There have been a few recent stories about businesses finding themselves spending more on tokens than they were spending on the workers these AI Agents were supposed to have replaced.
>compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people
Particularly when the mechanism behind most of these peptides comes down to "promotes more rapid cell growth". The intent may be to repair the skin, muscles, or ligaments, but biology is rarely that specific.
Agree. People understand and accept firing for performance issues. People understand and accept layoffs when they're a rare event needed to save the company from bankruptcy. What's not understandable or acceptable to most is the current trend of companies doing annual or even quarterly layoffs as an ongoing way to manage earnings.
This is why I've started telling younger people in the industry (I'm 52) "Don't worry about giving two weeks notice or doing knowledge transfer, it's not your problem. If you accept an offer and a better offer comes in before you start, take it and don't think twice. If the better offer comes in after you started, quit and take it, and don't think twice. If you're in the middle of a critical project at work and they're depending on you when a better offer comes in, take it and walk away." Loyalty in employment relations has been dead for a long time, since before I started working, but now it seems that even basic decorum on the part of employers is dead as well, and there's no reason to allow it to be asymmetric.
Once you get outside the SV and NYC bubbles, the vast majority of kids do not have their own laptops in the US. Phones, obviously are somewhat more common, but as even you note that's mainly with regard to teenagers - the average 10 year old in middle America does not have their own phone.
Age verification at the OS level makes no sense to me. Most households aren't going to have a separate device for every family member and so you will end up with a tablet or computer set up by one of the parents (and thus having their age stored) that will be used by both parents and children. Likewise, people generally won't create a separate account for every potential user.
> Nvidia's "rack scale" machines like GB200-NVL72s and GB300-NVL72s are basically a fully built rack you roll into a DC and plug into power and network. In that case, Oracle should probably just buy the rack-scale Vera Rubins when they come out instead of Blackwells and roll them into their new DCs.
This is what I don't understand. Why is the article making the assumption that the DC itself is tied to a particular GPU generation? AWS doesn't knock down a building and start over every time Intel releases a new Xeon.
> a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go
That seems like an insane gamble to me. Lay off all the workers now and hope that AI can deliver on its promise to replace them some time in the indeterminate future.
At this point it seems the entire AI Safety/Ethics debate was nothing more than a Marketing campaign to hype up the capabilities of the models - get people to think that if they're potentially dangerous that must mean they're so capable and they need to sign up for a subscription.
> the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023
The overhiring took place from mid 2020 through mid 2022. The reversal into layoffs started in late 2022 and was in full swing in 2023. While the overhiring problem was real, the correction was largely complete over a year ago. The layoffs we're seeing today have nothing to do with overhiring and everything to do with managing earnings to sustain equity valuations.
Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.
It's shocking to me how prevalent this "who needs Salesforce when everyone can just vibe code their own CRM from scratch in a day" narrative has become in the business press. Like, what???
Oracle is a perfect example of using empty AI partnership announcements to goose the stock price and also a perfect example of how unsustainable of a strategy it is.
Given that they have around 44,000 employees in total and they surely aren't firing all of their managers, it would seem they have a lot of managers. The press release indicates most of the reduction is in IT, so internal operations, not Engineering/Product or Sales/Marketing.