Tech Workers Share 40 Dark Truths That The General Public Rarely Understands About AI

Google make around $250 billion per year from controlling nearly all of the online advertising market.

Open AI need to recoup $1.5 trillion ($1,500 billion) just to break even on their hardware investment costs.

Their current *revenue* is just $13 billion per year.

For every over hyped startup promising an AI revolution, there are 1000 white collar people quietly using LLMs daily for basic tasks. Without much thought they won't need to hire a junior developer or expand their admin staff or backfill the guy that retired because they can do more and do it faster.

The dirty secret is that entry level white collar jobs are vanishing. Which means universities are selling a ticket for a train that's being dismantled and the pipeline for filling future senior roles is empty.

Reddit partnered with Google last year. This part isn't that much of a secret, but what most people don't realize is that everything, and I mean absolutely everything, you post here is being used to train Google's AI model. Then, said model is being used to post back on reddit for many different purposes, through bot accounts. Then, it all gets fed back into AI, posted again, fed back and so on. So not only you're all here arguing with bots, but you're arguing with lobotomized braindead bots who are using your own regurgitated words back at you. It's kinda like playing tennis against a wall with a poorly-made drawing of you taped on it.

AI cant fully replace a software engineer… not even a junior @.@, in order for any company to have a shot at replacing devs they need a strong development process that is well documented / comprehensive which very very few companies have.

Most of what companies are pushing as AI - is NOT AI. It’s just automation. It’s just getting systems to talk to each other and kick off processes without human intervention.

Agentic AI bots are in essence just connected to FAQ documents which look for key words, and then spit out the answers and create zendesk tickets (which are worked on by actual people) on the backend automatically. Then when it recognizes more help is needed beyond its prompts, it connects to REAL people to solve it.

So yes, AI and automation are changing the workforce. But they aren’t doing near as much as what tech companies claim they are.

I’m on the construction side and a lot of the contractors building these AI data centers have no idea what they’re doing. The demand is for these data centers to be built as quickly as possible. But there simply aren’t enough competent general contractors in the market that can do it. So that leads to a bunch of GCs and subcontractors with no experience in data center work building these projects.

That means a lot of mistakes and rework is required in the field. Making these projects double or triple time more expensive to build than originally budgeted.

I think at some point the costs (data centers, energy, the models themselves) will far outweigh the benefits for most companies.

AI companies don't make money, and most of the startups are scams to get VC and bounce. Also just because AI can't actually do your job doesn't mean your boss won't fire you and try to replace you with it. It's not the AI convincing them, it's the salesman.

AI is not new. People act like LLMs (the things that power ChatGPT and the like) are the be-all and end-all of AI, but it's really just the first "viral" AI tool. AI has been critical to nearly every product and service you've used in the last 15 years; everything uses recommendation systems and computer vision and speech recognition. LLMs are an incredible leap forward in text generation (and now image generation), but those are probably two of the least practically useful applications of AI.

AI engineering has been my full-time job since 2016, and the biggest difference since COVID is not what we can do, but how management wants us to do it.

The ability to measure its impact and ROI within the majority of organizations is basically non-existent and a massive after thought.

Whenever Copilot pops up in excel, outlooks, or powerpoint it is being counted as if the employee actually used it, they are equating that to time being saved therefore $'s saved in efficiency. The numbers reported by the tools counter (Viva) is showing millions of dollars in savings in larger organizations when in reality it isnt even close to that...

Executives who spend for their organization to have 'AI' are simply doing so, so that they can tell their boss that they are adapting and using AI, and they can say the same to their boss, etc. etc. It is a solution, looking for a problem.

Also - 90% of the agents we build cost the company $300k for a team to implement and it is just us hooking up a query to a knowledge source to get information they probably would've found by themselves a tad bit faster...

That it looks like we've come up with a way to waste even more energy (and now water) even faster than using bitcoin for McDonald's.

It isn't private. While some companies are trying to keep your data private, most are using it then to train from. This is particularly scary when some people are pushing it for uses like therapy where the data is extremely sensitive.

The tech companies are financing each other to keep afloat, its a scam for more money.

Lots of companies waste huge amounts of money using AI to solve problems that would be far easier to solve without AI just so their execs can say ‘we use AI too’ to the market.

Genuine organisational use cases where AI is the best of all available solutions and provides true ROI are vanishingly small. The current market around it is a huge bubble but everyone’s too invested to let the cat out the bag..

It’s the corporate equivalent of a tween trend with trillions of dollars behind it.

As an outsider looking in, I'm thinking that the biggest secret about AI/AGI is that it's an out-of-control mess that nobody really knows what to do with.

I work at a big tech company in Silicon Valley that you’ve definitely heard of.

AI isn’t a smokeshow, isn’t a bubble, and is quite possibly undervalued in terms of the impact it might have on society.

AI is quite possibly the most powerful and unique technology in the history of the Valley. We’ve observed that as we scale the model size and data used to train it, the performance increases to the point where it can now outperform humans on almost every benchmark of intelligence we can come up with.

As a result every company is in a prisoners dilemma to build the most powerful AI models, because the potential reward is so high.

Everything you’ve put into ChatGPT and most larger AI bots is searchable to anyone and there is little legislation limiting companies from providing it to law enforcement on the backend.

There are very few people who are pushing AI that have a clue on how to use it. Personally I think its going to be like the metaverse but instead of just Facebook buying in the whole world is.

I think it is super inefficient they talk of wanting more data centers all over, yet we have climate change, etc. And nobody wants nuclear power, they keep taking over farmland for solar fields seems insane. I have a feeling this will be a fad and then explode like the .com bust.

Progress in AGI has very much plateaued because of LLMs. 3 years ago, the big ml conferences would have dozens of new ideas and fundemental research presented, now its all minor modifications and micro optimizations of existing attention based architectures. And the benchmarks reflect this sadly.