I daily a GR Corolla. It's insanely fun to drive. The hardest part is i) keeping under the speed limit (which I do more often than I don't), and ii) the suspension. My god, the ride in this thing is SO stiff. The shitty Seattle streets bounce me around like crazy.
My partner is a lawyer (prosecutor for a large city). The reason she is at low risk is simply because of the rate of adoption of AI tooling (or ANY tooling for that matter). IT in the public sector (particularly city government) is so much worse than I ever could have imagined before meeting my partner.
Our city just spent >$15MM on "case management software" that took 5 years to build by some fly-by-night outfit in California who won the contract, haphazardly bolted together MSFT Azure components, then vanished with zero support.
These teams can't in good faith freely adopt AI tooling into their workflow because they don't have the bandwidth to do it well, so they don't do it at all.
I run an ML team in fintech, and am currently hiring. If a resumè came across my desk with this "skill set" I'd laugh my ass off. My job and my team's jobs are extremely stressful because we ship models that impact people's finances. If we mess up our customers lose their goddamn minds.
Most of the ML candidates I see now are all "working with LLMs". Most of the ML engineers I know in the industry who are actually shipping valuable models, are not.
Cool, you made a chatbot that annoys your users.
Let me know when you've shipped a fraud model that requires four 9's, 100ms latency, with 50,000 calls an hour, 80% recall and 50% precision.
We don't. I probably should make one of those, but as a solo act, the number of platforms I need to keep up with is ridiculous. Reddit/Spotify/Instagram keep my time occupied, it's brutal honestly.
Don't disagree. I'm merely commenting on the dramatic change in his audience, which IMO opinion was driven by TikTok virality. Going from a crowd of people who were singing along to people standing around waiting for the "TikTok hits" was really strange.
I've played music my entire life (picked up a guitar at 6 years old and just never put it down). I actually just released a new record last Friday (https://open.spotify.com/album/6JU0jmz537a6r2xrTvCcmn?si=eg4...). I joined a band when I was 15 (~2004), and we had some long tail success. We were able to tour, play huge shows (the Gorge in Washington, sell out the Showbox in downtown Seattle, an arena here or there). After high school I went to school for audio production, and even then I knew it was going to be tough to make a living. I ended up pivoting, studying math, now I'm in machine learning.
Music is the thing I love more than anything. I love writing it, releasing records, playing shows, and connecting with people on an emotional level. Never once have I considered it possible to have a fruitful career as a musician, despite seeing more success as a musician than most can ever dream of. Additionally, the industry (like many others) has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In many ways, it has put much more power back into the hands of artists: you don't need a huge studio/record label/promotion to release a record. You can just release records, and promote them yourself. The flip side of that is there are SO many more people releasing music these days, which makes it really difficult to cut through the noise if your music is halfway decent.
Finally, recommendation algorithms have truly transformed the landscape of content creation, likely irreversibly. I get messages _daily_ from people who have "hacked" the TikTok algorithm, and can get my bands plays. There is an entire cottage industry of algorithm "hackers", some of them actually have results too.
One odd anecdote: I love Alex G. I've been listening to him for over a decade, and have flown out to see him play in places like New york/Austin TX. A few years ago he played in Seattle, and the entire demographic of the audience seem to've changed overnight. Way younger, more "mainstream" looking kids, filled the Showbox in Seattle. The strangest part was that no one seemed to know the words to his songs anymore. I did some digging, and he'd gone viral on TikTok. A few of his songs went absolutely bananas on there, and it completely transformed his fanbase. They knew the words to those songs, but not his entire set. Is this bad? I have no idea, but the trimming down of content into bite sized morsels _feels_ bad to me, and I believe it will dramatically alter this next generation's baseline attention span. Again, not a moral judgement, just a factual claim.
I think your worries are very valid, and I agree that this could be a level step change in the consolidation of power that we already see among a few extremely powerful entities. Another observation worth noting is that SDEs who embrace this technology immediately are going to absolutely smoke past those who ignore it, and the gap will continue to widen as time wears on. Imagine having a slightly dumbed down SDE 1 or 2 (eventually 3) slave that can work 24/7. It will completely redefine what "entry level" means for software engineers.
I think "get it to write functional code most of the time" severely discounts the value of the code produced by ChatGPT. Knowing zero Swift (but being an SDE), I was able to build an audio plugin for Logic Pro X in a day, by leveraging ChatGPT. I'd previously tried this twice, and gave up because of the learning curve and my lack of free time. It's the most insane 0% to 80% tool I've ever seen.
So then what? If paying $2/hour is taking advantage, and paying over market isn't part of your solution...what is the solution? Not hire people in Kenya?
Also...yes it is a sentiment (a view of or attitude toward a situation or event; an opinion). Our opinions about what constitutes "taking advantage" are different. Saying otherwise doesn't make your argument more compelling.
This is a nice sentiment, but I think the answer is way more nuanced. You can't just roll into a developing economy and pay way over market without also disrupting the local economy and the people that live there. Imagine some similar situation in America, where for some reason, an international business comes in and pays 10-30X the market rate as similar businesses in the area, for the same product. The new jobs become highly (and potentially dangerously) desirable, other similar business go under because they can't keep up with the wage growth, etc.
To remain stable, economic growth must be slow and steady. The alternative is you simply don't go to Kenya, rather, you go somewhere else, and Kenyans get $0/hour.
> The last step was a really strange and uncomfortable 1-1 chat with a "very senior employee"
I had one of these once. The chief product officer came into the room, stared at me for awhile, then asked "tell me something you've thought really hard about...". It was a classic case of a narcissist exec. Glad I didn't get the job, as they are struggggggggggglin' right now.