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by hakfoo
14 days ago
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You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand. A lot of the current AI business is FOMO and vanity metrics. Nobody really wants to acknowledge the support tickets where the first three responses are the customer cursing because they didn't appreciate being handed off to a chatbot, or the reworks, or the compliance/policy/privacy concerns, or the internal friction and brand damage it's causing. Right now, a lot of that is being dazzled away by how "cheap" the alternative is, since it's built on an unsustainable cost base. It's like someone opened a "restaurant" where the food was actually supplied by making a bazillion new DoorDash accounts to claim promotional credits and having them drop the food at the "kitchen". During the initial phase, the customers will forgive that the burger was cold because it was $1.79. Once the funny money runs out and services start shuttering or pricing for actual profitability, people are going to ask about actual quality and return on investment. There will be a demand rollback. Even if you can do it cheaper with an open-model running on fire-sale hardware, we probably don't need 500 "chatbot listens and transcribes your meeting" services that weren't that much better than dictation software running locally on a Pentium III. We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence. We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds. |
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That was what I alluded to in the last paragraph. Semiconductor industry and everything associated with it will get screwed hard.
But in case you mean a demand collapse from the entire economy because even more people get laid off... yes, agreed. Dotcom bubble bust, here we come, full steam ahead.
> We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence.
I'd pay good money for an AI that could actually ingest Confluence. In literally every organization that does not have a dedicated team to manage it on all aspects, it inevitably devolves into a tire fire. Unfortunately there's no easy way (yet?) to "after-train" a model - what I'd envision here is a nightly batch job that adds another layer to the AI model from all the information in the Confluence so searches don't incur a giant cost for the AI agent to process everything.
> We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.
Oh we do. The stonk markets don't like it when companies employ people. People need office space, they need associated services (say, IT, fruit baskets and other amenities), they need wages, and in everywhere but the US you can't just go and fire them on a whim. The less people an organization has, the better the company looks on an investor relations press release. That is why the large AI organizations are investing untold billions of dollars... the race to be the first one that can fully replace a class of human employment. Say an SWE makes 130k/y on average - fire 100 of the 150 you have, that's 13 million dollars. That can buy you a looooot of tokens or hardware.