cross-posted from: https://fed.dyne.org/post/822710
Salesforces has entered a phase of public reckoning after senior executives publicly admitted that the company overestimated AI’s readiness
And yet, despite fucking up royally, CEO Marc Benioff won’t lose his job or probably any remuneration. And there’s the problem.
Well they probably had record earnings for a few quarters then their backlog caught up to their inability to deliver.
Got their bonuses and left scorched earth. The business strategy of private equity and capital.
Prayers and best wishes for Luigi and all of his followers.
I’m still holding out hope that they get half-drowned Clockwork Orange-style, despite how unlikely it is…
If any of us fucked up like this they’d have security marching us out.
well, those are the people ruling the world and calling the shots.
nobody will bring consequences to them except for us.
Not that I don’t love this for them.
But this source is really odd, it’s not a reputable new source, and has no citations, and very much an opinion blog type site.
Is there a better source for the story?
And these comments, man. Are they all bot-generated? I would have expected more comments calling this out. Just you and me (and the upvotes.)
“We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
I wonder how many executives made these types of decisions knowing the technology could not perform as intended, but wanted to boost their quarterly or yearly bonuses, versus how many were just gullible morons.
It’s also showing that they do not regret firing the employees; they would do it again if the technology was that far along.
Yeah, you can also restate what was said as:
We are catastrophically incompetent at our jobs.
But don’t worry, capitalism is totally based on merit.
… or maybe this just is the moment where it isn’t capitalism anymore, and it is clear technofeudalism, with a class of incompetent robber barons running everything.
Sucks to suck
It’s amazing how stupid these people are
How much longer will anyone believe the lie that success is earned and not luck
it is both: earned and luckedit: i should refrase that: i meant it is often both hard work and luckNepotism and malice, more likely
Cool, now fire the entire executive staff. Replace them.
They are objectively the people who would be the easiest to replace with LLMs.
All they do is have a rolodex, schmooze, and read reports and such written by people who do have some talent.
They’re also far and away the costliest employees to employ.
Oh no!!! The dumb business plan that has no proven way of working didn’t work!?
Yeah, they phrase it a bit differently. It was “premature”. 😅 Basically the same thing you said with some added innundo how they’re gonna try again…
It did work. They wanted to fire people and put the blame on AI so they can now hire other people cheaper. AI is only the excuse.
That would be a really good smokescreen but I kinda feel like they thought it might work they were so delusional.
C-suite is always clueless, and C-suite gets no consequences for their ineptitude.
If I were a shareholder, I’d be pushing my fellow shareholders to replace the inept.
If I were a shareholder, I’d be pushing my fellow shareholders to replace the inept.
How would you ever do that? Salesforce’s major shareholders are primarily large institutional investors, plus the founder and CEO himself. I can’t imagine how you’d be able to push them to do anything at all, even if you were a major shareholder yourself.
You are right. Just one more problem with a system owned by corporations, I guess.
I already had a good few years academic and professional experience in both NLP and ML before ChatGPT came out, and since then I’ve been doing some consulting in gen AI.
I don’t feel safe posting or commenting anything about AI on LinkedIn because of the sheer strength of the cult of “if you criticise AI you’re a Luddite who doesn’t understand the modern world, and should be shunned professionally”. Pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes makes you unemployable in the eyes of at least half the hiring managers in my contacts.
LinkedIn is a cult.
Who cares about pissing off the most broken human beings on the planet, the suck-up sycophant class of petite bourgeoisie wannabes who are the most active LinkedIn users?
They’re some of the most contemptible people who exist.
Why would you read or write things on LinkedIn? Except the parody accounts it’s all crazy people grifting each other.
Unfortunately it’s part of their plan.
Now they will hire people for cheaper.
Yep. I hope there employees are not dumb and will unionize, make them pay hard
Unions don’t typically get more pay; just working conditions that are less shit. 20% lower pay isn’t unexpected with union staff, especially in I.T, and that’s the value prop for the employer.
I want to see the delusion in HN comments really. “actually, he just didnt prompt hard enough”
Time to short
I think it’s a giant billboard sign that if they can replace you, they will. It was good for the tech bros to see this.
Well in this case even if they can’t replace you, they will try and fail
Their failure is quiet comfort when you’re out of a job.
Someone quoted this above and I replied there too, but this shows how they really think about the situation:
"We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
They don’t regret firing people, they regret not being able to replace them with AI
I whole heartedly believe my company would have replaced everyone in my department with remote workers from India if government regulations didn’t require US citizenship or qualified people. What I mean by qualified I don’t necessarily mean their quality of work but government regulations that require certificates and licenses to do the work.
So I guess AI will be after my job very soon
ML techniques have a lot of productive uses. Perhaps even LLMs and other generative approaches find their useful place one day. It takes effort and grit to find those productive uses and make them pay, which has been the case for any new technology I’ve seen come to the fore over the past good few decades. Chasing quick profits never delivered the results, and it never will.
Exactly.
Are we about to witness a technological revolution on the scale of broadband access for the masses? Yes.
Are we in a financial bubble the size of the dotcom and subprime mortages combined? Also yes.
I really don’t think AI is going to be anywhere near as influential as you think it will be.
We found a mathematical function which is good enough to be called universal estimator. Even better, our current computation technology is enough to implement these ideas algorithmically and compute in real-enough time. This will allow us to “do first, figure out later” rather than “hard work first, fruits later” approach.
It’s just not magic, so yea we have to find where it makes sense to deploy it and where it doesn’t.
Anecdote: I wasn’t really going for accuracy (we were looking at hidden layers more than the output layer) but the small model I was working with was able to predict cell state (sick with the thing I’m looking for?) from simple RNA assay data with 80-95% accuracy even with all the weird and bizarre regularization functions we were throwing at it.
For some things, it makes sense. For others, we need more research. For the remaining, this is an apple we need oranges.
I think a lot of the hype with AI comes from the sincere shock that throwing more compute at a really simple algorithm resulted in a program that kicked the Turing test’s ass. If we can’t recognize the significance of that, then we must truly have lost our sense of wonder and curiosity.
But the hype is focusing a little too much on the LLM side of things. The real gains are going to come from models that specialize on other kinds of data, especially data that humans are bad at working with.
We kicked the Turing Test’s ass? Ask an LLM for a joke and you’ll see it fail dismally.
Yes. And Turing has started asking questions that require basic counting skills, or the ability to recognize a letter in the alphabet.
lowest-level technical/call support is about the only thing i see, that area where your just waiting/trying to get the customer to shutup and tell you what their actual issue is.
The answer to your first question is actually “no”.
At least with dotcom and mortgages we had an assets bubble that didn’t have a shelf life of 5 years. It’s not like the capacity we are building now will be useful after the end of the decade
I had to scroll way to much for this. Need upvotes
