> Amos Bar-Joseph, the CEO of Swan AI, a coding agent startup, wrote in a viral LinkedIn post recently
How many humans could you pay for $300,000 a month and not have quality & reliability degrade like this?
0: https://xcancel.com/JustJake/status/2030063630709096483#m
Feels like investor signal: "we're AI-forward, mark us up next round"
Do the people with money not actually care about making more money? Aren’t they first and foremost concerned with your chances of financial success?
These people can’t possibly be thinking, “Well they say they spent an absolute shit ton on inference… they’re definitely going to be big winners!” and cutting massive checks, right?
Employees at most companies are bottlenecked on things other than code, like manual testing or waiting to compile.
Companies like Meta, mentioned in the article, have invested billions into solving these problems with distributed build/test farms and custom review infra.
I'm personally seeing this, because my role shifted from "write GPU test code" last year to "rearchitect our build and review processes" this year as this bottleneck becomes obvious.
But, how many businesses/sectors of the economy actually need to compete for marketshare? we assume it's nearly all of them. if that were the case, we'd see AI taking over much quicker.
You kind of had to be there to understand. When you’re immersed in that stuff, the rational part of your brain takes a backseat, and the primitive social / visual parts start to run the show. You start to develop incredibly warped perceptions of value entirely driven by the predominant narrative and most importantly, price action. When you see prices go parabolic, you start to interpret that as confirmation of the narrative. This generates a positive feedback loop that can lead to unbelievable and insane valuations. And by extension equally insane narratives.
What makes it even more uncanny is that a lot of the same actors (tech CEOs, VCs) are involved in this. Make no mistake - they understand how to leverage mania to their advantage. They go on long soliloquies about how game changing this or that asset is, and how anyone not buying in NOW is “NGMI” (not gonna make it).
This will not end well. I’ll never forget the incredibly insane financial decisions I made - it really felt like being under the influence of a drug.
https://blogs.uca.edu/sherring2/2024/08/02/the-most-expensiv...
> Our AI bill just hit $113k in a single month
I would wait until this is sustainable before bragging, but I think I can't expect much of the crayon eaters that post things on LinkedIn.
Is the reported behaviour an example of OpEx/CapEx but with humans?
2126: AI brags that it's reached 100% efficiency in Earth utilization after it's eliminated all organic life.
I subscribed to 404media a couple of months ago and they added me to all of their newsletters. They were all definitely unticked/opted out but they added me anyway. I reported it to them, no reply, so I unsubscribed from the newsletters and they kept sending me podcast emails anyway. I cancelled totally based on that and wondered if it was too quick a decision but this article has convinced me.
That's not to say that tech companies aren't doing legitimately bad things sometimes. But 404media has no desire for nuance.
They just really, really fucking hate the labor force they view as little more than cattle.
That reliance on third-party AI is a huge risk, just saying.
An economy of capital owners and everyone else on govt assistance or working for scraps? Sounds like a recipe for "interesting" times. Unhinged people are already making attempts on Sama and we are just getting started.