Mastodawn

Who works at a (tech) company that's not delirious about AI?

https://lemmy.world/post/44782779

Who works at a (tech) company that's not delirious about AI? - Lemmy.World

I see a lot of discussion here about over-hyped AI, and then I see the huge AI bubble at my workplace, in news, in PR statements, etc. Are there folks who work at companies – especially interested in those in tech – that have a reasonable handle on AI’s practical uses and its limitations? Where I work, there’s: - a dashboard of AI usage by team and individual, which will definitely not affect performance review in any way - a mandate to use one AI tool last month, and this month a new one to abandon that tool and adopt a different one - quarterly goals where almost every one has some amount of “with AI” in it - letters from the CEO asking which teams are using AI to implement features from ticket descriptions, or (inspired by the news) use flocks of agents, asking for positives without mention of asking for negatives - a team creating a review pipeline for AI-generated output in our product, planning to review the quality of the output… using AI - teammates are writing code and designs and sending them for review without ensuring functionality or pruning irrelevant portions, despite a statement that everyone is responsible for reviewing AI output Is all the resistance to overuse of AI grassroots and is the pressure for rampant adoption uniform among executives/investors? Or are some companies or verticals not drinking the koolaid?

Not a tech company, but a petroleum exploration company, which involves a lot of tech. The petroleum industry in general is extremely conservative in terms of tech, in that older and proven technologies tend to stick around. For example, I often write data to magnetic tape.

However, the industry doesn’t shy away from newer technologies where it does make sense. There is some AI at play, but it is limited in scope, and only deployed where it makes sense. Most of it is done on the processing side, so I don’t know much about it, but I get the impression it’s used in a similar manner to those headlines you see from time about AI predicting rectal cancer 99% correctly. Interpreting seismic survey data involves some geophysical wizardry that I’ve never quite understood - I just make sure the production servers offshore work.

seems like large scale data analysis and mathematics are the strong points of AI if I understand the tools correctly, less ambiguity and room for hallucinations.

Do people agree?

Yeah, I think so. When you have a huge dataset with low signal to noise, AI tools seem pretty great.

CodexArcanum Mar 26

“Artificial Intelligence” is a very broad term that, within computer science, covers a range of techniques and tools that broadly cover the study of “human-like behavior and impersonation.” Before the current fad of calling LLMs “AI”, the term was most often used in video games and covered techniques for pathfinding, decision making, reacting, seeming to speak, etc. Before that, pre-90s basically, “AI” had already undergone a few boom and bust cycles of hype with chess playing machines and, as always, chat bots.

In many fields, many of these same techniques and their descendants are being used to model and simulate and predict. All of them have trade-offs and limitations, that’s what computer science is all about.

I do remember talking to chatbots on AIM back in the day, so I think I had a leg up on other people in already understanding that the technology has existed for decades, which made me more cautious about the claims.

They made such a big leap so quickly, though. I remember even in 2018 thinking no bot would ever pass the Turing test.

Great point, they have come far, but my interactions have led me to believe they have come super far in faking it, not in actually understanding what is being done.

Maybe they have come further then I realize, but based on how easily they get tripped up on simple things and tie themselves into knots, the general models haven’t come too much further since.

For the size of data that oil exploration requires, tapes make lots of sense still.

They have higher density, and they are more shock proof. When you need to move masses of data round the world, writing it to tape, then sticking it on a plane is still the fastest way to move it (probably, may have changed I guess)

Yup, I 100% agree. Tapes are often viewed as obsolete, but there is no more cost-effective way storing data in the petabytes in a safer way than tape.

Hell, at work I have a few live storage clusters measured in petabytes, and being responsible for them can be pretty stressful at times. Data loss isn’t just bad, it is fucking terrifying when its data costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to collect.

I have yet to experience data loss, but I breathe a sigh of relief for every batch of data that has been confirmed written to tape. Because once it is, I know that it is safe and no longer my responsibility.

It’s written to two sets of tape at a time, both of which are read back to confirm data integrity, and once it is, that’s when I know that my live copy is officially not supposed to be a backup.

One set of tapes is stored on board in case something stupid happens with the other set during transport to a literal mountain for storage. There it is re-read and checksummed, confirming that the other set of tapes can be rewritten with the next dataset. (Yes every tape is written to twice).

@pageflight Small design company. We experiment with llms in different areas but so far there are marginal improvements and very little work-safe use cases. Totally not up to the hype.

ExtremeDullard Mar 26

My company is approaching AI like it’s been approaching anything for the mast 40 years: with extreme caution. It’s coming alright, but the engineers are carefully evaluating it for coding, and it certainly isn’t being rolled out recklessly.

I’m one of several die-hards who flat-out refuse to use it - not so much because it’s AI, but because it’s provided by an American company - and my choice is respected. Our CEO sees old-timers like me as the fallback is AI ends up shitting the company’s bed.

Have you checked if Minstrel can generate code? When I’m back at keyboard I’m going to see if it has, an intellij plug in.

starlinguk Mar 26

I work at a renowned tech company that frequently reminds its employees that AI frequently hallucinates.

Meanwhile we’re just waiting until Hegseth accidentally turns a Bethesda-area Target into a smoking crater because he was drunk-Grokking and fucks up ordering an airstrike to cheer himself up after the mainstream librul media hurt his fee-fees.

Like blowing up a girls school or worse like 9/11 the sequel John has planned?

Boomer Humor Doomergod Mar 26

Every time I hear stories like this I’m glad I work at a startup where everyone’s too busy to worry about shit like AI usage dashboards

kersploosh Mar 26

Medical device industry here. Some of our software and electrical engineers are using Claude as a sounding board for ideas, or as a starting point to find possible paths forward when they get stuck with a hard problem. Nobody trusts the model to give an accurate answer. At the end of the day, all work committed to a project is done by real humans with the normal review processes.

Management is cautiously looking at potential uses for AI in our products, but there is a healthy dose of skepticism all around. If your machine is displaying diagnostic data to a doctor there cannot be any question as to whether the machine is hallucinating.

mnemonicmonkeys Mar 27

Honestly, this is probably the best use case for LLM’s.

Tom Scott did something recent 2-3 years ago where he fed a bunch of his video titles into an LLM and had it come up 100 new names with a similar style. Most of the output sucked, a handful he had already done, and a few more sounded plausible but didn’t exist. But he got 8-10 that he could have turned into actual videos (doing all the work himself) and even did so for a couple.

The hallucination of AI can be used to help a human artist or programmer, designer, scientist, etc.) make a new connection they couldn’t before, and they can then use that new connection to implement their new idea. But LLM’s generally suck for anything more than that, and over-reliance on them slowly erodes people’s ability to think and create over time

For my pov at my work, there’s definitely that disconnect between what the executives are saying and the ones lower down the chain who are actually tasked to implement and support those new technologies.

There’s a company-wide mandate to use AI, so naturally everyone is trying to inject it into their projects. But the idea of putting AI into something is different from actually implementing it, and the latter is far more complicated with all the governance and security involved. And all these teams are escalating everything because of how long stuff takes to get reviewed and approved or how complicated it is for them (the non-tech people) to actually deploy it themselves. People think they can just deploy a local MCP server on their laptop, or deploy a cloud compute on their own and run it from there. Deploying something in production infrastructure is not as simple as creating a new compute and installing whatever you want.

LifeInMultipleChoice Mar 26

We have AI built into some tools I believe, but I have never been told I had to use them. The truth is they don’t work all the time for every situation and the client is more worried about user data accidentally getting scooped up and spending time warning us to never enter any users information anywere, even so much as notating a user saying they have a limitation that explains why we performed a task in a non standard fashion is a complete not happening.

So if someone said, “I am vision impaired,” someone reading our notes would probably be wondering… Why the f didn’t they just do a,b,c it would have been much easier. But they are worried if those notes get integrated into something the AI gobbles up in the future, they don’t want to get sued for that user information to somehow be linked to them. As that could be considered medical data I guess.

The funny part is, if an AI does use that data for learning now, it may start trying to instruct or perform tasks based off of highly inefficient solutions designed to assist a specific disability

Did your CEO have a “Fireside Chat” about how great AI is?

I run a tech company that doesn’t use any AI:

sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/

We make an email service, and we have a hard stance against any AI in our product:

sciactive.com/2026/…/our-stance-on-ai-in-email/

Human Contribution Policy – SciActive Inc

gwl [he/him]Mar 27

Y’all hiring? I’m tired of my place being like “AI IS BEST, YOU SHOULD ALL USE IT”

Not yet, but hopefully soon. :)

gwl [he/him]Mar 27

If you’re willing to hire a fully remote Brit lemme know in a DM

angelmountain Mar 26

I work as a developer for a smaller (~50 people) tech company and most devs use AI on a daily basis, but everyone is free to choose what, how and how much (until our tokens run out 😬, but we do have a decent budget).

We find we have to learn how to use this new, powerful (and sometimes also very annoying) tool properly. PR have been sent for review without properly being checked by the “author”, bosses have raves about AI but also reality checked when they saw the bills they have to pay and we will probably make more mistakes as well as productivity boosts in the future. We will see where this all ends up.

For now I just enjoy having this companion when I need it to guide me through new fields I would have not dared to tread before, which is fun. Worst case I’ll be building houses instead of web applications in a few years. Working outside instead of in a stuffy office. Could be worse.

I am employed by a tiny software dev shop that develops a few apps used in education. No AI at all, unless I proactively choose to and pay for it out of my own pocket.

I run a small (5-employees) tech firm. We ignored AI for the first couple of years. Last year we started paying the basic Cursor subscription for our employees. We encouraged them to try it out a bit for a couple of weeks however they saw fit to evaluate if they found it useful for their workflows but we said we didn’t mind at all if they ended up deciding to adopt it long term or not. I started as the only coder in the company and I review every PR so I am extremely familiar with all our codebase and I haven’t found it very useful personally but the people that joined more recently say it can be useful to point them towards parts of the code they are not familiar with yet. Right now each one uses it as a tool freely however they prefer and I don’t usually ask them about it, same way I don’t ask how often they use the “find and replace” function in VS Code.

That could potentially backfire on you:

sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Reasonin…

You could be including copyrighted code and not complying with its license.

You don’t own the copyrights to AI generated code.

The bugs and vulnerabilities AIs introduce are much harder to spot than in human authored code.

Your team might not understand the code that they’re submitting.

Etc.

Human Contribution Policy – SciActive Inc

Good luck proving that any given snippet was written by AI. That sounds like a total mess.

Tar_Alcaran Mar 26

Not in tech, but LLMs have been great for my safety and compliance consulting business.

Before LLMs, I would spend quite a bit of my regular workday on creating safety plans and coming up with systems to improve conditions and ensure compliance.

Now, with the power of LLMs, management can generate those plans themselves. So instead of me spending my normal workday on it, I get to bill my emergency rate when the hallucinated slop gets rejected and they need something at the last minute.

I can honestly say LLMs have made me thousands of euros.

urge to downvote rising… rising…

…calm

rising.. rising.. falling….. rising

AI slop clean up is the new highest paying job.

CanadaPlus Mar 27

And probably a lot of meh paying ones too, eventually, when the bubble bursts and people realise they’ll never actually be able to trust LLMs.

oh, got it! going to found a startup for AI slop cleanup. we could use LLM to automate…

Job security

You had me in the first half

I sometimes have to get involved with writing safety protocols. Not my favourite task, but I’ve always been super nervous about using AI to assist because it’s such a specific, rigid and important thing, that needs to be expressed as simply as possible, all of which AI is bad at. Care to share how you use it?

DaPorkchop_ [any]Mar 27

They don’t, they said their thing is charging emergency rates to bail out other idiots who do use it and trust the output blindly.

That’s on me for not reading. Thanks. I gotta learn that pre coffee commenting should be double checked.

PetteriPano Mar 26

I work at a startup that classifies and extracts data from often very fuzzy sources.

We are encouraged to use agents for development. We use models in our services for things like pinpointing Coca-Cola* cans in YouTube videos. We offer our customers LLMs to discover how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are presented on YouTube.

*Soda scenario imaginary. I don’t want to dox my niche, but it’s similar enough problems that we solve.

I just use AI to fill in the stupid forms HR make us do and don’t verify its output because I don’t respect it. Kills 2 birds with 1 stone.

Please God, give me an AI agent that can watch the video and do quiz for the yearly mandatory HR training

I am pretty good at speedrunning elearning

NannerBanner Mar 27

My company has started using AI voices/figures in the videos. Like they weren’t bad enough already…

AI watching AI to AI some slop to satisfy the AI the HR is using. Ugh.

mnemonicmonkeys Mar 27

My company has some mandatory training videos they redid with AI. I don’t get it, none of the actual content was any different from last year’s video. They literally paid someone to redo the video with AI instead of just reuse the previous video.

It’s kinda the same thing as Coke’s AI Christmas commercials this past year. They could have run their old, classic commercials like Hershey’s kisses does every year. Instead they paid to make new commercials with and pissed a bunch of people off

NannerBanner 6d ago

I think in my case there may have been some royalties or appearance fees that they could avoid? I just noticed it after a few seconds of the little person breathing weirdly compared to the speech patterns and mouth movement, and then could barely focus on the actual information presented (not that there was much; I could have read a transcript of the bloody thing in a tenth of the time and retained the info better).

My wife’s at a major video game company that, oddly enough, hasn’t gone crazy over AI. Since she’s in localization, she uses DeepL which has some machine learning, but not really an LLM and LLMs aren’t really being pushed on her since it’s a downgrade. From what I can tell, their dev team is also just keeping things human made, although they’re in Japan so that might contribute.

They aren’t saints, they did try to union bust a few years back, but their stance on AI, as well as creativity first mentality and recent pay raise guarantees and whatnot, kinda show they’re paying attention.

spankinspinach Mar 27

Government - great at research, terrible at generation. If you ask it to find and summarise laws and regulation, does a great job, quotes info, can even generate reasonable overviews with a handhold.

Ask it to generate anything that isn’t directly quoted in a specific doc and it goes WILD. Even with some solid training in prompt engineering, it makes you work for focused outputs unless you give it clear everything (data, prompt, target template, revision and scoring process). But once the workflow has been solidly validated a few times I’d rate it “usable”.

greybeard Mar 27

Software company here. There’s a strong external push for us to shove AI into every corner of our UI, but so far we’ve largely kept it out.

The one place we are using it is a pretty strong use-case (essentially sentiment analysis). We’ve had a chatbot in dev for a while, but are struggling to find a valid usecase for it. I think most of us are hoping the AI craze dies down and suddenly our lack of AI is no longer a marketing point our competitors use against us.

BrickEater Mar 27

Advertise your lack of AI it will draw customers who are sick of the slop

The one I work at went “all in” about a month ago. I started noticing a dramatic increase in garbage/nonsensical code at the end of last week. I didn’t make the connection between the two until Tuesday.

I’ve got a manager that usually listens and they asked me to try it and take notes because they know I’ll tell them the truth. … I’ve got a lot of examples prepped for our next meeting.

The hard part is definitively blaming LLMs because I don’t have time to track down every single commit and analyze it for LLM usage but there’s 100% a correlation.

pageflight Mar 27

Yeah, I wish git blame could highlight the lines written by Claude/Codex. Usually when I ask my colleagues ‘so did you use AI much for this one’ they will say yes. But it makes code review that much harder, especially when they then take my PR comments and feed them to the LLM, so I’m coding by playing telephone with a bot.

mnemonicmonkeys Mar 27

Unfortunately they’ll never do that because they’re owned by Microslop and they can’t allow any marring of AI’s reputation

Butterpaderp Mar 27

We have offshore devs that I think found the copilot button in vscode recently…seeing lots of em dashes in code review today 🫠

ExLisper Mar 27

I work at a small software company. There is a push to use AI but I would say in a reasonable way. It does speed up some tasks but no one is vibe codding and pushing things without proper review. So far no one is tracking the usage or pushing us to use it more. It’s just a new tool we’re encouraged to be familiar with and use reasonably.

gwl [he/him]Mar 27

who works at a tech company that’s not delicious about AI?

OP

I work at Tech Company that loves AI

people with poor reading comprehension replying to this thread

I required an outlet to bitch regardless of my ability to reed werds gud.

I’m sure I’m not the only one : D

gwl [he/him]Mar 27

Honestly, fair