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No real output. Lots of layoffs though (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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[–] 168 points 3 months ago (23 children)

And they achieved... what exactly?

More faces per book? Instant Instagram? Whatsapp is now appier? Finally copied Second Life in meta horizons?

Like... What does $221,000,000/month of AI even get you?

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    And they achieved… what exactly?

    I sometimes wonder whether AI is just a way to launder money at the same time as burning the planet.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    The big push happened right after the crypto crash. I have a suspicion both are pushed by energy companies. If power consumption goes down, we start switching to renewables and stop consuming dirty sources. They can't have that, so they pushed crypto to consume it. They let it crash because they started pushing "AI" instead. Politicians always say we can't decrease power consumption, and we just need to build up to replace dirty energy sometimes in the non-specified future. We will never reach that if they can instead keep creating excuses to expand demand.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    The app is falling apart. From marketplace discussions the link back to the listing is mostly broken. The app crashes frequently. Images and video will glitch back and forth by several pixels, randomly.

    I think they are doing a massive study on how automating code production kills products. It is a brave move and I look forward to the papers they publish when the company folds.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Right? I haven't noticed anything change, everything is as buggy, slow, and difficult to use as it ever was.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The dark patterns on meta products are downright evil, and infuriating. How anyone can stay on their products baffles me. They punish you for using it.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Only decent way to see local events and updates on stuff happening in my area, also most people use marketplace so it's how I find stuff to buy locally.

    Facebook with ublock and a userscript to clean all the crap off it is at least generally usable.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    You make the mistake of assuming any of that matters.

    You're talking devotees of the LessWrong crowd. The self-proclaimed "rationalists". They are quite literally a religious cult that worships AI. (I know this sounds deranged. That's because it is deranged!) The money is beside the point to them. What matters is that they trigger the Singularity so that the Rococo Basilisk (I know that's not the proper name: my artistic license number is MY0B) doesn't torment their simulacra for eternity.

    No. I'm not making any of that up. (Except that it's Rocco's Basilisk.)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    May have proved senior engineers are more effective having a team of agents rather than a team of junior engineers

    Doubt that is the case, but that is likely what all these middle managers expect in these companies

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    An agent can produce code quickly, but at the accuracy level of a co-op unless a significant amount of time is spent to "prepare" the agent. Trouble is, you have to know how to do the job you're asking the agent to do to be able to effectively steer it to an acceptable solution.

    With a co-op (or junior engineer), I still need to do the equivalent of the above to train them on the tasks/concepts they need to perform their work, I still need to have a firm grasp of what it is that I'm asking them to do to be able to guide them to the correct solution.

    The difference is that the co-op/junior retains that knowledge and is able to extrapolate that to different situations as well as come up with innovative solutions based on that initial knowledge. One of the biggest risks to tech work from LLMs (aside from the general problems with LLMs) is it encourages managers to not hire juniors/co-ops, which means that there will be no new generation of senior developers coming up to replace us when we retire (lol, as if).

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I want to push this outside engineering. It sounds like they want to train computers, not employees. Which, I don't know about your fields, but folk aren't exactly looking to mentor their future competition in the financial industry. So you pretty much get to teach yourself or go back to school.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Historically (at least in orgs that aren't maximally toxic) software engineering has actually had a great culture of seniors helping Junior and midlevels grow. IME most of us enjoy mentoring, and further enjoy having someone else who can do the boring shit for us. It's why, despite incompetent management being the norm, the industry has succeeded as much as it has.

    Unfortunately I think this is changing now. The ownership class has finally pushed too far and I think a sizeable portion of us have realized that we devs have to stop maintaining the engineering cultures of our orgs to fight back.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Management has proven to the board that they're using the technology everybody in corporate likes. They'll surely get a bonus for that. And once it's obvious it fails they'll lay off thousands to compensate for the billions spent and get a bonus for the thorough cost cutting. Then hire a bunch offshore to get work done.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    I would imagine the answer Meta execs would want, would be “effectively microtargeted advertising to those most likely to buy the product, creating sales for our advertising clients and allowing us to charge them more”

    Going through massive sets of user data to figure out which of them would most likely be interested in a product does sound like a plausible use case for AI

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