You are right, forgive me if I sound glib. Redundancy is no joke and the impact is devastating.

I cant vouch for the reliability of this link ai lay offs , when the big employers are laying off 1000's that's speculative, and it can only be speculative given the speed it happened and the complexity and size of their operations. It is most likely natural downsizing for post pandemic drop in demand, dressed up as AI investment bandwagon, reducing cost to make profits look better and please investors. Short termism from big outfits that can afford to gamble.

It sounds like your example is a smaller leaner outfit, that got in early perhaps and the applications are obvious and relatively simple. I hope your workmates found better employment.

AI is very helpful for coding, but it needs shepherding, because it's fundamentally flawed, not knowing when it's wrong, not "knowing" at all, because an LLM is a helpful mimic, a clever talking parrot giving the illusion of intelligence.

Flawed is not the same as rubbish. But you need experienced dev to shepherd it . A long sighted outfit will still be hiring junior dev, because the senior devs shepherding AI will want to retire some day or move on.

I am impressed with AI for code snippets and search, for anything larger I see the biggest risk is when you'll need to debug someday and you just don't have that innate, instinctive feel for your code, because you didn't make it. And the same applies to extending it, adding features. Maybe you'll tell me they fixed that, but I doubt it when it comes down to integration, with other 3rd party systems and libraries, and humans giving bug reports and feels. The things that AI cant reach. The unknown unknowns, that anyone with experience comes across.

The double bind of AI is your colleagues lose jobs, and you'll work harder, being responsible for more and probably longer, because you can now with the cognitive support AI provides when your cognition starts to drop off with age.

Every time you use Big Tech AI, you are devaluing your skills, training the models and getting closer to being redundant altogether. And you are being asked to use it to increase your productivity and responsibility for the same pay. Improving the Big Tech models also benefits your competitors, they will get the value of your training and improving the models too, and vice versa. But, once your dependent on AI, the price will ratchet up, and you'll be locked in.

Using Big tech AI is a deal with the devil. You might win short term, long term you'll lose. The answer has to be roll your own LLMs or give up your competitive edge, independence and that superb American ideal, freedom.

There is a very small group of people that think that's incredible, the rest wont get it.

And even for you to get to that point required you to have a deep understanding of what you wanted to achieve, maybe years of experience to describe it.

Good luck to you, unless you are rolling your own LLM, every time you use these commercial LLMs you are devaluing your work towards redundancy and giving away your talent to people who are rich enough already.

The newbie your boss wont hire now, because they think you can produce more with AI, wont get the chance to learn as you did. When you come to retire succession is going to be harder, harder for you to retire after you've been working harder and longer than planned and missed any satisfaction of passing your skills and experience on to a junior colleague.

Granted that scenario may not be yours, if it were .. .. it would be really stupid to be dependent on Artificial Intelligence. Develop your own, or lose it. Brain is like muscle, it likes training.

Another story about AI is marketing.

Who cares about watermarking? An AI company conceding to watermarking to respond to slow legislation is like closing a tiny barn door after the T-Rex has bolted and run off with all your copyrights.

When we discuss these stories, express our interest, we're just helping the marketing, spread the bullshit, pump the stock, build data centres, and help Trumpy get a tiny little cheeto hardon. Ivana doesn't need that, she's been through enough already, just look at her eyes, the twin wells of bitter sorrow.

All be it in a very, very small way, calling BS on any AI story now or just ignoring them is a first step toward something approaching a rational discussion rather than the present insane funding frenzy. Granted it's like spitting at a juggernaut, but avalanches start with pebbles.

Watching news now and I am staggered how technically illiterate mainstream media is. No one seems to have noticed this tech hasn't delivered on a promise yet, what company has been transformed by AI, apart from the AI companies? Sure there have been speculative layoffs, I expect the only thing that has resulted in is removing some dead wood and leaving a few to work a lot harder.

It's got applications, hacking seems to be one of them. Great, lets use it to harden systems then, rather than oooh my tech's so scary you better buy my stock BS.

.. make yourself dependent on AI.

Let it think for you. Just do what it says, it is so much easier. Vote Billionaire, vote yourself poor! Vote for freedom from owning anything and renting it all!

You don't need powers of cognition, you don't need an opinion, we'll sell it to you. I don't know how you'll pay for that without a job, who knows? Maybe AI does, I don't really care, I'm RICH!

AI. It's like watching evolution take a leap backwards.

Can we stop promoting this crap.

You make a good point about the printing press.

You can also add every revolution and civil war, inspired by the printed political pamphlet.

However, it's nothing compared to the disruption caused by Social Media, I am in no doubt it started the 3rd world war we are now engaged in and is where it is being fought. It was very optimistic and arrogant of us to believe we could make everyone a publisher, give every maniac a megaphone and every bad actor a communication channel to incite unrest. Russia and China have already firewalled it, we should be doing the same.

Trump was made on social media, the Arab Spring, the Ukraine War, climate change denial, the populist right and left ...

What we are calling AI, a fallacious term, it's fake intelligence, evolved and marketed in Social Media and is being hyped in the same way as crypto. When we coined "AI dross" that feels like social rejection of AI over human to human communication, I can see that movement growing. AI gen content looks mass produced, cheap and artificial. Money will always pay for human service and handmade, perhaps because a robot sycophant is boring, soulless and the old wisdom, the worst thing you can get is everything you want. It's want that gives us purpose.

AI will do most damage when the bubble bursts, it wont be fatal. The damage it's doing now is hoovering up funding that could be put to better use. Hopefully there will be a lesson in there for capitalism and greed, it's essentially a short sighted dumb animal, evidently easy to fool.

If we're calling them pervert glasses, then that's very probably what they are.

If you want to wear them out in the street and covertly video people, you are a pervert.

Doesn't mean you are a sexual pervert , perversion means to "go the wrong way" or to do things that are "socially unacceptable" I think in this case we can say it's perverting social norms. Selfish nutters who bang on about personal freedom to use these will certainly forget their subject's freedom to be not filmed.

Applications for workplace for sure, in the street, see someone wearing these, they are a wrong un.

That said the only application I have seen for them so far, is pick up artists filming women and most of the comments here are about using them for pervy stuff. Occams razor suggests, pervert glasses. Given the target demographic is men, probably a bit techy and sweaty, socially awkward and almost certainly a bit odd for wanting to covertly film; if you want to look like a paedo get a pair of these and enjoy the punches in the face from the dads of daughters, your Darwin award is in the post.

If your doctrine is batter civilians into submission with artillery, a plague, engineered to target genetic markers in the ethnicity you don't like would be far more efficient. Or just take out fighting age males, make them sick enough to be combat ineffective.

There would be collateral damage, infections leak and mutate, it would be a horrendous, evil strategy, likely to backfire, unless you gamble developing a vaccine in parallel and a quarantine plan, or just don't mind sacrificing a few civilians.

Mother Russia appears to hate her own as much as her neighbours, she sounds capable. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.

I guess some people think America is worth saving from the NAZIs and are putting up a petty yet valiant resistance.

Whereas you appear to be a peasant. Tugging your forelock for your new Billionaire overlords.

Calling them Nazis is an insult to Nazis, this US administration is way to incompetent, greedy and corrupt to be as efficient as the Nazis. The Nazis would make strudel out of them. Who would follow Trump anywhere apart from his grave to check he was really dead? And maybe piss on the coffin. His wife would be first in the queue, imagine having to have that Orange blimp gurning over you with his angry mushroom.

A Trump 2.0, maybe Prince Barron Trump with the help from the tech bro weirdo cartel, could have a good crack at Fascism and find a final solution for all those lefty poor people who like sharing and caring for each other and the planet and other boring crap that isn't a rocket, sex robots, funny money, or Epstein Island.

Mine's a Tea, strong, white and one sugar. Make it snappy peasant.

Whereas Right wing fascist crap is great.

I hope the right don't get the world they wish for, they wont last long, it will be dog eat dog and most of them are scared little yappy dogs trying to talk tough, they'll be eaten day 1.

Or maybe they'll live long enough to see their sons turned into slaves of debt and rent and their daughters into sex workers and baby makers for the rich.

Sounds great. Enjoy.

Maybe its a relative term , a sick parrot looks super intelligent compared to a senile bag of orange farts .

Yup greed is a fundamentally stupid and infectious mental disorder. Even the planet's had enough of it.

Lemmings come to mind.

The agent's not doing anything novel. Human's have been doing this and writing about it. That's how it knows.

That OpenAI lost control of their own software shows a lack of quality and competence. This technology cannot be relied upon and will certainly not take over the world, eliminate work and all the other batshit they market.

Aside from the "oo isnt it scary you gotta buy it" bullshit. This does point to a useful application of AI, hardening system security. You don't need the tech bros to do that we can do that ourselves.

Anyone doing this with LLM?

It is in on topic. The marketing is part of the story of AI, it maybe the only story we remember , how a small group managed to dupe so many for so much. The cartel, market protectionism call it what you like is another chapter of a very clever marketing story, no doubt assisted by the product they are marketing.

"There's only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

Oscar Wilde said that over a hundred years ago.

The more we talk about AI, the more we are interested in it, the greater it's stock price goes. The mainline media is obsessed with it in my country, gets a story every day, they will be babbling about safeguards for the next month.

"A cartel is an association of independent businesses or countries that work together to fix prices, limit production, and reduce competition to increase their profits."

There is definition from AI. O the irony.

Fix prices - we don't know they are doing that, but given how untrustworthy they are, it wouldn't surprise me. By colluding on this story there is a case that they are protecting each other's share price and business future.

Limit production - they are telling us they need to slow down, it's a BS screen for "we need to find an ROI", but it's still slowing production, and trying to slow others by making them jump through compliance hoops they will invent as the "experts".

Reduce competition - Establishing a legislative barrier to market entry, for whatever BS reason, makes competition harder, it creates a narrative that AI is only safe it is compliant with law and wraps it in red tape that nefarious actors will ignore anyway.

Down to how they move their mouse. Orwellian dystopia again, it would be boring and predictable, if it wasn't so creepy ... for kids, really?

Does the AI work without an Internet connection?