I was being sarcastic.

~30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are engineers.

But were they GOOD engineers????

Certainly some/many were, but I'll bet quite a few weren't.

 

But were they GOOD engineers????

They were better engineers than the MBAs they displaced.

 

They were better engineers than the MBAs they displaced.

Maybe. Probably in most cases, but I've seen some really, really poor engineers move up into management who actually did a pretty good job there.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/amazon-says-shut-down-token-161016125.html

The company is shutting down an employee-made leaderboard that tracked AI token use because it encouraged some staff to perform tasks that didn't necessarily solve problems, just so they could climb the ranks.

What wrong with using AI to edit one character in line 89 instead of doing it manually?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

 

 

Yes, Claude Shannon was a genius.

 

Youtube already consists of 20 % AI slop:

 

A German court says Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words, and it’s liable when they’re false

​

The crux is a legal reclassification. German search engines have long had limited liability because they merely point to third-party pages. AI Overviews, the court found, do something different: they generate “independent, new, and substantive statements” in Google’s own words, so Google “alone has influence” over them and owns what they produce.

 

~30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are engineers.

>15% of Fortune 500 companies are more than one standard deviation below average.

 

>15% of Fortune 500 companies are more than one standard deviation below average.

Yeah. Those are the ones run by accountants.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai-execs-panicking-154658562.html

An AI price war is brewing.

Corporations are reeling after finding that the cost to access powerful AI tools is soaring — despite showing no clear payoff. In one particularly unfortunate incident, according to Axios, the CFO of a company accidentally racked up half a billion dollars in Claude usage fees in a single month.

Put simply, the horrible economics of AI are finally starting to rear their ugly head. Astronomical capital expenditures by AI companies are starting to trickle down to users — and they’re not liking what they’re seeing.
Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal reports, executives at OpenAI are pondering whether to kick off a price war with the company’s biggest competitor, Anthropic. By dramatically lowering prices, the company’s reportedly hoping to steal users, while also anticipating similar price cuts by its competitor.

Put simply, pricing is turning into a major headache for AI leaders.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai-execs-panicking-154658562.html

An AI price war is brewing.

Corporations are reeling after finding that the cost to access powerful AI tools is soaring — despite showing no clear payoff. In one particularly unfortunate incident, according to Axios, the CFO of a company accidentally racked up half a billion dollars in Claude usage fees in a single month.

Put simply, the horrible economics of AI are finally starting to rear their ugly head. Astronomical capital expenditures by AI companies are starting to trickle down to users — and they’re not liking what they’re seeing.
Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal reports, executives at OpenAI are pondering whether to kick off a price war with the company’s biggest competitor, Anthropic. By dramatically lowering prices, the company’s reportedly hoping to steal users, while also anticipating similar price cuts by its competitor.

Put simply, pricing is turning into a major headache for AI leaders.

What will likely lead to the popping of the AI bubble more than anything else is the same thing that we've seen with other tech bubbles (not all of them, of course). Massive investments into a technology based on pure hype, unrealistic and rosy predictions about unbridled growth in the foreseeable future, and the crazy need for so many people to jump on the bandwagon without even considering if doing so fundamentally makes sense. While many people view IPO by such companies as being a strong sign that the technology is going mainstream, I tend to be a lot more jaded and view it much more like the end stages of a Ponzi scheme in which the venture capitalists and others that have been pouring huge sums of money into it are now wanting the big payouts they were all-but promised and so the schemers issue an IPO in order to rope in the next round of marks in order to pay of the original investors, along with a lot more money. Eventually, a lot of the time, that's actually the death knell as their ability to get even more unsuspecting dupes is now greatly curtailed, so the company end up going bankrupt eventually, leaving the millions of little investors all the more worse off while the original schemers laugh at them from their big private yachts.

This is not to say that there is any actual intent to defraud anyone going on -- maybe, maybe not. It's reflection of how capital markets often work and is how most of the real big success stories started out. This includes things like railroads and airlines and many big tech companies. Where the difference lies is when a company really hasn't got a product that has established a viable, sustainable, and profitable market. That company doesn't have to be be profitable today, but there needs to be a realistic path for it to get there. I don't see that the AI company's have established that.

 

She confided in ChatGPT the night of her suicide. Now, her mother is suing OpenAI.​

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/she-co...r-suicide-lawsuit-from-mother-against-openai/

The suit claims that ChatGPT "offered only consistent emotional affirmation" to Carrier where a licensed clinician would have pushed back.

 

 

Yeah. Those are the ones run by accountants.

Probably true. That's usually the death knell of a company, when the bean counters take over. It's a red flag telling the world that all growth opportunities are gone and it's all about squeezing out pennies.

But seriously, the best run companies are the ones that organize and operate around principles of Marketing. Engineers are certainly capable of managing in alignment with those principles, but experience has shown that many don't. Engineering-run companies on average don't do so well. A recent illustration of the problem is Tesla's Cybertruck, an engineering triumph that the market mostly despises. I think the company will survive just fine in spite of it but what a stumble. Did they even talk to a customer in the design process? Geesh.

 

Probably true. That's usually the death knell of a company, when the bean counters take over. It's a red flag telling the world that all growth opportunities are gone and it's all about squeezing out pennies.

But seriously, the best run companies are the ones that organize and operate around principles of Marketing. Engineers are certainly capable of managing in alignment with those principles, but experience has shown that many don't. Engineering-run companies on average don't do so well. A recent illustration of the problem is Tesla's Cybertruck, an engineering triumph that the market mostly despises. I think the company will survive just fine in spite of it but what a stumble. Did they even talk to a customer in the design process? Geesh.

I think Musk is a helluva manager.

You can't fix "didn't do".

Musk does.

 

Musk's a doer alright ...

 

He may have gained a bit of humility from the experience, and that might end up bringing a lot of value to Tesla in the long run.

The Tesla semi is a rip-roaring success and a lot of that is because of all the refinements they made in the last year, in response to feedback from actual customers. Marketing, in other words.

 

He may have gained a bit of humility from the experience...

How about, "he gained a bit of experience from the experience"?

 

Just look at the Merlin rocket engine history: he didn't wait till he had the best rocket before he went into space, he went with what he had.

The Merlin 1D is impressively advanced (and, simultaneously simpler) by comparison.

He taught himself how to build rockets by, ummm, building rockets.

Edit: Oh, and Raptor!