Very anecdotally after recently having gone through the interview loop for the last 3 months (and finally landing something last week, yay), there was barely any talk about AI in any of my interviews, both from startups and from larger companies. There was 1 or 2 startups that had some trite things like "AI Native Engineer" for the role, but when I asked my interviewers what that even meant, they basically told me they had no idea and it was something management was pushing to attract people interested in building AI features.
I've done somewhere around 60 or 70 interviews the last 3 months and in every single one I asked "What role do you see LLMs serving in the day-to-day work at $COMPANY, and in the products you're building? And what are your personal thoughts on LLMs and how useful you've found them?". I was pleasantly surprised that nearly everyone had pretty level-headed views about the topic, mostly along the lines of "There's definite potential, it's very useful in some specific tasks, but it's not an all-intelligent panacea like it's being sold to everyone". This included the VP of Engineering at a very large, influential and successful company in the Netherlands who was extremely wary of LLMs. If I had to put a very non-scientific number on the views I encountered, I'd say roughly 80% of companies/teams I talked to were very neutral and balanced on AI, around 10% were fanatics about AI, and the remaining 10% were extremely anti-AI and didn't want anyone on their teams touching them for any of the work.
Caveats of course that this was entirely anecdotal to my experience in recent interviews, and this was all for companies in the Netherlands (both remote roles & local), but I think the tide is starting to turn slowly and people are sobering up a bit from all the incessant, endless hype regarding LLMs (AI is too broad a word with too many actually useful things and it's a shame it's been conquered by the recent LLM hype). You wouldn't think so reading through HN, but then again if you look through recent YC batches like 99% of them mention AI/LLMs in some capacity even when it makes no sense.
Well, "entirely anecdotal" it is not! That's a very good sampling space (60-70 interviews) by, yes, a "biased researcher", one that is looking for a job which would skew the replies by the "respondents", but still excellent job, I would totally acquire your entire research report on the industry when it comes out if that was the case.
People highly criticize evergreen jobs, not without reason, but continuously doing job interviews as an evergreen job candidate is an excellent way to poke and gauge the industry, as it is of the job market, especially if it gets past the HR screening phase.
The biggest side cost (that’ll ultimately kill AI investment for awhile once this bubble pops) is the fact that for many people LLM = AI.
It’s going to be difficult to justify AI investment in private financial markets - causing more consolidation and control of future technology to fall into the hands of the large tech firms.
It’s a gamble that Sam Altman and others have taken - hoping and praying it won’t blow up in their face.
I think Sam Altman will be just fine. Also, Since he has no access to a revolutionary new architecture anyways, that was his shot. Why should he not take it.
You clearly missed my point.