Stock up on dry beans and rice. See if your parents have a spare room. Don’t buy anything expensive. This bubble is gonna hurt.
Though I'm more concerned about the effects of the current political climate, than the "AI" bubble popping. In the scenario of that going south, nothing will be normal for a long time.
I don't know if I'd call myself a booster or skeptic. I'm loosely speaking all in in the office, but what would I actually spend?
On the one hand, my - I dunno, thought leader-y hat would say, why wouldn't I spend 10k/head on them. These tools are amazing, they could double someone's output.
But they also are these like infinite toys that can do anything, and you can spend a lot of money trying all the things. And does that actually provide value. Actually provide like rubber hits the road monetary value on a per-head basis. If you're really focused and good, probably? But if you're not disciplined. You can spend a bunch of money on tokens, then spend a bunch of money on the new features / services in production, and spend a lot of your colleagues time cleaning up that mess.
And this is all human stuff. This is all assuming the LLM works relatively perfectly at interpreting what you're trying to do and doing it.
So like. Does it actually provide the benefit of X dollars per engineer per year? Because it wouldn't have to, it could in fact go the opposite.
If it really augments my output, sure, currently I just watch my tokens drop to 0 within 3-4 days of using it and then having to wait a month for them to reset because I wont pay for more parrot tokens. The output speeds up some small things but to my overall speeds its not noticeable a ton.
From the PwC survey:
> More than half (56%) say their company has seen neither higher revenues nor lower costs from AI, while only one in eight (12%) report both of these positive impacts.
So The Register article title is correct.
> It's a snowball effect that eventually builds bigger and bigger.
That's just wishful thinking based on zero evidence.
The hype train must go on, and I'm sure all employees are under strict NDAs, so we may never know.
verdverm•1h ago
I must admit the idea has a lot of appeal, because there are people seeing good ROIs, so it does not seem to be the tool as much as the tool user
bediger4000•1h ago
jbs789•1h ago
The company needs to have the right culture and ability to integrate leading technology, whatever it is.
thewebguyd•1h ago
That's, I'd argue, the majority of companies though, which still spells a problem for the AI bubble.
I've been a part of enough failed ERP implementation projects to know that there's actually very few enterprises out there that collectively have their shit together and are good at implementing technology.
If AI also can't solve that problem for them, it'll just join the long list of already existing boring enterprise tech that some successful companies use to great effect, and others ignore or fail to adopt, which isn't exactly a multi-trillion dollar industry to live up to the current hype.
svilen_dobrev•18m ago
in the times when Agile was still just a way of work (not a mantra), adopting it showed exactly the glaring troubles in the overall (human) pipeline. But it needed quite some time - like months of work - to really show.
This seems same thing, only much faster..
Actually making some parallels might be interesting.. agile was/is also touted as "the silver bullet"..
justapassenger•13m ago
And it's problem specific to software engineering. Any engineering deals with it - when you manufacture physical things, for example, tolerances, safety factors, etc, are all tools to deal with reality being messy.