Mastodawn

I've had a chance to use Opus 4.6 a bit, not just for coding tasks, but for other typical corporate management activities too, like reading and writing policies, understanding bookkeeping, etc.

And I have some scary news. Sure it makes mistakes, but for a person treating it as an extended information processing tool instead of outsourcing thinking to it, not more so than your average junior developer, outsourcing partner, big four consultant below partner level. It just delivers results much, much faster.

It's not hard to imagine a world in which racking up a €1000 AI bill per day per person driving it isn't just considered normal, but cost effective.

We'll see exponential hunger for AI compute, in a world in which chip production scales linearly at best. And the implications for energy consumption are shocking.

We'll also see the market for junior developers dry up. And no one has an idea where new senior developers who actually can meaningfully manage AI dev work will come from.

We live in interesting times, and not in the best sense of this phrase.

Christian Vogel Feb 22

@ela i still do not see how this would work. How many senior developers, administrators or managers do you see letting the AI explain the balance sheets or write policies, so that a daily €1000 bill makes sense, per … (what sized?) company?

We are now talking about companies burning („investing“, into rapidly depreciating computers) around 500 billion €/$ per year (2027 projection), let’s say that stuff keeps running 5 years, then still 8.3 million of these€1k users are needed to pay the bills.

Christian Vogel Feb 22

@ela ah, sorry… 1k/day! Ok, then make that 400‘000 people… still, I’m not convinced… 🤷‍♂️

Gabriel Adrian Samfira Feb 22

@ela I have a feeling that companies that have the foresight to keep hiring juniors as they always have, will have a huge advantage over companies that adopt a philosophy similar to the one in Jurassic park 1, where that one underpaid guy was maintaining the entire system and ended up stealing company secrets.

The flip side is that the AI bubble will burst and we are left with the useful bits of AI. Right now it feels like we've just discovered the barbeque and we're using it to bake cake.

prom™️Feb 22

@ela I could take a similar perspective, running around in IT at the moment - but I still don't, because my intuition won't follow. I don't have answers - let me ask questions:

* How much AI hunger can actually be satisfied?
* How fast will AI input become scarce?
* What's the societal reaction?
* Wouldn't there be emergent economic reactions?
* Are we sure that real-economic effects are accounted for?
* It could boost the real-economy?
* If AI input becomes valuable, it becomes a product?

@promovicz Have you tried buying RAM or SSD lately? Scarcity has already hit, and it will only be getting worse. So far, economic effects have largely been on the stock market, but apparently investors see a lot of industries losing their base for existence. Just look at the dip e.g. LexisNexis took.

@ela @promovicz If we get rid of all the jobs and opportunities, who will be the customers for the industry?

@Nfoonf @promovicz Well, according to billionaire ethics (longtermism, effective altruism, that kind of stuff), most people will die and that's a good thing?

@ela @promovicz I think they have a plan if people refuse to die, don’t they.

@ela @promovicz you feel this conversation sipping into the mainstream with conservatives in Germany discussing euthanasia as a an alternative to a healthcare system for chronically ill in backrooms already. but the recent talk about unemployment and disability being a lifestyle choice is already preparing the discourse space

prom™️Feb 22

@Nfoonf @ela A plan? It's fascism. It has every plan. That's why it's bad.

prom™️Feb 22

@ela I understand some of that. Maybe, the main reason I don't panic is that I'm trying to make choices. My work is IT infrastructure-related. We see a compensated impact, I believe (about economics, not RAM prices)? I'm still wondering how this will play out in Europe, on a social and societal level.

No disagreement on "interesting times".

@ela I fully agree.

Markus Vervier 👾Feb 22

@ela Seems like scary and interesting/fascinating often go hand in hand when it comes to technology...For the training of juniors I can only imagine that some skills and education will just become obsolete, others will just be lost (someone compared the Linux kernel to the pyramids where future scientists will be puzzled how someone could build them without modern tools).. On the upside, the snakeoil seems to be hit much harder for now!

Henryk Plötz Feb 23

@ela So ... Butlerian Jihad then?

@henryk Might be a mixture. Haven't checked on guillotine prices lately.

Henryk Plötz Feb 23

@ela Guillotines: 12.5% off!

@henryk @ela might be less for fat people. your mileage may vary

@ela Two vague thoughts: 1) I don’t think we can accurately predict the resource and energy use of this tech yet, other than “it’ll be more than it was before it emerged” (which, duh). The Silicon Valley trajectory is obviously to just throw more resources - GPUs, RAM, energy, money - at it because they can and because bigger and more powerful is the name of the game in that world, but there are other developmental paths being explored that work with and around serious resource constraints.

@ela and 2) “We'll also see the market for junior developers dry up.” - this is going to be more complex, too. Yes, where juniors devs were merely treated as cheap labor when mediocre quality was enough, this’ll be true, but there are environments where that was never the reason to hire junior devs, and it’s not clear to me that those would suddenly stop hiring juniors. It’s maybe more that “demand for vast numbers of code monkeys” is over? Which is obviously its own upheaval, but.

Oliver D. Reithmaier Feb 23

@ela so you are saying that AI could replace corporate management? 😏

@odr_k4tana Corporate management *and* Big Four. 💅

Oliver D. Reithmaier Feb 23

@ela that's a good idea we should popularize

fellmoon 🏴Feb 25

@ela jap. I started using opus 4.5 last week at $dayjob, switched to 4.6 on monday, when it was made available to us... I'm not able to audit it's code properly, because it's a lot better then me at coding. But it writes single use scripts for single use analyses jobs in less then 10% of the time I'd need. My employer just made annulment contract offerings to 5% the Tech Workforce, people who the company thinks are not retrainable to modern work+ai.

I'm not in a position to refuse LLM usage for ideology-reasons and the way I think I will heavily benefit from this tooling - as much as I despite the associated problems.

For the first time in my life I'm seriously thinking about what job outside of tech I'll have to build over the next decade, because I doubt there will be a place for me after that.

@fellmoon It's not just IT, it's all knowledge worker jobs. And I think the answer is in the meta game, someone still needs to orchestrate.

fellmoon 🏴Feb 26

@ela *somewhat sad nod* jap, question is how many orchestrators does one need or want and what does it do to the rest of society. Basically capitalist-accelerators ultimate love-child...

@fellmoon Basically, learn how to grow food. And try to grab a piece of land that will support that despite *wild gesture pointing at everything*

@ela I’m curious how you used it for policy work. Via chat, with cowork or something different?

@lsanoj Claude Code in CLI.