alt Hacker NewsI have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
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Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
Cost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.