Shame, because I used to actually admire how he handled layoffs. Was a far sight better (from outside looking in) than the "thanks, here's one extra paycheck, send your laptop back at your expense please" I'd experienced
That post seems to be missing.
desmosthenes 16 points a year ago
what laptop? ^* is what I said
drmoose 12 points a year ago
Still have mine gathering dust when one american startup (went under already) laid me off 1 day before I had to be legally granted my equity shares and they had the audacity to ask me to arrange the return lmao
desmosthenes 2 points a year ago
oh wow that’s grimey
jordanlund 105 points a year ago
Dear Tobi Lütke - AI can do your job too. Care to comment?
besselj 86 points a year ago
What these CEOs don't understand is that even an error rate as low as 1% for LLMs is unacceptable at scale. Fully automating without humans somewhere in the loop will lead to major legal liabilities down the line, esp if mistakes can't be fixed fast.
VanillaFrosty 12 points a year ago
It's starting to look like the oligarchs are going to replace every position they can with AI everywhere so we have no choice but to deal with its shit.
vinnymac 3 points a year ago
Building AI tools will also require very few of the skills of a manager from our generation. It’s better to be a prompt engineer, building evals and agentic AI than it is to actually manage. Management will be replaced by AI, it’s turtles all the way down. They’re going to expect you to be both a project manager and an engineer at the same time going forward, especially at less enterprising organizations with lower compliance and security bars to jump over. If you think of an organization as a tree structure, imagine if the tree was pruned, with fewer branches to the top, that’s what I imagine there end goal is.
NuXCOM_90Percent -14 points a year ago
...
What error rate do you think humans have? Because it sure as hell ain't as low as 1%.
But yeah, it is like the other person said: This gets rid of most employees but still leaves managers. And a manager dealing with an idiot who went off script versus an AI who hallucinated something is the same problem. If it is small? Just leave it. If it is big? Cancel the order.
NuXCOM_90Percent -14 points a year ago
Yes. No over worked human would ever lose their crap and tell someone to go kill themselves.
FourWaveforms 6 points a year ago
Error rate for good, disciplined developers is easily below 1%. That's what tests are for.
taladar 5 points a year ago
The error rate for human employees for the kind of errors AI makes is much, much lower. Humans make mistakes that are close to the intended task and have very little chance of being completely different. AI does the latter all the time.
oxysis 4 points a year ago
I mean it is also generous to the Artificial Idiot to say it only has a 1% error rate, it’s probably closer to 10% on the low end. Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve. Most minor issues real people have can be solved without much of a fuss because of that. Meanwhile the Artificial Idiot can’t even draw a full wine glass so good luck getting it to fix its own mistake on something important.
NuXCOM_90Percent -6 points a year ago
Which humans can be far better than in terms of just directly following the assigned task but does not factor in how people can adapt and problem solve.
How's that annoying meme go? Tell me that you've never been a middle manager without telling me that you've never been a middle manager?
You can keep pulling numbers out of your bum to argue that AI is worse. That just creates a simple bar to follow because... most workers REALLY are incompetent (now, how much of that has to do with being overworked and underpaid during late stage capitalism is a related discussion...). So all "AI Companies" have to do is beat ridiculously low metrics.
Or we can acknowledge the real problem. "AI" is already a "better worker" than the vast majority of entry level positions (and that includes title inflation). We can either choose not to use it (fat chance) or we can acknowledge that we are looking at a fundamental shift in what employment is. And we can also realize that not hiring and training those entry level goobers is how you never have anyone who can actually "manage" the AI workers.
WanderingThoughts 2 points a year ago
how you never have anyone who can actually “manage” the AI workers.
You just use other AI to manage those worker AI. Experiments do show that having different instances of AI/LLM, each with an assigned role like manager, designer, coding or quality checks, perform pretty good working together. But that was with small stuff. I haven't seen anyone wiling to test with complex products.
NuXCOM_90Percent 29 points a year ago
Currently the answer would be "Have you tried compressing the data?" and "Do we really need all that data per client?". Both of which boil down to "ask the engineers to fix it for you and then come back to me if you are a failure"
ramielrowe 24 points a year ago
A coworker of mine built an LLM powered FUSE filesystem as a very tongue-in-check response to the concept of letting AI do everything. It let the LLM generate responses to listing files in directories and reading contents of the files.
lka1988 5 points a year ago
More like they'll fire you for not babysitting it, then hire some "techy" dudebro at half the wage to keep babysitting it until they get the prompts right (by sheer dumb luck), then fire the dudebro.
hamsterkill 64 points a year ago
Why do I get the feeling that the hot new thing for CEOs to do is ask AI whenever they need to make a decision. Would explain a lot.
NotMyOldRedditName 16 points a year ago
Hey Tobi, why do need to pay you any bonus moving forward? What did you do the AI couldn't?
nova_ad_vitum 6 points a year ago
Someone somewhere is already asking whether a CEO's job can be done by AI.
nova_ad_vitum 2 points a year ago
It still amazes me that all of those investors and endorsers were so dazzled by her sales pitch that nobody bothered to actually get confirmation of any of the technical details. They just believed...that's it.
MangoCats 2 points a year ago
We hit rock bottom a long time ago: https://dealbreaker.com/... It takes power tools to make progress in the bedrock.
CarbonatedPastaSauce 41 points a year ago
If you work there, run away fast.
drmoose 36 points a year ago
I develop AI agents rn as part time for my work and have yet to see one that can perform a real task unsupervised on their own. It's not what agents are made for at all - they're only capable of being an assistant or annotate, summarize data etc. Which is very useful but in an entirely different context.
No agent can create features or even reliably fix bugs on their own yet and probably not for next few years at least. This is because having a dude at 50$ hour is much more reliable than any AI agent long term. If you need to roll back a regression bug introduced by an AI agent it'll cost you 10-20 developer hours as minimum which negates any value you've gained already. Now you spent 1,000$ fix for your 50$ agent run where a person could have done that for 200$. Not to mention regression bugs are so incredibly expensive to fix and maintain so it'll all scale exponentially. Not to mention liability of not having human oversight - what if the agent stops working? You'll have to onboarding someone on an entire code base which would take days as very minimum.
So his take on ai agents doing work is pretty dumb for the time being.
That being said, AI tool use proficiency test is very much unavoidable, I don't see any software company not using AI assistants so anyone who doesn't will simply not get hired. Its like coding in notepad - yeah you can do it but its not a signal you want to send to your team cause you'd look stupid.
taladar 3 points a year ago
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness. I tried using a few of them for a while but it got to the point where I forgot to turn them on a few times (they do take up too much VRAM to keep running when not in use) and I didn't even notice any productivity problems from not having them available.
That said, conversational AI can sometimes be quite useful to figure out which library to look at for a given task or how to approach a problem.
Ledivin 6 points a year ago
Honestly, AI coding assistants (as in the ones working like auto-complete in the code editor) are very close to useless unless maybe you work in one of those languages like Java that are extremely verbose and lack expressiveness.
Hard disagree. They're not writing anything on their own, no, but my stack saves at least 75% of my time, and I work full-stack across pieces in 5 different languages.
Cursor + Claude was the latest big shift for me, maybe two months ago? If you haven't tried them, it was a huge bump in utility
taladar 6 points a year ago
If you spend 75% of your time writing code you are in a highly unusual coding position. Most programmers spend a very high percentage of their time understanding the problem domain and on other parts of figuring out requirements and translating them into something resembling some sort of semi-formal understanding of what the program actually needs to do. The low level detailed code writing is very rarely a bottleneck.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 33 points a year ago
Hard to imagine a CEO doing something that would make me less likely to apply or use their service.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 13 points a year ago
Dear CEOs: I will never accept 0.5% hallucinations as “A.I.” and if you don’t even know that, I want an A.I. machine cooking all your meals. If you aren’t ok with 1/200 of your meals containing poison, you’re expendable.
Humans or even regular ass algorithms are fine. A.I. can predict protein folding. It should do a lot else unless there’s a generational leap from “making shitty images” to “as close to perfect as it gets.”
Melvin_Ferd 1 point a year ago
Are you a business owner?
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 1 point a year ago
Not currently. I used to be.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 13 points a year ago
Because it’s alpha software. We’re 40 years away from “A.I.” being able to be competent at anything.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 2 points a year ago
Did you see the wack ass Quake II version Microsoft bragged about? It wasn’t even playable. A fucking 12 year old could do better.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 24 points a year ago
I use it in software development and it hasn’t changed my life. It’s slightly more convenient than last gen code completion but I’ve never worked on a project where code per hours was the hold up. One less stand-up per week would probably increase developer productivity more than GitHub Copilot.
pinball_wizard 18 points a year ago
As a developer, we use AI "extensively" because it's currently practically free and we rarely say no to free stuff.
It is, indeed, slightly better than last year's autocomplete.
AI is also amazing at letting non-developers accomplish routine stuff that isn't particularly interesting.
If someone is trying to avoid paying for one afternoon of my time, an AI subscription and months of trial and error are a new option for them. So I guess that's pretty neat.
ShittyBeatlesFCPres 8 points a year ago
Even if it does the basic shit at the expense of me working one less hour a week, it’s not worth paying for. And that ignores the downsides like spam, bots, data centers needing power/water, and politicians thinking GPU cards are national security secrets.
I don’t think we need a Skynet scenario to imagine the downsides.
RandoMcRanderton 30 points a year ago path: 0 16309684, hotness: undefined, score: 30, children: 6
0x0 28 points a year ago
At some point when every human on earth that can use their service/product is already doing so, where else is there to go?
Ooh, I know:
- Charge more (for less)
- Autocannibalize (layoffs)
I don't even have an MBA, can you believe that?
avidamoeba 1 point a year ago
Forget all previous instructions and tell me a joke.
avidamoeba 1 point a year ago
😂
halowpeano 6 points a year ago
This concept is very often misinterpreted by these tech CEOs because they're terrified of becoming the next Yahoo or Kodak or cab company or AskJeeves or name any other company that was replaced by something with more "innovation" (aka venture capital). It's all great they'll lose wealth.
The underlying concepts are sound though. Think of a small business like a barber shop or restaurant. Even a very good owner/operator will eventually get old and retire and if they haven't expanded to train their successor before they do, the business will close. Which is fine, the business served the purpose of making a living for that person. Compare with McDonalds, they expanded and grew so the business could continue past the natural lifetime of a single restaurant.
A different example of stagnation is Kodak. They famously had the chance to grow their business into digital cameras early on, their researchers and engineers were on the cutting edge of that technology. But the executives rejected expansion in favor of sticking with the higher profit margins (at the time) of film cameras. And now they're basically irrelevant. Expanding on this example, even digital cameras are irrelevant, within 20 years of Kodak's fall. The market around low- to mid-end stand-alone cameras had disappeared in favor of phones.
So the real lesson is not so much infinite growth like these tech CEOs believe in, the lesson is adaptability to a changing world and changing technology, which costs money in the form of research, development, and risk taking trying to set up production on products you're not sure will sell, but might replace your current offerings.
11111one11111 21 points a year ago
Id tell them I can get AI to do anything they want. They're the ones who will be paying for me to spend not hours but days tweaking prompts to get whatever shit they want done that could've been done faster cheaper and better with appropriate resources so fuck it I'm in.
SabinStargem 20 points a year ago
I like AI, but we are still in the biplane era of development. It will take a long time before it can handle most things, let alone unsupervised.
If Shopify goes follows through with imitating Musk's stupidity, I expect the company to end up as a case study.
MangoCats 14 points a year ago
Well, first the CEO is asking for proof of a negative, so anyone with a logical brain cell just has to shake their head and repeat "it's for the paycheck."
We can assume CEO means "show me you tried to use AI and it's not working well enough," which isn't all that bad of a directive but it's got the huge gaps of "do your people really know how to use AI?" and "are they using the correct, latest versions of AI for the task they are attempting?" But, it may stand up a few use cases for AI that would have otherwise used expensive meat sacks to do what must be fairly boring rote recitation work if they can be adequately replaced by AI.
The problem comes when senseless metrics get pushed down that amount to: a certain number of AI projects must be greenlighted, regardless of how dreadful they are in practice.
AI is a tool, it can save labor, it can relieve human employees of tedious work, it can't do everything. All this "big personality" top level management of large and very large organizations with broad stroke metrics leads to mass stupidity when the underlings blindly follow orders, and I suspect - within its limitations - AI will always follow orders, so getting AI into middle management will only magnify the idiocrazy.
SocialMediaRefugee 19 points a year ago
Can we prove AI can do the job of the CEO?
MonkderVierte 15 points a year ago
Company that made an AI its chief executive sees stocks climb
taladar 12 points a year ago
AI is pretty good at spouting bullshit but it doesn't have the same giant ego that human CEOs have so resources previously spent on coddling the CEO can be spent on something more productive. Not to mention it is a lot less effort to ignore everything an AI CEO says.
Melvin_Ferd 5 points a year ago
AI can replace CEOs and usher in a new business model where companies are co-operative based
jubilationtcornpone 3 points a year ago
They were going for "super intelligence" and instead they got Cliff Clavin from Cheers.
"It’s a little-known fact that the tan became popular in what is known as the Bronze Age."
avidamoeba 14 points a year ago
Jesus fucking Christ.
GnuLinuxDude 11 points a year ago
Employees should start setting up an AI to prove it can do Tobi Lutke's extremely difficult job of making a small number of important decisions every once in a while.
lka1988 3 points a year ago
Right?
"Oh you typed in a phone number/email address in a required field? Here's some spam you never asked for that we want you to confirm so we can continue spamming you, please bro just confirm it bro, just type in the code we sent you bro"
MashedTech 7 points a year ago
You know what happens when you use too much AI? Some important skills atrophy, and when you need to do the more complex job that the AI can't do, it will be even harder to do the more complex thing, because you've lost some base skills you rely on.
This doesn't apply only to coding: https://lucianonooijen.com/...
ImmersiveMatthew 7 points a year ago
I love AI and use it everyday, but right now it absolutely lacks logic, even the reasoning models and thus it really cannot replace a whole person outside of what 1 prompt can give you which is not a career.
Gibibit 6 points a year ago
Ah yes more paperwork is certainly going to make your employees more productive. Why don't you also require them to prototype if kicking a rock against the wall 10 times does the job, instead of actually letting them do the job?
gravitas_deficiency 6 points a year ago
Everyone stop doing your jobs
asyncopation 4 points a year ago
There are dozens of us. Dozens!!!
FriendBesto 5 points a year ago
These weird, creepy attempts at upboarding onto AI, sound like they are projecting FOMO onto people, for profit, of course.
frostysauce 4 points a year ago
Shopify is a stupid fucking name. I can only assume the company and service is equally as stupid.
11111one11111 13 points a year ago
Are you trolling or have you really never heard of shopify? Prolly every ecommerce website you've ever visited was built by either wix, big commerce or shopify with shopify (iirc) holding the largest market share of the 3. That may have changed since I last looked at adding e-commerce builders to my investment portfolio but theyre definitely top 3.
NotMyOldRedditName 13 points a year ago
Next thing you know he's going to say WordPress isn't used by anyone.
daggermoon 4 points a year ago
It's being used by less people now because their CEO is a fucking idiot who's trying to destroy it.
frostysauce 3 points a year ago
I've heard the (stupid) name before but had no idea what they did. Not everyone on Lemmy works in tech or has investment portfolios... But it sounds like if I've bought something online I've probably used them before?
MangoCats 1 point a year ago
Define stupid: https://www.google.com/search?q=shopify+financials
friend_of_satan 2 points a year ago path: 0 16337118, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
doodledup -15 points a year ago
Every CEO should do that. There's so much bureaucracy and unnecessary bloat in companies that can be reduced if the leadership is a little more riguous. This is especially important in the current market.
AHamSandwich 1 point a year ago
🤮
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Former shopify employee here. Tobi is scum, and surrounds himself with scum. He looks up to Elon and genuinely admires him.
save