Futureism- Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort, Says Their Time Is Over

[CentralMass]

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-thanks-programmers-over
"Thousands of tech workers are being laid off, from Atlassian slashing 1,600 jobs to Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block firing almost half its workforce. Meta’s latest round of layoffs is rumored to affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company.

A common thread among these devastating cuts is industry leaders touting the capabilities of AI, claiming that the tech has made the workers who find themselves on the chopping block redundant. Whether those claims align with reality, or whether the layoffs are actually the result of corporate bloat and pandemic-era overhiring, is a topic of much debate.
In a Tuesday tweet that can only be described as twisting the knife, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that “I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character.”

“It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took,” he added. “Thank you for getting us to this point.”

It’s a particularly tone-deaf and borderline vindictive missive that suggests Altman has long given up on the idea of fairly compensating content creators and coders for their work. It’s no secret that OpenAI’s AI models were trained on data that was shamelessly scraped from the web, a controversial practice that has triggered a litany of copyright infringement lawsuits.

Altman’s remarks drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
The news comes as OpenAI desperately tries to keep up with the competition in an increasingly crowded enterprise and code-facing AI software landscape. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that executives had started ringing the alarm bells, calling for the company to double down on coding and enterprise customers"
“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.”

Others called him a “f***ing psychopath” and “scum.”

“Nothing says ‘you’re being replaced’ quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,” one user wrote.

[2naSalit]

1. What if they...

Got enough of them together to hack and disrupt their replacements?

[struggle4progress]

2. It's like the fuckin tulip mania of the 1630's

[multigraincracker]

13. Bingo.

Crypto coins.

[edhopper]

3. AI can only copy what has been done

It cannot innovate.

[Bluetus]

6. The layoffs ARE about AI. These companies have all pissed away hundreds of millions of dollars

chasing after AI, but none of them have figured out how to make any money with AI yet. They can't get that money back, so their only options are to cut payrolls or else report huge losses.

And the META cutbacks are particularly big. But that is because Zuckerberg's hallucination about turning everybody's lives into VR went nowhere. Nobody wants that shit, so 5 years and billions of dollars later, he is shutting it down.

On the AI front, there are now hundreds of open source LLMs that a person can download for free. They don't have to use Altman's AI or Musk's AI. It is hard to compete with free.

The companies that will survive this AI hysteria are the ones who don't try to swallow the whole Internet into their LLM, but instead curate their model to do something particularly well. For example, we have seen dozens of occasions where lawyers have submitted AI-generated briefs that have all sorts of garbage, cases that never existed. That's because the LLMs simply vacuumed up every bit of garbage they could find on the Internet. A company that trains their LLM with tightly curated, high-quality legal resources (like an updated version of LEXIS) will probably be successful. Likewise for a LLM that aims to offer good medical advice. Or engineering advice. Or tax advice. Or whatever..

Evidently Altman, Musk and Zuck never thought about these things.

[Bluetus]

16. Just to illustrate that point about curated LLMs

Lexis/Nexis has always been a leader in information resources for the legal profession. They offer Lexis+ AI, but are positioning it as an "assistant", trying to avoid blame when dipshit lawyers just hit the button and produce a brief without any proofreading. This is a very conservative position, but they are highly respected in the legal field, so that may work out.
https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-plus.page

There are newcomers who are trying to position as "Lawyer-in-a-box". If they have done a good job of curation, then they might make take a big bite out of Lexis' share.

https://gc.ai
https://strongsuit.com/solutions/legal-research-ai/
and a bunch of others:
Thomson Reuters CoCounsel
MyCase
Harvey AI
Diligen
etc etc etc

These things are growing like weeds, but who knows what the quality is? A law firm can trash their reputation in a hurry if they use an AI product that buts out garbage.

But the point is, none of this business is going to Altman, Musk or any of the other crooks who are taking investors for billions of dollars to build vast data centers that may end up mostly unnecessary.

[CentralMass]

9. I think that if an individual has some knowledge or expertise and asks the right questions that it can lead

to innovation. The amount of information and the speed at which it can tap it is impressive. I've working on a couple electronics projects as a hobby and since I had Google's Gemini linked to the Google search I've been using it. I am working with some small single board computers running Linux and coding mostly in Python. If I want to install some software package or ask it if what is available to perform a specific task etc it offers suggestions and gives detailed instructions on how to install it. etc. I ask it specific intelligent questions and as much as I hate to admit it but it help me develop the code and hardware much faster than I would have done on my own. I think if I chose to pursue it it could help productize one of the ideas and sell it. It actually offers suggestions on how to expand upon my ideas etc.
I think at some level AI was responsible for me getting pushed into retirement a little earlier than I had planned. The notion that one or two programmers using AI can replace 30 is pretty accurate in my opinion. It is clear that it is already eliminating thousands of jobs.

[edhopper]

15. The difference is

you are asking AI to write the code for your innovation. But it will not develop new codes, or new ways to code.
I had this discussion with a graphic designer who said companies will use AI to design new logos and such. But all AI can do is look at existing logos and make variations. It cannot come up with a new style.

I am being overly simplistic here.

[struggle4progress]

12. +!

[tinrobot]

17. It's a lot more nuanced than that.

But the bottom line is that AI is absolutely taking jobs. Those jobs will probably not be coming back for humans.

[hunter]

4. When circumstances are forcing you to lay off people...

... just say AI is taking over their work.

No need to make investors nervous.

[JHB]

5. A year from now: they'll be hiring people back to debug AI slop code.

[CentralMass]

10. I'm not sure about that. From what I can tell, it is getting better and better. With a knowledgeable programmer working

with it, it can learn and adapt very quickly based on their input and selections.

[haele]

7. It seems to be a bit soft, but I suspect it's more gristle and chewy.

Probably less meat, more rancid fat.
When the majority can no longer afford to buy food, they will eat the selfish Rich.

I've been interested in the late Bronze Age collapse - Archeologist Eric Cline has an interesting thesis that our civilization is facing a similar collapse; They were facing climate change, poor leadership, internal strife, economic corruption, stratified class systems, breakdowns in supply and trade infrastructure...
If we ignore climate change, if we ignore the average working people, if we ignore the health of our environment and our Infrastructure, if we obsess over petty hierarchy and outer show of wealth and power, one small series of catastrophies - like high unemployment along with a long drought/famine which leads to large numbers of migrants and fights over resources to survive.
And the lack of the local governments to adapt and shore up the ability to maintain resilience within their populations.
It will be different, but we are heading for a collapse, or we are looking at a transformation.

[sakabatou]

8. Meanwhile, companies are hiring human programmers to fix all the shit AI does

There's one AI I enjoy, but she was built to entertain people, alongside her developer/programmer/creator.

[0rganism]

11. Yeah, who's going to organize your fantastic new army of agentic AI? Gonna do it all yourself, Sam?

A long-time friend regularly uses a team of AIs to help him refactor and update programs; he sets up prompts to clearly and carefully identify their roles and responsibilities so they don't get to hallucinate all over the projects. He succeeds because he's an experienced programmer and project lead who's familiar with techniques for getting good results with projects, and he can use AI to do in a week what would have taken him months without it. But he understands well how to do these things plus he has considerable skills and talent.

Getting quality results with agentic AI requires considerable planning and test design (unit & project level). Not just anyone can do these things, my friend has skills and insight. Amazon recently laid him off, so he's on his own, free-lancing and working at a startup.

These huge tech companies may have just shot themselves in their collective feet by letting so much creativity, skill, and talent loose in what's already a tough job-finding environment. There's a lot less to gain by switching employers or career paths for financial safety, so they'll be doing the things they already know how to do well, in the wild. If humans survive the next 2 years, we could see a computing renaissance comparable to the '90s. The companies pimping their foundation models complete with cumbersome data centers are going to find themselves competing against an ocean of skilled independent users running their own AIs locally in smaller shops and a dwindling subscription base overall. Will they make AI invent their new ideas for them? Cos that's really not AI's strong suite.

These companies are making exactly the wrong move by shrinking their workforce instead of enabling higher productivity from that workforce and actually using AIs to do amazing things in the service of humanity. Instead, they'll face an army of tiny competitors putting forth swarms of incredibly useful applications and devices, slurping up patents, pulling investment capital -- not quite what they bargained for, eh?

[IbogaProject]

14. The models are learning from him

So his prompts are being injested by the models. If he is auditing output with another model it is learning too. Anerica's prosperity is near collapse. Our treasury has admitted the federal government is now insolvent. Taco insulted Japan during a crucial meeting where she came to get concessions to continue to only buy oil in Dollar denomated transactions. They have now decided to by Yuan based contracts, which will increase the chance that Iran will let those ships past. Japan is by far the largest holder of American Treasuries. If and when interest rates increase those securties will loose value. There will be a run on our debt and it will set off a Nineteenth century style depression. Rubio already said this not-war's outcome will be Iran tolling for passage across the straight. Our AI is cost constrained, China has been releasing stuff opensource I see huge disruptions coming. Throw in a climate break with runaway methane releases and then major earthquakes and one or more mega volcanos and things could move into catastrophe. I think this AI bubble is just a symprom of a system bluffing its way through recent financial quarters.