It's not even stealing. They paid OpenAI for the tokens. It violates the OpenAI TOS, which specifically forbids using it's outputs for training competing models (which is very ironic)
The other big missing part here is the enormous incentives (and punishments if you don't) to publish in the big three AI conferences. And because quantity is being rewarded far more than quantity, the meta is to do really shoddy and uninspired work really quickly. The people I talk to have a 3 month time horizon on their projects.
JavaScript code and Haskell code ultimately both get turned into instructions for a microprocessor, so there really isn't much of a difference between both.
My own experience with Dual N-Back
1) I did it for a month. Probably some improvement, although I did not have any specific test done. Probably the most tangible use is really feeling how working memory (and losing it) is like and having better control. In the same way you might suddenly realize how breathing is and controlling it after learning meditation.
2) The study specified dual N back imposes a pretty demanding regiment. It's 12 sessions daily, consecutively for ~month. It takes about 20 minutes each day of intense focus.
3) There's naturally going to be a lot of survivorship bias in reviews. But you could argue it doesn't make your intelligence worse, so there's only net upside.
I predict many areas will eventually become like old mining/factory towns. Middle class jobs are being offshored at an astounding rate. Just doing some math - if a tech company lays off 7% of its employees for six years and sends the jobs overseas, nearly half of its American employees will be fired
My mostly uninformed worse case estimate is a large portion of these companies become something like the "body shops" (I believe MS has some association with Accenture, so that'd fit) where they maintain a minimal US presence for (mostly) customer facing "sales"/"high touch" positions so they have someone to broker deals and contracts with the (often clueless, IME) F500s, and then outsource all implementation work offshore. Same goes for some large portion of "important" managers.
For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
It's unlikely, say, for Google Search or AWS EC2 or something critical at MS (M365 maybe?) to be totally off-shored, but lesser services/functions are a likely target. (I know this is already happening to some extent at these companies; I've heard from reputable sources there's some large services that were nearly entirely built by staffing firms)
Basically, I think it's two things: we've reached the end of stratospheric growth in "tech" (sorry I just don't see the LLM wave getting there; a million SAAS thingys to "vibe code" a React calorie tracker ain't it), there's a massive surplus from the ZIRP era paired with some sort of obvious recession happening (or that's been going on for a while).
It's also a reset of sorts--look I'm as "pro software" as the next commentator here, but it's pretty absurd to think that there's loads of people making 200K+ to write CRUD stuff. There's just not a "shortage" in any way for any of these skills, as anyone doing a job search can attest.
This type of pay is really only "rational" in the markets where the cost of living has skyrocketed in the manner it has (largely/entirely a function of the "growth" era in SF/Seattle/Austin). It never seemed sustainable, and I suspected there would be some abrupt end when the "learn to code" era really took off.
On a positive note, perhaps those cities would be more affordable, but the in-elasticity of housing prices on the "way down" are always a problem for buyers.
This assumption is a pretty Western view, in that you assume that SV/USA still has technological primacy. I believe this to be generally true, but leadership has no incentive or reason it should. And if I'm being frank, there may be some bias here because it seems like companies with indian CEOs are offshoring at a much faster rate than non indian CEOs (e.g. Google vs Netflix). And non core roles could effectively be perceived to make up the majority of the company. So some cultural fondness for India plus a somewhat low view of the bulk of employees could result in most jobs being offshored.
For sure, I think your projection is a worse case scenario, one that's totally in the realm of possibility.
In "non-growth" times (i.e the era we're in now (post ZIRP) and probably for the foreseeable future, LLMs being the exception), very little outside the major revenue generators is probably "core" roles.
>For the "deep"/important/critical technical work, there will likely be staff retained on-shore, while the "boring" CRUD-type work that comprises some portion of the FANNAGS (whatever) is done overseas.
Someone who was a highly skilled factory worker would have said the same thing in
the 80's. That didn't work out too well for them in the long run. You have to assume that eventually those overseas workers will become experts in that "deep" work because they have the incentive to.
This. Tech workers are the modern day factory workers and tech cities will become like the rust belt once all the jobs get shipped overseas and AI takes over.
No it won't happen overnight, but neither did factory jobs leaving. I suspect though in 10 years the tech market for US workers will look very different than it does today.
I really want to destroy this blatant lying by tech CEOs that these are layoffs because of AI, tax laws or interest rates. Most tech companies have headcounts at their peak or slightly below. Whenever these amounts are fired, often near equal amounts are hired in India (and not counting L-1 transfers into the US, H1Bs etc). AI is a fiction invented to cover up the true reason: tech companies have adopted a long term strategy of profit making by wage arbitrage. They have identified their largest cost to be people, and are working to fix this.
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