Engineers avoiding its use and solving problems personally are playing the long game. They know that the current LLM tech will collapse - probably due to rising fees and the need to keep growing - and people will be ill-equipped to dig out from under the technical debt – a very real problem.
AI is not profitable and has no obvious path as of right now ow to become profitable.
The adoption we’ve seen from so many companies is based solely on the fact that AI is cheaper than salaries. But AI companies are currently running at a huge loss, and the price gauging is inevitable. AI will likely never be as economically viable for the average company in the future as it is right now.
The future of AI very much depends on it continuing to improve for the next decade at the same rate that it’s improved in the last 5 years. This doesn’t seem super likely given the fact that we got here by training AI on more and more data created by humans, and now that so much publicly accessible content is written by AI, it will be harder and harder to find new training data to improve AI in any meaningful way.
There are just so many big questions out there surrounding AI and it’s masters and biggest cheerleaders don’t have straight answers for them.
Considering the fact that there are open weight models that are pretty close™️ to frontier has me thinking otherwise. Yes I think the frontier companies will probably be face to face with collapse, but capable (and cheap) models already exist and will continue to improve. I think it’s much more likely that companies will simply run their own models (possibly custom agent harness as well) and have all the benefits they were looking for at a fraction of the cost. That being said I do think there will be a significant plateau of capabilities in the next year or so and leadership will realize these are just helpful tools and nothing more.
All that is to say, I don’t agree with your assertion that coders who are not using AI will have any sort of competitive advantage. In fact I think they’re hurting themselves in the long run. I think skeptical engineers who have a foot in both worlds are actually the best equipped for the future. Accelerate your workflow but not at the expense of quality/security.
Engineers avoiding its use and solving problems personally are playing the long game. They know that the current LLM tech will collapse - probably due to rising fees and the need to keep growing - and people will be ill-equipped to dig out from under the technical debt – a very real problem.
What makes you think it will collapse?
There are just so many big questions out there surrounding AI and it’s masters and biggest cheerleaders don’t have straight answers for them.
Considering the fact that there are open weight models that are pretty close™️ to frontier has me thinking otherwise. Yes I think the frontier companies will probably be face to face with collapse, but capable (and cheap) models already exist and will continue to improve. I think it’s much more likely that companies will simply run their own models (possibly custom agent harness as well) and have all the benefits they were looking for at a fraction of the cost. That being said I do think there will be a significant plateau of capabilities in the next year or so and leadership will realize these are just helpful tools and nothing more.
All that is to say, I don’t agree with your assertion that coders who are not using AI will have any sort of competitive advantage. In fact I think they’re hurting themselves in the long run. I think skeptical engineers who have a foot in both worlds are actually the best equipped for the future. Accelerate your workflow but not at the expense of quality/security.