So $150 million to train the two models?

Seems like a reasonable capital cost if it worked and was legal.

Charge subscriptions of $10,000 year to keep something up to date. You wouldn't need a profound amount of customers to cover it.

There are many possibilities before workers withdraw their labour.
The union should advise their members about what they can aim to achieve and what legal ramifications exist.
They should be easier to deal with compared to 5000 ignorant people, although not as easy as 5000 people who sign any contract without asking questions.
While the employers can pay a retainer to HR experts, 5000 people need to pool their resources to get similar quality of legal advice. This should be the basic understanding, rather than "unions = strikes".

AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

I'm skeptical this company is doing it properly (or even has their own models), but I think you could do this with two models.

The documenter is trained on all available data.

The coder is trained but without any copy left code.

Clean room reverse engineering actually seems like a place where AI will be extremely capable.

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

Eh, people who complain about the left being authoritarian are usually thinking in terms of 'freedom to oppress'. Nothing is more important to them then being able to use power to punch down and they clutch pearls when the left makes it a little harder.

Sort of. It's a diverse crew yes, but the engineering resources, time and consumption of fuel to achieve ?What?????? is not my kind of woke.

With open source you can document a lot more than with closed source.

Generally if the implementors have seen the original then it's not clean room.

It seems to me if one AI writes documentation and then another that never saw the code in question writes code it'd be legit.

How is that illegal?

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

That's what campaign donations get you, if they are large enough.

This is why congress occasionally bullies the big tech companies. We all think they might want to have some regulation or to punish them. Oh sweetie... they're saying "nice company you have there... would be a shame if something happened to it..."