Five Things AI: Small Businesses, Empty Promises, Coding Jobs, Aigentina, Dying SaaS
There is so much AI out there! Find out what it does!
Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!
Five stories on AI again this week. One thread: the tools are working. Small-business owners are building armies of AI workers, doing in days what used to take a full team. Pre-ChatGPT startups are getting eaten alive, weighed down by staffing models that made sense three years ago. Productivity is up across the board. Wages are not. The valuations of AI companies are hitting the stratosphere while the social safety net is getting cut at the same time. Developers are not complaining - they accept the shift from typing to thinking. Javier Milei is writing AI law and Peter Thiel is excited about it, which should tell you something. Every tool promises more, and most deliver more or less the same thing with a different coat of paint. The gains are real. The distribution of those gains is the open question nobody in a keynote wants to touch. The question nobody wants to answer is - working for whom?
The Small-Business Owners Managing Whole Armies of A.I. Employees
These days, most people have realized that A.I. is creeping into the office. A recent Gallup poll found that 28 percent of the respondents use it anywhere from several times a week to daily. But these are mostly just the familiar chat sessions. The partisans of OpenClaw are doing something that is, depending on how you look at it, either more wildly ambitious or foolishly risky — or, as many will readily confess, both. They’re creating virtual employees, artificial staff that scurry around on their hard drives, doing work on their own say-so.
AI will help so many small companies to do so much more than was ever possible for them.
As AI gets better, it reveals an empty promise
There’s a sinister tone lurking beneath some of these advancements in productivity, because the response to increased productivity has been one of the biggest scams of the past century. Well before consumer AI entered the scene, productivity exploded while wages failed to keep pace. Nobody is working less, they’re just earning less. And as more AI-related companies reap trillions in valuation, the current US regime is looting the social safety net — the kind that must exist if we’re all going to become out-of-work theater kids. You simply can’t look at these things separately. If the end result of private companies optimizing the workforce means nobody has to work, then we have to live in a society where people can still have a roof and a meal. Is anyone confident that will happen while leaders are cutting SNAP benefits while building taxpayer-funded ballrooms?
The author makes a strong point here: there are so many new productivity tools out there that promise so much. But if you actually play around with those tools, you find out that they all do more or less the same, just with different flavors.
I Built an AI Company. Here’s Why AI Won’t Kill Coding Jobs.
This pattern is familiar. We replaced shovels with excavators, and then we built skyscrapers. We replaced manual arithmetic with calculators, and accountants did not vanish; they did more interesting work, if you can believe it. Each time a tool made a job easier, we didn’t run out of things to do. We found bigger things to do.
AI coding tools represent the same kind of leap. You still have to tell the machine what to build. You still have to understand what it’s doing well enough to check its work. And these coding tools still make mistakes when generating code, so you need an experienced software engineer to fix them. The job shifts from typing to thinking, which for most good engineers is the part we love anyway.
There is a huge change going on that transforms a lot of jobs, that’s for sure. The developers I talk to aren’t complaining, they accept the challenge and reinvent the way they work.
Javier Milei: Argentina invites AI to free itself
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, Adam Smith illustrated the potential of technology and economies of scale in his celebrated recollection of the pin factory. And, as much as the industrial revolution freed us from the constraints of the human muscle, AI will free us from the constraints of the human brain, pushing productivity beyond our wildest dreams. It is for this reason that my government last week submitted legislation to Congress establishing a dedicated legal framework for the deployment of AI.
This is the libertarians’ wet dream. Peter Thiel is excited and moving down there. This is a terrible idea.
‘Disrupted or dead’: AI is crushing a generation of startups built before ChatGPT
Companies built before generative AI are weighed down by bloated staffing models and software designed for a pre-AI world, according to Zhu, making it hard for them to transform themselves.
“Unless they make a stark, 180-degree pivot to rebuild the exact same thing from scratch, they’re going to slowly fail,” Zhu said. “What that means is that investors would rather just bet on new entrepreneurs at lower valuations rather than double down on older startups.”
The agents are eating the children of the digital revolution.
