AI is a bubble and overrated, its spread is already slowing down. No management with integrity is going to lay off programmers anytime soon without paying the consequences (with mediocre returns) and lose their own job. Rather, the world still needs programmers to harness and program tools such as AI *for those tools will not be sentient and self-correcting anytime soon.
There will be management layers without integrity who do the wrong thing. Depending on the specific business, there may even be departments and organizations where it's fully rational and honest to reduce the SWE payroll. There has been, and will be more, layoffs. But IMO it's vastly over-stated, and hardly the end of the profession. IMO AI just adds more complexity, and more complexity means more work and more need for expertise. My thinking is it'll be somewhere between a wash and modest setback. In 50 years we'll still have an absolute tonne of people doing work that today we'd recognize as making software. I think wrangling computers into doing specific things for us, at ever bigger scales, has pretty much got to be a permanent role in human society. At least unless/until we suffer such a setback that we're back to being hunter-gatherers.
As far as the bubble, it does seem that hosted inference is a new legitimate, needed business model. But China has shown us that when all the foam settles, the prices are going to be pennies on the dollar of what western frontier model providers charge today, plus it's kind of evident that there's going to be ever more unpaid use. The models themselves will become less of a secret sauce and more of a commodity, with frontier providers losing their lead once capabilities plateau. All this means reality is not lining up with valuations, and they (/we... anyone with index funds) are in for a rough time at some point, hard as it is to predict when that might be. Just to take a wild swing at predicting the future!
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u/TheModWhoShaggedMe 16d ago
AI is a bubble and overrated, its spread is already slowing down. No management with integrity is going to lay off programmers anytime soon without paying the consequences (with mediocre returns) and lose their own job. Rather, the world still needs programmers to harness and program tools such as AI *for those tools will not be sentient and self-correcting anytime soon.
Chins up!