is, the companies doing these layoffs rarely actually end up losing money from overhiring. They’re still profitable. Just not profitable enough for the people on top.That’s a bit perverse.

mixdup: That's the problem, they can't afford it

archagon: They can afford it. They just want to make even more profit.

vor_: > But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.

triceratops: You might have better luck in suburbia, growing vegetables in your yard, trading with neighbors, and taking turns patrolling at night than trying to rough it in the wild.Haven't we learned anything from The Walking Dead?

noobermin: Covid was six years ago man. Don't insult people's intelligence.

Wissenschafter: This website is literally unrecognizable from 10 years ago. I don't even know where to go now. /r/accelerate seems to be the only place with people who aren't blinded by some kind of emotional bias, plain stubbornness, or straight up stupidity.

vor_: You've been complaining about Hacker News for years.

vor_: When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages.As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.

spprashant: I don't think the disconnect is very surprising to the "insiders".Your Dario's and Sam's know exactly what they are doing. They know it's going to cause a lot of job displacement, even if the technology isn't perfect. They are trying to get the C-suite elite hyped up about it, and the hyperscalers are along for the ride as well. There's so much money to be made.They could not care less about what joe schmoe on the street thinks about it.

ThrowawayR2: [delayed]

Wissenschafter: The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age.I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.

elzbardico: Funny, I was supposed to be the expert in my company, but I was run over by the demo folks, while I was uselessly preaching about evaluation, safeguards, guardrails, observability.

snicky: God, those self-indulging posts on LI are the worst. Sometimes it feels like half of the world's compute is wasted on that.

glaslong: Yes I believe we're quickly approaching crypto territory, where distributed ledgers certainly have their valuable use cases, but the overwhelming _mindshare_ is active scamming and/or monkey jpegs.There needs to be a concerted focus on real value for end users and less "yeah the terminator will take your job and raise your kids in your absence"

an0malous: Yeah but the other guy says his AI is going to cure cancer and mine minerals on asteroids. Who do you think the investors are going to fund?

jarjoura: This is 10000% OpenAI's fault.In 2022 the world was open arms, welcoming AI advancements.However, since 2022, OpenAI and all of its original founding researchers, had their dramatic fallout, and began screaming in public saying crazy people things like "the end is coming."Why did they insist on force launching ChatGPT? Google at the time refused to launch their own version (it was their own research that gave birth to LLMs) based chat because they knew all of the negative outcomes and unreliability of it all was just a poor product experience.Instead of launch quietly like DALL-E and keep it fun and experiemental, nope, they threw it up online and moved full-steam ahead."THE END IS COMING" Sam Altman said. "AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOBS WITHIN 5 YEARS" Dario said. "AGI IS ALMOST HERE" Elon Musk said.The disconnect is because these specific men, making those specific bold crazy person claims, with zealous cult following employees (including many of us here in this forum), kept marching ahead. Not only that, no one asked the rest of the world if they even wanted this technology EVERYWHERE.This technology could have been so cool if it were given the breathing room to find usecases for it. Natural Language programming has been tried for a half a century, and it finally arrives.Yet, it's so tainted by all the crazy person speak, and doomsday messaging, it's also thrown out there in such a haphazard way that have burned so many bridges, this technology is truely toxic. The fact that Gen-A and Gen-Z now have to waste brain power speculating if something is AI generated, is such a waste, but here we are. Welcome to the shit storm that was entirely made by those men.

Wissenschafter: " But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer."Get better rituals. PEBCAK.

Wissenschafter: https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-homeAnyone here who is currently 'underwhelmed'; please get through all 10 steps here and then say the same thing.This is just the beginning. I seriously can't believe this place turned into neo-boomerism ideology on tech. I honestly don't get it, just makes me think everyone here talking about being seniors and architecture and blah blah; don't actually know shit, and aren't actually good at what they do.

adithyassekhar: I want to agree with you but when was this ever true?

MidnightRider39: It was true when I started to work in this industry ~8 years ago. But of course YMMV especially depending on country and company

baxtr: What about karpathy though?

elzbardico: Wasn't Karpathy the guy who used to work for tesla and that tried to convince everyone that you only need cameras for self-driving and that by 2025 there wouldn't be anymore cars without self-driving capabilities to sell?

moregrist: Whether or not the CEOs' statements are true, they affect public opinion.You have CEOs claiming that AI is driving layoffs alongside CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI talking about the end of white collar work. All this is then amplified by tech journalists like Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. The biggest public proponents of AI keep telling people that it will take their jobs.What comes after the end of jobs? Who knows. Sam Altman occasionlly making vague statements about curing cancer. There are vague hand-waving notions of a Star Trek utopia.But to be honest it feels more like a Cyberpunk future, where the Altmans and Musks get to live cancer-free and the rest of us eek out an existence without jobs or any prospect for a better life. Or maybe it looks more like Star Trek, but we're all red shirts.Can you blame people for hating this?

Spooky23: Anything Musk or Altman say is just about raising money. Nothing they say can be taken at face value. There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.The better question to ask is what happens after the end of OpenAI/Tesla/etc? AI may take your job away, but not because of robots replicating your labor, just good old-fashioned economic collapse.

noosphr: If you consider what assemblers and compilers do programming, sure.But men didn't kick them out, technology did. Von Numan famously forbid the Eniac from ever being used for assembly when you had a perfectly cheap secretary pool to do the assembly by hand.Low creativity repetitive work requiring great attention to detail is what the early female programmers did and what was automated first.If we ever get deterministic AI the same will happen up the chain. I'm not holding my breath for the current generation of models, or the upcoming ones I've seen in papers.

elzbardico: It seems like you get personally offended by people using their critical reasoning abilities.I know a folk who did a PhD in the area, and work at one of those frontier labs as a researcher, and privately he is as sceptical as the most "stubborn" HN denizen you mention.Unbounded enthusiasm for AI without any reservations is something that can only be born out of minds utterly deprived of imagination and creativity.

HaZeust: The plutocracy is forgetting that a working and productive populace - with fair wages and representation - is their end of the deal for disproportionally benefitting from the fruits of labor from others; and directly prevents violence against the status quo. See: The top articles in the last 3 days.

AlexandrB: Totally right! The folks who were very recently telling us we were all going to be trading NFTs in the metaverse are the clear eyed optimists not motivated by anything but rational consideration for the truth.

jjulius: tl;dr - "I will dismiss this because of the time I've been spending in a pro-AI bubble".

Wissenschafter: I never needed to be in a pro-AI bubble to dismiss bullshit; I wrote my capstone Philosophy paper on AI and Existentialism back in 2014.I am dismissing the neo-luddites because they are stupid and wrong, not because I am in a pro-AI bubble.

keeda: Not really managers, I would put the new role more in the senior engineer / architect category. Those still have to deal with deeply technical things like design, architecture, problem decomposition, research, domain expertise, code review, collaborating with technical peers -- all of which (people) managers don't typically do.If you ever wanted to climb the senior technical ladder, this is now the quickest way to experience it. Except instead of other people you get to work with agents which, while a very different experience, requires largely the same skills.So yes, your job is not what it was before, but with career growth it typically was not anyway.

booleandilemma: [delayed]

elzbardico: Or more likely you don't have the knowledge and the skills they do. They are judging things in a level that you don't have any idea it exists.

Wissenschafter: Finding people on HN that think NFTs are a joke and don't understand their utility, mind blowing.This place is fucking dead.

grebc: Levels 2,3,4,5 all say coming soon.Did you have AI Agent summarise this for you?

Wissenschafter: Funny how it says that, yet I finished the whole thing.Maybe you should try reading a bit more.https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5...That is the completed instructions for the fifth level, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually read more and find the rest of the steps on their own.I spent some time chatting with Google engineer who put this together, Ayo Adedeji, at UCLA's SAIRS conference.

pibaker: I have noticed similar sentiments among some teenagers. It's not a universal sentiment but those who hate AIs really hate them with a passion.In the meanwhile there is a rising tide of feel good AI content targeted at old people on Facebook. My mother has been sharing with me many "funny videos" that are very obviously AI generated. She evidently does not care, and according what I hear from others she is far from the only old person who gets sucked into "slop." I hesitate to use this word but it captures the feeling too well for me to pass it up.I don't have data but I sense there is an inverse correlation between age and disgust towards AI generated content.

JumpCrisscross: > a realistic economic scenario for how we're going to transition into our utopian abundant futureOne aspect almost certainly has to be data centers being run as utilities. That forces transparency, resists monopolization and gives public commissions a say in e.g. expansion.

notnullorvoid: Hell no, the current state of centralized AI is bad enough, socializing it won't make it better.We need to let the AI as a service businesses fail.

JumpCrisscross: But in the meantime you prefer privately-controlled monopsony datacenters?

notnullorvoid: Yes I'd much rather big investment firms waste their money instead of government.

pibaker: I actually feel the opposite. I don't think people from outside CS will have that much interest into the very basics of AI because there is usually a huge gap between "this is how back propagation works" to any AI model that is remotely useful. And if you are interested in the fundamentals themselves you would probably be majoring CS anyway.A course on how to use existing AI tools will be pointless, but if there is anything I know about college students is they love taking easy courses for easy credits.

eloisius: You might be surprised by how many of them are aware of the harms of social media, while acknowledging that it’s impossible not to engage with it. It’s not their fault we built the toxic slot machine world for them that we have. And besides, I’m pretty sure my boomer parents spend about as much time scrolling slop on Facebook as kids do on TikTok.

largbae: Well we can easily see that the "abundance" people are wrong(for example everyone can't have a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, no matter how capable the robots become).An alternative possibility that inequality is about to explode between those who profit from AI/robotic labor and those displaced by it.

eloisius: Ah, but you can have a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park in a gen AI paradise, and that’s just as good.

sph: ChatGPT has been around for 4 years at this point. Not very long, but I’ve heard of the ‘imagine what it’ll do in one year’ spiel quite a few times by now.

partyficial: How long was the internet around before it became essential for every day life?

sph: No and it has been said already elsewhere in this thread: decision makers are not entirely rational, they might fire entire departments even if the AI revolution isn’t here quite yet

xg15: Almost sounds like the "walking ghost phase" during radiation poisoning...https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1975oj/whats_ha...

sph: Fantastic analogy. I dare say it applies to our current economy as well.

bit1993: "Make something investors want" is the name of the game now and the reason for the disconnect.

sph: Always has been since the ZIRP era. The ‘make something people want’ phrase was coined by a famous Silicon Valley investor. I heard he runs a popular forum.

sph: Also 5. Not what the world needs.Automation can free humanity from toil, but automation in the hand of billionaires that does the work of white collar, educated people in a period of economic and cultural turmoil, with no plan to employ them all than hoping UBI descends from heaven unto the world, is the recipe for societal disaster on a massive scale.

CobrastanJorji: That's underselling their role. One of those ladies doing the assembling for Von Numan was Grace Hopper, who then used that expertise to develop the first compilers.

Meanwhile, 56% of AI experts said they believed AI would have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years.

munificent: > Meanwhile, 56% of AI experts said they believed AI would have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years.Imagine choosing to be an expert in something that you think is a coin flip away from making the world worse.

johnfn: Isn't this an extremely reasonable thing to do? To take an extreme example, consider people working on gain-of-function virology research.

losvedir: I don't think you can just invert it like that. There's probably a significant percentage of respondents who think it might not have much impact.

archagon: I can't imagine most people working on gain-of-function virology expect it to make the world worse.