“Don’t be left behind. I mean, if you see any kind of new tools in AI, any new projects by the big name, by OpenAI or Google, go and learn it. Get certifications, take classes that would make you in the front of the line when it comes to hiring,” he said.
You can smell the misguided desperation from the person quoted through the screen.
It’s a contest in tech right now who can signal the hardest that they’re “AI-first,” and Zuck continues to show his lack of imagination and independent thought by lighting 10% of the company on fire to make the most smoke in a valley already choking on its own smoldering fumes.
Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn’t stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It’s like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who’ve burnt more calories have probably done more work but it’s not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I’m going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I’m not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.
Yeah the thing that pro-ai zealots don’t get is that if they’re right and AI is the future, then being left behind is ultimately not up to you. The point of AI is to leave workers behind. Embracing it doesn’t do anything to save you, it just accelerates the end of your own job.
You can smell the misguided desperation from the person quoted through the screen.
They’re laying off 10% of the workforce and simultaneously rewarding employees who waste as many AI resources as possible, including the one employee who burned $1.4 million in tokens in one month.
It’s a contest in tech right now who can signal the hardest that they’re “AI-first,” and Zuck continues to show his lack of imagination and independent thought by lighting 10% of the company on fire to make the most smoke in a valley already choking on its own smoldering fumes.
Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn’t stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It’s like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who’ve burnt more calories have probably done more work but it’s not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I’m going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I’m not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.
Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.
Yeah the thing that pro-ai zealots don’t get is that if they’re right and AI is the future, then being left behind is ultimately not up to you. The point of AI is to leave workers behind. Embracing it doesn’t do anything to save you, it just accelerates the end of your own job.