What follows is an email I wrote to a former boss of mine, who happens to be the owner of the business. They have always been a bit crazy, a bit greedy and have always fostered dysfunctional relationships with people. But after hearing about how hard they are going into AI from one of my former co-workers, I decided to drop them a line and speak my piece on this. I don’t believe this will make a difference, but I’m also done being quiet on this topic. Tiny bits of information and names have been redacted so as to protect the guilty and the innocent. I have also corrected a few tiny grammar mistakes in the original. Otherwise, here it is:
[Business Owner’s First Name],
Long time no chat.
Word around the campfire is that you are basically betting the farm on AI / LLMs. I’m sorry to hear that but I guess ultimately I’m not very surprised. I’d like to take a moment to offer you some of my thoughts. I’ll try to do it without cursing too much as I don’t want this email to get blocked by [Sys Admin’s First Name]’s pesky filters. That’s a big step for me because I really really dislike AI. Let me tell you why:
AI Is A Perception Trap
Its sycophantic and it ultimately always tells you that you are right. No matter how much a lot of us might try to deny it, there is something very appealing about taking hits off what one could refer to as a “crack pipe” of validation. It feels pretty good, doesn’t it? Well here’s the harsh truth: It’s all nonsense. None of it is true. Tech as a whole has devolved into a rent seeking enterprise and that has driven the industry to embrace one metric above all else: Engagement. This started with the social media platforms like Facebook who realized that people would spend more time on Facebook if they simply designed Facebook to show them only things that a get rise out of them (both good or bad). Then they could show more ads to those users and thus make more money.
AI is doing the exact same thing. It’s just hijacking your brains dopamine system to get you hooked and keep it there. But it’s hard to see that when you are within the trap because it feels so good.
You are in the trap.
AI Wont Last
Every single part of model development and running actual models is fueled by debt. Debt that will never ever be paid off. This will of course result in a severe economic correction. I believe that it will either happen this year or early next year. When it does happen, the immense costs required to train, run inference and actually operate the models will not be able to be ignored. AI service providers like Microsoft and Anthrophic have already made it clear that the billing structures for all of this are about to change because every single transaction is a net loss for them right now. AI is far more expensive than you seem to realize.
The money is going to run out and when these services raise their prices so that they cover their actual costs, the bottom will fall out of it. Shareholders and Venture Capitalists will turn tail and AI development will grind to a halt. What few AI services remain will become very expensive and less effective (see Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7 for a real world example of this part already playing out).
Your Employees And Ultimately You Will Pay The Price
When the AI goes away, guess what? Everything you built with it will suddenly become unmaintainable by the people you tasked with building it. You’ll need a dozen [My Replacement’s First Name]s to even have a snowball’s chance (see, I avoided the curse word here) of digging your way out of that hole. You won’t be able to hire actual effective people like me because we’ll have moved on to something entirely different by then.
Yeah that’s right. I don’t want to write code anymore. I hate this career. Why? There are a lot of reasons but the straw that has broken the proverbial camel’s back here is AI. My current employer is going insane over this too. Every hackathon and every technical presentation is all about AI. They are aggressively tracking AI metrics. I refuse to use any of it. Eventually they will fire me because of this. This is fine because I’d rather not do this anymore than spend my days trying to convince an LLM to create a crappy version of what I could’ve made on my own had I been allowed to.
In any event, the mess you are creating right now will need engineers to clean it up.
Good luck finding them.
Anyway - best of luck on your endeavors. One last word of advice: Don’t be so quick to fire / replace people with AI. You are rich enough. Is the prospect of another zero at the end of your bank account really going to change your life? Probably not. But hey I guess your mileage may vary. Maybe Elon Musk being on the verge of becoming the world’s first trillionaire has you feeling poor. Well don’t. You can still buy and sell the rest of us a hundred times over and still have enough money left over to wipe your butt with hundred dollar bills for the rest of your life without feeling remotely as poor as the rest of us feel.
Regards,
[My First Name]
I’m done being quiet. It’s high past time we stopped letting the fools and charlatans define this profession. But we can’t do that as long as we sit idly by and allow them to act with impunity. With that in mind, I’ve also started speaking out at work. That’s because as I stated, I’m done being quiet. I will not go quietly into the good night. I will rage against the dying light.
I encourage the rest of you to follow suit.