it’s now apparent that using AI is more expensive than hiring people, especially since it offers only limited productivity gains at the moment.

And there it is: the wakeup call. The sound of a bubble at least deflating a bit (probably more to come). But we all know it will take months or years for that realization to really sink in. Corporate leadership will mess around trying to cut costs while denying they made a bad call by falling for the hype.

Also, this isn't just hitting tech giants by the way. This is hitting everyone who jumped on the AI bandwagon. What were going to see is a frantic scramble in two directions:

1. hiring a subset of people back because the C-level now realizes they are under-staffed for purpose - emphasis on subset, because they will happily keep overloading those remaining as much as possible.

2. pivoting to open source in-house hosted models to cut costs, and initially struggling with all the janky tooling that will come with it. But even once the tooling has been improved to be somewhat usable, there will still be some initial frustration with these models. For all the problems with the bleeding edge ChatGPT and Claude models, in most cases they are more useable than the self-hosted ones, which lag by a couple of generations.

What I'm hoping to see is the push to rely on AI drop off sharply and a resurgence for online community collaboration and resources. They weren't perfect, but at least they keep one's critical thinking and research skills a little sharper.