“OMG you guys, we can save so much money! I can’t wait to fire a bunch of people! Quick, drop everything and (run an expensive experiment with this | retool our entire data org for it(!) | throw a cartoon bag of cash at some shady company promising us anything we ask for)! OMG, I’m so excited for this I think I’ll just start the layoffs now, because how can it fail?”
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The above is happening all over the place right now, and has been for some months. I’m paraphrasing for effect and conciseness, but not being unfair. I’ve seen a couple of these up-close already, and I’m not even trying to find them, nor in segments of the industry most likely to encounter them.
It’d be very funny if it weren’t screwing up a bunch of folks’ lives.
[edit] oh and for bigger orgs there’s a real “we can’t be left behind!” fear driving it. For VC ones, they’re desperate to put “AI” in their decks for further rounds or acquisition talks. It’s wild, and very little of it has anything to do with producing real value. It’s often harming productivity. It’s all some very Dr Strangelove sort of stuff.
I just got back from the AWS re:Invent conference and it was full of AI stuff, most of which didn't make much sense. The biggest announcement was "Amazon Q" [0], the Amazon general purpose chatbot. They hooked it up to the AWS console and I've not found a single reason to use it. I tried a couple of questions about a problem that I was having and it didn't provide even a modicum of help. So far, I see GAI as a complete failure.
“OMG you guys, we can save so much money! I can’t wait to fire a bunch of people! Quick, drop everything and (run an expensive experiment with this | retool our entire data org for it(!) | throw a cartoon bag of cash at some shady company promising us anything we ask for)! OMG, I’m so excited for this I think I’ll just start the layoffs now, because how can it fail?”
- - - - -
The above is happening all over the place right now, and has been for some months. I’m paraphrasing for effect and conciseness, but not being unfair. I’ve seen a couple of these up-close already, and I’m not even trying to find them, nor in segments of the industry most likely to encounter them.
It’d be very funny if it weren’t screwing up a bunch of folks’ lives.
[edit] oh and for bigger orgs there’s a real “we can’t be left behind!” fear driving it. For VC ones, they’re desperate to put “AI” in their decks for further rounds or acquisition talks. It’s wild, and very little of it has anything to do with producing real value. It’s often harming productivity. It’s all some very Dr Strangelove sort of stuff.