“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels.”
So the people that understood it best were sceptical, and this didn’t give him pause.
Can someone explain to me why all these empty suits dick ride LLMs so hard?
Because they try the tools, realize that their job is pretty much covered by LLMs and think it’s the same for everyone.
They’re easily conned and they love yes men.
Technical staff were skeptical because they actually know what AI can and can’t do reliably in production environments - it’s good at generating content but terrible at logical reasoning and mission-critical tasks that require consistancy.
it’s good at generating content but terrible at logical reasoning and mission-critical tasks that require consistency.
Thank goodness nobody is crusading to have AI take over medicine.
So it’s the CEO they should replace.
The bullshitters were quick to adopt the bullshit factory.
Can someone explain to me why all these empty suits dick ride LLMs so hard?
$$$$$$$
AIs are cheaper than humans.
Not really. Because they don’t work and then they have to hire more humans which is more expensive than just keeping them on for the 6 months it’ll take for the CEOs to realise that.
Cheaper NOW, when OpenAI operates at huge loss
“Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff…”
Tell me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does without telling me you’re completely out of touch with your company and what it does. FFS how is this guy the CEO? Oh, he’s one of the founders? Brilliant.
Vaughan says he didn’t want to force anyone. “You can’t compel people to change, especially if they don’t believe.”
But he did. Change or be fired, basically.
“You multiply people…give people the ability to multiply themselves and do things at a pace,” he said, touting the company’s ability to build new customer-ready products in as little as four days, an unthinkable timeline in the old regime.
Ooh I bet some nefarious hacker types will be salivating at the incredibly rushed code base that is probably a spaghetti mess and as insecure as fuck.
Vaughan disclosed that the company, which he said is in the nine-figure revenue range, finished 2024 at “near 75% Ebitda”—all while completing a major acquisition, Khoros.
I had to look up EBITDA - some interesting points to consider when you look at this metric he used:
A negative EBITDA indicates that a business has fundamental problems with profitability. A positive EBITDA, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the business generates cash. This is because the cash generation of a business depends on capital expenditures (needed to replace assets that have broken down), taxes, interest and movements in working capital as well as on EBITDA.
While being a useful metric, one should not rely on EBITDA alone when assessing the performance of a company. The biggest criticism of using EBITDA as a measure to assess company performance is that it ignores the need for capital expenditures in its assessment.Hmmm… I’m no accountant (I leave that to my actual accountant), but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?
I’m no accountant but surely if they were being profitable it would sound better to say something like “We’ve remained profitable throughout and our earnings per quarter are on par if not greater than before.”?
no, because profitability isn’t the key figure they are interested in. it’s growth. i recently got fired because of disappointing growth; e.g. the increase in profitability was not as large as they expected. which means they still made more money than last year.
this is why expenditures get relegated to “externality” status; because otherwise projections would make it look like a company can not grow infinitely large, and surely that’s not true
Today, I ran into a bug. We’re being encouraged to use AI more so I asked copilot why it failed. I asked without really looking at the code. I tried multiple times and all AI could say was ‘yep it shouldn’t do that’ but didn’t tell me why. So, gave up on copilot and looked at the code. It took me less than a minute to find the problem.
It was a switch statement and the case statement had (not real values) what basically reads as ’ variable’ == ‘caseA’ or ‘caseB’. Which will return true… Which is the bug. Like I’m stripping a bunch of stuff away but co-pilot couldn’t figure out that the case statement was bad.
AI is quickly becoming the biggest red flag. Fast slop, is still slop.
That CEO:
Just like an AI. Instead of learning from mistakes, he repeates them, and denies any wrongdoing.
“You’re Absolutely right!”
“It enabled us to shit out products in 4 days.”
Glad they incorporated such thorough testing in their process.
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
Imagine that.
“The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.”
https://youtu.be/KHJbSvidohg#t=13s
I see the same push where I work and I cannot get a good answer to the most basic question:
“Why?”
“We want more people using AI.”
“Why?”
“. . .”
“The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.”
[sigh] Because of course they were. Those people couldn’t find their own arses even if they used both hands.
Same reason as forcing people back into the office even though it’s the solution to a number of serious issues affecting society:
Investors/banks have tons of money in these markets and are incentivizing/forces companies to adopt these policies to prop up the markets, whether it is in their interest or not.
Oh, yeah, we have that too… we want people in the office because collaboration! Synergy! etc. etc.
“How does that work if you want everyone using AI?”
“. . .”
Oooo hot take time: I’d rather work in an office again than be forced to use LLMs.
I’d rather use the AI than go back to the office. The AI doesn’t care if I’m wearing any pants.
CEO of enterprise-software powerhouse IgniteTech.
Can someone tell me what they do? They don’t have a Wikipedia Article and their website is mostly AI slop.
They throw buzzwords at venture capitalists in hopes of one day selling out.
After grilling their silly LLM for a while, I was able to squeeze out what that company really is all about. They don’t really make anything. They just buy miscellaneous software companies, and turn those apps into subscription based cloud cancer. Enterprise software meets maximum enshittification, yeah baby!
I’ve never heard of this jackass nor his shitty software. I feel privileged.
Has ai ever disagreed with anyone? That’s probably why it’s so popular with rich ‘people’
Granted, my ideas are all baller as fuck. But still…
Those people don’t hear no often…
One guy is like “Friday is forced AI ‘training’ day” (as if one must ‘train’ to write prompts. Using natural language rather than a unique language or syntax and trusting the computer to make a comprehensible and accurate output is the whole point), and then he has the gall to claim “turns out people hate learning!”
Writing prompts is definitely a thing users must learn to do properly, to get the right results.
But anyways, any company that fires people in favor of AI is only digging their own grave anyways. I personally believe AI (of which LLM is only a small part) can definitely serve as an automation tool that can increase output. Great companies will use this tech to give their employees more time to work on things that are meaningful to the company, that the AI cannot do. For instance, a company could free up some time of highly skilled engineers to help a couple hours a week on the most complicated service desk issues to increase customer satisfaction. Or the LLM can create more time for sales to have meetings with customers, instead of doing admin they already hate, etc… Use it to grow, not to shrink.
Besides, if your company can be completely run by AI anyways, then congratulations, you just reached the end goal of open sourcing your company. Because why the heck won’t anyone be able to replicate that quickly?
Besides, if your company can be completely run by AI anyways, then congratulations, you just reached the end goal of open sourcing your company. Because why the heck won’t anyone be able to replicate that quickly?
Yeah that’s the thing these tech bros never seem to understand. It’s obviously not going to work because if it did work it would have already been done by somebody else, it’s called the Law Of Mediocrity. It’s simply requires the base assumption that you are not the smartest person in the universe, which of course is where it all falls down, because they always assume they are.
As a paid, captive squirrel, focusing on spinning my workout wheel and getting my nuts at the end of the day, I hate that AI is mostly a (very expensive) solution in search of a problem. I am being told “you must use AI, find a way to use it” but my AI successes are very few and mostly non-repeatable (my current AI use case is: “try it once for non-vital, not time-sensitive stuff, if at first you don’t succeed, just give up, if you succeed, you saved some time for more important stuff”).
If I try to think as a CEO or an entrepreneur, though, I sort of see where these people might be coming from. They see AI as the new “internet”, something that for good or bad is getting ingrained in everything we do and that will cause your company to go bankrupt for trying too hard to do things “the new way” but also to quickly fade to irrelevance if you keep doing things in the same way.
It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to say now “haha, Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for $50 Millions and now they are out of business”, but all these people who have seen it happen are seeing AI as the new disruptive technology that can spell great success or complete doom for their current businesses. All hype? Maybe. But if I was a CEO I’d be probably sweating too (and having a couple of VPs at my company wipe up the sweat with dollar bills)
The only difference between AI and NFTs is that the market believes in it.
There are use cases for AI. There are none for NFTs.
One use case is whenever you need to produce some inane bullshit that nobody is probably going to read anyway, but it’s still required for some reason. Like cover letters.
Now, you might argue that we should work towards a society where we don’t have to produce this inane bullshit that nobody’s going to read anyway, and I would agree with you. But as long as we’re here, we might as well offload this pointless labor onto a pointless labor-saving machine.
Kindly disagree. People actually read cover letters, and a cryptographically secured entry on a pubic ledger has some conceivable use.
That’s why I created “Poopchain, the only blockchain with millions of unique pictures of poop.
