The closer people live to the consequences of their decisions the more rational they become. Until leaders(and I use that term loosely) are held accountable, the insanity will continue.

I've been enjoying journalist Ed Zitron's recent diatribes about how impossible it is to find a business leader who had a plan for measuring their ROI from adopting AI coding.

What he says he's consistently hearing from them mirrors what I saw at my own employer: they thought they had ROI metrics, but they actually only had usage metrics such as "lines of code committed" or "number of pull requests". The only way those could possibly work as an ROI measure is if your business charges customers by the line of code.

I feel like most successful businesses have such a moat of required capital to compete with them that even tho in theory poor decisions like this is supposed to give opportunities for entreprenuers to hit when the big dogs make a wrong move, it doesn't end up happening.

> leaders

Don’t play their game and call them leaders. They are management, bosses, executives.

> They are making decisions about things that they just don't understand. And are completely unworried about it.

Clowns, even.

> Just blindly following whatever the news cycle is about AI.

But followers might be most apt.

——

This is such a huge pet peeve of mine. Describing management goofs using their language that makes them sound all-so-brilliant. We constantly watch these people do the dumbest shit and then they go around describing themselves as “thought leaders” and “servant leaders”. When, really, most are just clowns with fragile egos.

And, while I’m rambling, they’ve tried to take away the fact we are workers by calling us individual contributors. Using language to attempt and hide the hierarchy and power dynamic at play. It just…bothers me so much.

Groups resist to change - the bigger the group, the most resistance there is.

As a leader, pushing for rapid change cannot really be nuanced lest the push dissipates into the organization's entropy.

That's nothing new though. It's just very obvious this time.

I've never seen self-awareness from leaders. They always lead on vibes.

Understanding this was one of the most important things in my career.

During ZIRP they discovered that the way to lead companies nowadays is to become a maxxer of whatever current fad is, and the more you maxx the better. And then when things change and you're wrong, you'll be a strong leader and, in ZIRPs case fire everyone you over-hired, with AI will be similar.

Why be a normal guy that waits to see what happens and is measured and pragmatic when you can get attention basically through the whole cycle by being the earliest adopter, adopt it to the maxx, then also be the loudest big brain when the tide changes and be praised for "taking hard decisions" when you revert everything you said so far?

The fakemaxxing economy.

Having studied control theory I think it makes perfect sense. When trying to make a system target a new level it's quite natural for there to be overshoot that needs to be reigned in. It's also natural for the correction to go too far and need to be corrected in turn. This is not indicative of stupidity it's completely normal.

It would only be laughable if they waited way too long to reverse course, but I don't think that's the case.

The actual cost is going to drop 99% in ~4 years.

How much that makes it into enterprise pricing is TBD, since none of the hyper scalers are making money yet of selling AI inference.

Almost all businesses are ahead of the gun. For most of their use cases, AI is either not yet good enough on its own, or good enough but too expensive.

No one wants to get left behind, so everyone's trying to get onto it now, even though it's not ready for what most enterprises want to do with it.

It's easy for them to look at a small startup without billions of lines of legacy business logic debt and see them having success and wonder why they can't have just as much - or more - why they're bigger so they should have better and more success, right???

Wrong...

But when it gets ~99% cheaper for local inference over the next 4 years, at the same time the price per watt improve 4x -> a lot of those cases will start to pencil out.