[hshdhdhj4444]

I strongly believe AI will drive efficiency. I’m less certain about whether that’s already happening or will happen in the future and when in the future.

However, I’ve already seen a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go.

Efficiency is output/input. The input is easy to measure. It’s cost and in this particular case salaries.

Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily.

So you cut the easily measurable inputs and inflate the easily manipulable output.

One could imagine the reverse would also be possible, where you maintain inputs but inflate the output, but there is an asymmetry where investors will reward you for cutting costs even if there are no efficiency advantages that makes cutting inputs more sellable than inflating outputs.

[pipo234]

> Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily.

First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average.

Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials.

Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Oracle is mediocre because it could be.

That's probably where you'll end up if you're a company where that's an option.

No one was ever going to switch databases to a better DB as long as:

1) they did the bare minimum to ensure no alternative existed where switching made any sense.

2) they never charged too much where it made sense to switch thinking along the lines these businesses made decisions.

It's like the resource curse played out on a company scale.

If you have no incentive to get better, you won't.

[oxag3n]

> Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially?

Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB.

Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc.

Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.

[pipo234]

Sad, but true.

And if they had it their way, Oracle would have similarly strangled every last customer of Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, etc. to squeeze out every last dollar.

And then make it look like they're innovating.

[DebtDeflation]

> a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go

That seems like an insane gamble to me. Lay off all the workers now and hope that AI can deliver on its promise to replace them some time in the indeterminate future.

[boringg]

I think we wont know until the true costs for ai are revealed. Right now were still in the vc growth above all things part of the cost curve. It will get worse quality as revenue demands increase (as all products suffer).

It will be another dependency for all companies to bear. Hopefully significant gains for humanity, tbd

[gopher_space]

… and in the background the next hiring wave slowly builds into a tsunami.

Sometimes I feel like the only person left who remembers the pre-dotcom vibe. OpenClaw etc. should have set off alarms that we are back in the land of the Quick and the Dead.

[k32k]

Yeah OpenClaw for me was the alarm sounding... not just because of the project itself, but the fight between Altman and Zuck to pursue him. It shows a fundamental lack of product sensibility/visionary thinking within OAI and Meta. Having lots of dosh clearly doesn't solve that problem in-house.

[AnimalMuppet]

You don't even have to inflate the output. You just cut the dead weight, which reduces input without harming the output.