Are Large Language Models Really AI?

They pay these people almost nothing, and they still want to replace them.

To become a Billionaire in the first place you are going to be far more likely to have negative psychological traits. That's how they get to where they get to.


These are the people we are hoping will be nice to us, when we collectively no longer have any leverage over them. Not saying it's gonna happen, but it's interesting to think about.

Most tech companies (or even game companies) are not proper companies, they do not function based off profits. They function based on funding rounds (Discord, Reddit, Open AI etc), they effectively just keep begging for money from mega wealthy people and using snakeoil salesman tactics to get money to fund the company well beyond their means. Many of these companies make zero profits.

Open AI did vast funding rounds and raised huge amounts of money, and with that money they agreed to buy up 40% of the worlds ram to lock out competitors for instance. A corporate espionage tactic, funded by money they could not make themselves (they are currently imploding).

This is why they were hiring so many people 5+ years ago, and why these companies are full of people literally doing nothing (you see endless women on tiktok working at tech companies in manufactured jobs, making videos about doing nothing and eating avocado and drinking starbucks). Cause the inflated work force implied growth and people invested cause of the implied growth from the bloated workforce (this is also why they have so much DEI of incompetent people, cause they don't do anything to matter and it helped gain investor money).

The are now downsizing with AI for the same reason, to pander to investors that AI is the future that they are embracing and that will improve the value of the company long-term.

However, ones making profits and not begging for money are actually doing it for real reasons.

You are confusing tech startups with established tech corporations, those are wildly different things.

Tech startups are entities working towards building something of value and while profits are very nice they really just want value as their ultimate goal is to sell that value to someone else. That someone else is either a larger tech company like Microsoft, Broadcom, Meta or Amazon, or to the public via IPO. Established tech companies are those that have already transitioned into a full profit model by leveraging whatever products or offerings they have.

This is discord, because you mentioned them.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/discord-statistics/

Total investment is $1bn USD, total valuation is $14bn USD, revenue is around $500~600 million USD, though they are still operating at a loss. Back in 2024 they terminated a large number of staff to reduce operating expenses and I suspect they are going to start selling gaming usage data as a secondary revenue stream in preparation for either an IPO or a sale.

Ever noticed how most of us have discord starting automatically and it displays which game you are playing? Yeah they are in a key position to sell gaming usage data either directly to game publishers or to data brokers who will then sell it to game publishers.

OpenAI wasn't even a for-profit company. It was founded and funded as a non-profit company then back in 2019 pull a fast one and "restructured" by starting a new for-profit company and transferring all the IP into that company. Right now they are a privately held company and I'm pretty sure they are being used as a debt bag for lots of this AI circular investing nonsense.

After studying a little more about vibe coding, I conceded.

It does make sense having a scrum master agent…

Before the great recession mass layoffs usually increased stock prices. This may seem odd but the stock market reflects expectations and emotions rather than anything like reality or P/E ratios.

I think lean and efficient has replaced lean and mean. Both are reductions in personnel expenses with a positive coat of paint.

As someone who has often made my living sewing visuals of people sewing at normal sewing machines is NOT going to train GP robots to sew. And it certainly is not going to teach cutters to cut.

We are closing in on fully automated sewing. I mean fabric in, clothing out. There are no machines that look like anything I have ever sewn on and no more GP robots that on an automotive production line.

How Automation In Apparel Manufacturing Is More Than Humanoids: The Tech Innovation That Matters
Forbes

Automated Cutting & Sewing For Industry 4.0
Textile world, 2/2024

That's my point, prior to the GFC companies could do mass layoffs with the expectation that "line go up". But nearly two decades later account managers are a lot more skeptical and it's all about the wording on "why". Publicly traded companies can't lie on those notices, but they can be economical with the truth, which they usually are now.

I really like that "economical with the truth" line. Its much more elegant than mislead.

Yeah SEC regulations make it illegal to outright lie on public mandatory public disclosures. So instead they overemphasize things that make them look good while underemphasizing things that don't. Like claiming their "AI initiatives" are expected to bring this massive productivity boost and therefor they don't need as many people.

That statement itself is not a lie, they executives can "expect" that, and expectations are wrong all the time.

This scene from Wolf of Wall Street summarizes the whole thing.



Nothing said in that phone call was a lie, it was all complete truth, and also highly suspect to anyone not keen enough to catch the words.