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genAi provides a much bigger opportunity for scammers but I don't see many Ai cottage industries coming

Hence, the half-hearted effort to discuss a Basic Income structure. They know they are trying to destroy peoples' lives, our economy, & our society. But anyone who questions them or the hack-handed way they work are treated as "Luddites"

It’s very cool. It certainly adds a ton of value to the world that people can do this for themselves. In theory it adds a bunch of value to GDP creates a big consumer surplus. But it doesn’t translate to money in anyone’s pockets.

For every guy who has "made it" from this new paradigm, there's 10+ who lost their job. After I lost my job of 3 years in devops after 8 years in support, I became a helpdesk manager and when I hired for a *temp help desk entry* I got at least 10 apps from former devs with 15+ years in the field.

The disconnect I think is that the form is now amenable to being completed so much faster than the substance. The amount of “I vibed up this cool player comparison dashboard” “Ok what data are you using for the comps?” “Oh that’s just dummy data for the demo, not my job for the rest” I’ve seen…

This was almost the @atticusgf.bsky.social story and then, miraculously, was not

Based on talking to friends in various industries, that's entirely true, but moreover, management seems willing to literally stake the existence of their company on a technology they don't understand, so they won't be "left out". Insisting this stuff be integrated with everything.

In the long wake of the Great Recession, the classic tiresome, pat answer to people who couldn’t find a decent job was “learn to code.” Now, do we have a similarily oversimplified yet sorta-plausible answer for people who no longer can find stable employment? I don’t think we do. That’s unsettling.

Most companies are just using GenAI to slash headcount, penny counting short term saving, without realizing they're accumulating tech debts at exponential rate and increasingly shipping half-baked products. Or maybe management know but don't care, since they all have short-timer mindset.

Why pay people for Robot use? The point of the Robot is it replaces people!

I see a lot of software getting better, but I haven’t seen anything I want to give *my* money to. Anything I want I can just build myself or find someone giving it away for free.

It’s more the mythology of it all.

(they're probably not doing great, the scammer's life is often subsistence work, but scamming has very clearly gotten easier!)

And then what do we do in 20 years when those people are retiring and no one has been trained because there were no entry-level jobs for a generation? Good times, nice thoughts.

marketing is much harder task than development in like 99% of cases and that’s not gonna change bc you can’t vibe marketing success

IMO the opportunity has shifted from a national one with VC backing to a regional one finding small to medium businesses that have processes to improve.

I got my first ever job as a Agent Orchestration Engineer. Setting aside the money which has massively reduced the precarity of my unsafe living situation, this job has allowed me to work with kind, compassionate, intelligent, insightful, amazing people who make me a better person by working with me

It certainly makes my job easier as a teacher, all my bs metawork tasks, leveling texts to different lexile levels, creating multiple versions of tests, the loads of narrative materials I need for gamification It's like having a C level teaching assistant which was never going to happen otherwise

And I have co-workers that successfully use it for science. Do they make money? No. But they do make lil shiny apps and stuff so other people can visualize their data more easily.

Nope lol who has money to spend on the things I'm making? Not a soul because they've all been laid off by aforementioned companies

Even for huge corporations, are they actually saving more money than they spend on the tokens? They don't seem to be doing anything that would bring in billions in new revenue with AI.

I know a few people who have startups with like....let's say less than 10? employees and a vibe-coded app or service. Any more than that and they're having to pay real engineers to fix it. This stuff seems fine for home or personal use but the minute you need customer data it's like 🤷‍♀️

It's been really nice for skilled tradesman in the construction industry. Their pay rates have increased $20 per hour in many cases. I'm being pedantic here, of course. These guys are "cashing in" in as much as they can buy a house. So at least there's that.

Indeed

Anyway, I like to think I'm still keeping up, but will be working for stuff I care about going forward. Will figure out the rest... eventually.

Speaking of hyper wealth and investing, both venture capital and private equity seem profoundly limited in their imaginations about interesting things to invest in in this new world

The buildout of fiber for the commercialization of the Internet that went bust in the dot-com wipeout, left behind excess capacity that laid the seeds for the substitution of cable TV with streamed content. What will innovators do with excess GPU-centric compute?

Some of us made our internet fortunes the old fashioned way: on the Diablo 3 auction house.

It feels really gross to listen to

If everyone can build shovels, then the money isn’t in shovels anymore

Also interesting to see someone like Cory Doctorow point out that the big AI layoffs tech companies did were probably more just "typical" layoffs, in that there was a huge overhiring that happened during Covid and now this needed to happen. (signed, person in video game industry)

"We managed to fire some junior developers" doesn't seem like it adds up to the 100+ billion in revenue the AI companies need to pay their obligations.

definitely, was thinking about this earlier today after reading amodei's recent thing

There were (not-even-AI) related layoffs at scale at most major tech companies, and I really do think these layoffs were barely or not even targeted at all. I don't want to anecdata thing but I get regular pings for a linkedin profile I haven't updated in ten years, which I regarded as a sign.

The way for a normal person to make money from AI appears to be becoming a slop merchant on YT etc.