Mo Bitar had a bit of advice that I think is applicable here: Lie. Claim to be an extreme 10x vibe whatever. Put “AI enablement” (whatever the fuck that means) in your LinkedIn profile. And wherever you get hired, commit to using enormous amounts of tokens as they require.

Then just… write code. Oh, definitely use the LLMs, too, but not for anything important. Set them to work writing BASH scripts or something. Get them burning through tokens to summarize all the corporate documentation you can find. Have agents creating agents to test the output of other agents and report to more agents on what the agents are doing. Meanwhile, do real work. Make sure that for every PR, you have the AI do one thing on it, to give it that code-slop shine.

Sucks that this is where we’re at, but it is what it is.

I’m sorry that happened to you. I’ve also seen it happen to a lot of very good engineers I’ve known over the years. It’s truly insane. I know some people who’ve had to dip into their 401k accounts early just to keep their heads above water, and it’s going to be an economy-wide disaster soon.

Throwing good money after bad just to avoid having to admit they fucked up, huh.

What are you talking about?

Software engineer, here. Yep, the burnout is real. I consider myself fortunate, however; with the skyrocketing cost of AI, my employer has been urging us to do as much as possible by hand lately to cut back on token usage.

I think that’s pretty much where the entire industry will go soon.

It’s related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they’re cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they’re buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.

As soon as the first one fails, it’s all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.

If you’re referring to the Chinese Room, I don’t personally find it to be a compelling argument against the hypothetical possibility of AGI. The proposed room has no way to store information, no way to incorporate that information into its system, and no way to initiate activity without external input.

Heck, now that I think about it, it’s actually a pretty good description of the way LLMs actually work. But not the way an autonomous thinking agent works.

But LLMs are incapable of acquiring or understanding information.

Generally not.

First off, there are definitely cognates, because English borrows a ton of words from French (and modern French borrows some words from English), but in many cases the usage differs substantially.

For example, if I want to describe someone as very “sensitive” in French, I would probably say something like, “il est très sensible.” Related word, but in English, “sensible” means something like “shows good judgment.” To describe someone as sensible in French, you say, “il est sensé.”

Secondly, the pronunciation differs a lot. The French “sensible” sounds something like “sonseebluh” to native English speakers. You have to have already tuned your ear to the sounds of French words to pick out most cognates.

It’s absurd that this is even a question for some people. We may get AGI someday, but a vector database that generates streams of tokens based on tokens that it receives as input is never going to be it no matter how huge you make it. It lacks a world model, it doesn’t have the capacity to update itself with new information, and - most importantly - it doesn’t even do anything until it receives input.

And the assholes pushing this as potential AGI fucking know all that already. They know that without input, LLMs literally do nothing. They’re not sitting there going, “I think therefore I am” while waiting around to hallucinate dangerous medical advice and fake case law at people. They are static and unchanging.