alt Hacker NewsAre there any companies outside of the "AI shovels" business that make more money because of AI? Every time I ask someone why they went so hard on adopting AI, I hear the same story about the fear of losing the market share or becoming less competitive. Honest question, who is benefitting from all of this? The revenues at majority of companies seem flat at best. There is a growing concern about professionals getting deskilled, the job satisfaction is not improving, wages are stagnant. Mind-boggling that we are actively engaged and often push for this experiment that hurts our own profession. Cheering for our own demise.
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Not keen on outing myself by providing evidence, but I think we do generate more revenue by using AI. We launched new products with a small team and also optimized our outcome-pricing based product using AI several times. We also reduced costs by self-hosting more software.
But we're a tiny baby startup, so things like "spin up a new product with 1 engineer and get to $1m in revenue on it" or "reduce our IaaS bill by 300k/yr" is a meaningful contribution for us.
We're also building new AI-enabled software that was not possible before.
The big breakout hits have been AI Infra, but that makes sense from a technological perspective, Cisco made a lot of money well before Google did, but Cisco is not where the money concentrated in the end.
We don't really know what the equivalent of Google as an application business will be in the AI era, but there's a pretty big chance it's not actual Google. But Google still has to do it's best to hold on.
I use AI compatibility as a metric when evaluating new software to add to my stack. If an AI agent isn’t able to do most of what you can do in the app by opening it, I prefer to look for other options.
Does not apply to everything though. E.G: I don’t care about AI support for my non work chats/email, since I’d rather not give it access.
Yes.
Engineering’s job has always been to deal with hard technical challenges and apply new technologies.
Writing code was never the point. Predictably creating specific outcomes was. Wrangling AI in a way that multiplies productivity is the new job.
I won’t lie, it kind of sucks to be young right now, learn about punch cards and assembly in school, and then graduate into a market that’s moved on to Fortran. Sorry, I meant high level languages and AI. To say otherwise might imply the industry has seen a similar shift in the past where engineers made the exact same complaints practically verbatim.
Regardless, the reality is that college teaches very little about 90% of real engineering work anyway, and we still need to hire smart people for this new type of work.