This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm so happy everyone in the comments is engaging in a thoughtful and informed manner and not just spouts uninformed nonsensical talking points from both sides to see who can shout the loudest.
His analogy about turning off AI is bloody weird. Pick almost any technology from history. Chances are if you had turned it off a few short years after it was first introduced, it wouldn't have had any major impact. Why would AI be any different?
Well, he hasn't been describing our future for at least two decades. /sarcasm
This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the "I wish I could do ____. but _____" ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer "a thing". This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We're at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.
I can only speak to my own area of expertise, biotechnology
and it appears that AI is in fact changing everything and doing so fast eg
The story itself is pretty ridiculous. He starts with a conclusion, and then looks for stories to support that narrative. What should happen, is first establish criteria to measure if an AI project has been successful or not and then measure projects against that criteria. Instead the author uses anecdotal stories of projects he has heard failed, so it must all be wrong.
Not one mention of the advances in medical research using AI, because it goes against his narrative.
If you read the article, he talks specifically about that. The people using AI for real shit, like protein folding, can use it to improve their work, because they're experts at it, and know when the AI is fucking up. The AI helps, but could never, ever, replace them.
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?" The answer is that these AI users are "centaurs" – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad.
Amazing analysis, thank you for sharing it.
