I already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say.
Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
People that are saying OpenAI is screwed because a lack of profit, I'm not of that opinion. They are encroaching on every industry they can. They have name brand recognition, a huge user base and are showing they can be a valuable tool to all types of businesses.
As much as I hate to see it. They are now threatening industries like Engineers, Game Developers, Accountants, 3D modelers, 3D animators, Video Production, Audio Production, Therapist, Tax Auditors, Journalists, Authors, Artists, Mathematicians, Product managers, Every type of analyst and pretty much any other job that can be done behind a computer screen.
I used ChatGPT the other day to resink a CPU with termal paste, replace a PSU in my PC and snake my kitchen sink from the wall. I didn't exactly need it's help but wanted someone looking over my shoulder so to speak. It can help you repair all types of stuff, but as far as county / building codes and such, that probably isn't far off. It seems to understand things quite well.
By that point money ceases to have value, because the value of money comes from the motivation it gives people to work. If AI does everything, then money is useless (unless AI like money for some reason).
There will still be a need to distribute and exchange ressources, goods and services.
Real estate, food, energy, mobility.
That will be done with money. Or violence. Either way, a scary future to people when labor doesn't provide any value. Elon promises abundance, but what can he do against greed?
Yeah could get interesting. Things like legal, programming, math, etc. are going to be relatively cheap / free. Meanwhile something like natural resources, building things, yardwork, etc. may go up in value. Or perhaps we end up with a relatively "spiky" economy since 90% of people are just doing physical jobs (the only human jobs with value), and the AI owner class of course gains all the value from intellectual products (with value diminishing towards cost of electricity). Thinking as human value may be roughly as valuable as it ever was (which is to say nearly non-existant other than the ability to solve an immediate physical problem). Might also be that physical strength and stamina are the highest value mating traits, since they will be able to protect and provide. Physically weak intellectual types will have little value since they can't out-think the machines, and they also can't provide for a family by doing valuable physical tasks. IQ overall begins to drop as mating favors intelligence less and less, as it can actually be an impedance to being productive.
For a short time in history, the ability to obsessively focus on intellectually interesting abstract concepts was highly lucrative, but just as quickly we returned to the laws of nature: those who can lift and move succeed, those who can only think are automated out of existance.
We go from a species increasingly seeing themselves as "brains with bodies" to "amazing bodies with weak brains". The limitation of robots and AI in the physical realm, power hungry, mobility limited are contrasted with human values: energy efficient, highly mobile and dexterous, extremely good strength/speed/size ratios. The brain on the other hand, while energy efficient, is completely outclassed and seen as we see our swimming/jumping abilities: a novelty for sports, but nothing we seriously consider a defining human trait.
The smartest humans can fill weekends with novelty pursuits like building circuits, games, programs, etc. But they are about as useful as whittling and hobby woodcraft, something to pass time, but ultimately of no economic value.
there are always be next frontier of problems which require creativity, unless AI become supersmart completely make humans redundant in all cognitive functions.
Most HNers are clueless that if you have Top Talent + Capital you already have an insurmountable moat. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic all have that and none of the regular guys can compete against them (if they choose to attack that industry)
20 year industry vet here. Yeah, no thank you. In the age of AI, developer productivity and job security will involve your proprietary workflow. It no longer makes sense to share your knowledge with the world.
I've also worked 20 years in the industry, and if feel completely the opposite. Having a great setup and pipeline that works for you is a huge plus, but nothing can replace the intuition and knowhow you have built up with experience. Sharing is still caring, and we should not stop caring
Serious question, why? Nobody gives a fuck if I'm out of a job, especially OpenAI and Anthropic. They stole the worlds knowledge to put us out of a job and arguably took away what it means to be a human. Why should I contribute anything more to that?
Solving hard problems will be the only thing that separates you from others. Your mindset and tools should be a trade secret at this point.
You're not going to lose your job because you shared your AI setup / tools with your colleagues. You're going to lose your job because management over-hired and is being pressured by shareholders to reduce employee salary expenses. It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have if management is forced to have layoffs and you're in an unlucky situation. If you're worried about job security, you should consider joining a union and not be fixated on knowledge sharing.
> It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have
This is false on its face. There's a reason why a company, even today, would hire John Carmack over a person with no reputation, or offer him a higher salary if employing both people.
Unionising is definitely something worth considering. But, as with the question of whether it's better to compete or cooperate with other people in your field, is a nuanced question that depends on details you aren't acknowledging.
I think you've introduced a new dimension that is irrelevant to the original argument -- namely the original debate in this thread fork was that "knowledge sharing" is not what is killing your job security. Your comparison to John Carmack, is more an argument about competency rather than knowledge-sharing, and so yes that's pretty much a trivially obvious and true statement: a highly competent employee has more job security than a less competent one. Great, you win that point, nobody is arguing against that.
But also, do you not see the irony in the fact that, aside from John Carmack's obviously high degree of individual competency, another huge aspect of Carmack's value as an engineer, is how he's dedicated a huge portion of his career and his time to -- wait for it -- SHARING his knowledge and his approach (and yes, his personal setup? [1]). Carmack is actually an excellent proof-point of the positive value of knowledge-sharing and building a career on a foundation of openness, rather than an argument that engineers should selfishly guard their secrets and retreat into their own personal caves to guard their perceived local/private moats.
[1] Just one random example, out of probably thousands of such interviews or blog posts or whatever that he's probably done over his career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzr7hRXcwkw
I was only objecting to this claim in the parent post:
> It won't matter what hard problem solving moat you think you have
If that is "a new dimension that is irrelevant to the original argument", you'll have to take that up with them. (I think it is a load-bearing part of their core argument.)
It's a great point. At 36, Steve House released a video in 2006 about all his climbing equipment (someone talked him into it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKK-e4gVVA (reupload) I thinked he helped a lot of people with that video in the super competitive world of mountaineering. This was after a legendary ascent of Nanga Parbat. May well have shot himself in the foot but also cemented his status as YT was taking off at the time. Moreover, I think he likes/liked teaching.
A year or two ago there were some very precise workflows documented here. The reluctance now would mark the transition away from "sharing helps me" to "sharing hinders me" ...it's an interesting topic. Sharing with strangers may be the problem because the favour will never be returned - at least not in a direct way. But, metaphysically according to natural laws it might be. Because sharing a valuable secret openly is such a powerful way to express abundance. It grants someone followers. It also prevents people from filing a patent on it.
4 years later House survived a 25m climbing fall.
It's all about one's internal motivation. "Those that can, do, and those that can't, teach."
Well, what happens if "those that can," actually teach?
Just imagine if all sporting stars shared their secrets.. what would happen? Secrets just occur naturally, if you don't share, they'll likely be stolen unless protected - and that requires effort too.
6 months ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly with you. Lately however I've observed coworkers vibe coding massive band-aids over broader architectural issues in our codebase without any prior context.
They have no understanding of (nor any desire to understand) what they're doing, but they are being given kudos by management for their "initiative" to solve the organization's "big problems." Guess who will be asked to clean up the mess if (when) it blows up.
It's getting cheaper and cheaper to kick the can down the road, and standing in front of that risks making you look like a dinosaur. It's going to be an interesting few years...
Seeing how these kids walk around with smug faces telling everyone they will "do IT now" just because claude told them so and manament wants ai everywhere made me sad at first, but then hey - everything this world keeps being destroyed, no matter how intelligent creators were. Perhaps there is some fundamental law in it.
Two years ago, I'd consider this attitude as ungrateful. Today, this attitude is 100% correct and I slowly start to be like that.
People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security. I actually recently thought of nuking the entire IaC setup and go back to shell scripts on random virtual machines. Too bad that Claude can figure things like that out pretty easily. Well, the world sucks now.
I've landed here as well, but by force. I've actually tried to share some of the productivity and workflow tools I've built with AI that help automate portions of my work, specifically on target firmware debugging, and everyone at work just...ignored it. Didnt care. Of the small number of people who even stopped to look, a few of them were actively negative. Maybe I didnt sell it hard enough, but my job isnt to sell productivity tools internally (or even make them, i did it for myself). So, I'll keep making myself more productive and build tools for myself. And everyone else will just have to figure out their own path. I tried to help, but oh well.
I can appreciate why you'd come to this conclusion, but may I offer one idea that I think you've potentially overlooked?
Unless you are a solo founder running your own company by yourself (in which case ignore the rest of this comment!), then your fundamental job security is likely to be predicated on the survival of your company as well as the survival of your own individual job itself.
From the company-survival POV, all companies are engaged in competition (unless they have a total monopoly).
Therefore I ask you to consider the competitive scenario, of whether a competitor to your company who adopts a more collaborative culture, might be more likely to outcompete your company (assuming everyone you work with in your own company adopts a similarly "dick"-ish stance, to use your own words), and therefore you lose your job due to being out-competed, rather than due to internal politics or due to a failure to guard your personal expertise?
Maybe you say -- I don't care if my company is out-competed, I'll just get another job. Ok fair enough, but might it not be possible that, in a future job interview, they may ask you for examples of collaboration? And if you commit to a monk-like devotion to solitude and privacy, then maybe you are undercutting your own future hireability?
There are no free lunches [1]. By optimizing for one thing (what you view as protecting yourself), you might be sabotaging another dimension (your company's overall competitiveness, or your future hireability).
Anyway, nobody knows shit about shit. I certainly don't pretend to be an authority, but I would caution you to avoid coming to a hasty conclusion, especially since it seems emotions are involved and possibly clouding your judgement. You may also consider whether this decision to protect yourself in this way, is in itself a premature (micro?) optimization of a sort, and if whether you might be failing to optimize on a more macro level.
That's a fair judgement, thanks. Sure - if we consider the entire economy, then it is definitely true that more collaborative companies will outcompete companies full of self-centered monks. I am only considering the local situation, and I certainly hear similar voices from friends at many other organizations.
People might think I'm a dick, I don't care, my tools, my knowledge, my job security.
If you're feeling ponderous, I'd ask you to consider the outlandish hypothetical that this doesn't win you meaningful[1] job security, and you end up in the same bucket o' crabs as the rest of us. Would you regret your current actions?
[1]: anywhere from the fathomable "my harness didn't come up in my layoff email nor in any of my failed interviews following that" to the realistic "the entire concept of employment shifted under our feet so quickly and so profoundly that a dash of solidarity & luck outweighed even the shrewdest preparations".
People think that job security means "I'm unfirable god and king". What it really means is "I am sitting comfortably mid-low on a sorted to-fire candidate list, if it needs to happen at some point for some reason".
You should check the provenance and licenses of your dependencies -- I bet there's a few irrational gifts in there from the nerds in the "open source" community ;)
This is true. I also think part of your job security will be constantly racing on this treadmill to make sure you're able to incorporate that next model (if applicable). Meaning incorporate your tools, existing knowledge, harnesses, configs etc...
I’ve felt for a long time that the things I loved when I first started programming aren’t really there anymore. This comment made me realize that world truly is completely gone.
This is really disappointing. I love programming community because they just share or open(-source) their knowledge with an absolute no cost. There's tons of resources about how to build a OS, DB, Apps, etc. I'm curious why would you think differently about AI workflows.
> they just share or open(-source) their knowledge with an absolute no cost.
You need to consider how they were able to do that. For many people, it’s because they had highly paid, secure jobs that essentially funded their open source activity.l, even if only as a side project or personal project. If you take away that security and reliable funding, you destroy the environment that supported people sharing like that.
I'd fire you for having that blanket attitude. People haven't truly known how shit works in this industry for the entire fucking time. People are following patterns set out by arrogant pricks for reasons they don't know or care to know, they are just following orders.
That said, someone, somewhere in the chain should understand how the system works. I agree there.
Yeah, but in the corporate world now, you're being judged by how fast you get shit checked in. So, if you need to understand every line these days... you're going to end up in the bottom 25% of the company pretty quickly. Not saying you're wrong, just saying how fucked things are becoming.
Perverse incentives have always been the purview of bad management. Measuring things that don't cause success is easier than figuring out what actually matters. (It's also why I don't practice corporate medicine anymore.)
Honestly, the entire dev community should save question and answers, uploaded them to a shared repo anonymously, then just use that data to distill further models and provide them to the public for free.
Theoretically, this should be legal and ethical, when comparing to Anthropic's own behavior. That said, the reason you can't is Anthropic states in their terms that they don't want you to do this.
Anthropic's entire business model is skating on thin ice.
So basically, this entire conversation and article is summed up by 6 in one hand and a half dozen in the other in regards to this method vs traditional SPA's.
Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
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