SuboptimalEng

I see you didn't read the description under the title :)

Exactly. Be prepared to switch companies/models at moments notice.

I mean, if someone truly disliked AI, the only natural course would be to ensure that they can switch to open source and not willingly give money + data to the frontier labs.

True. Maybe we could start with smaller sized GPUs until it becomes the norm in society to have GPU clusters in homes, then upgrade where necessary?

Get those AI companies to compete on who installs the GPUs, and let them offer incentives to you (the house owner) on who to choose :)

Indian-American here. Thank you for this!

I have hearing sensitivity and have repeatedly asked my parents to lower the volume on TVs, whatsapp videos, insta reels 100s of times. They always lower it for 5 minutes before raising it back. Likely because they are losing their hearing, but unable to admit that.

I tend to be very mindful of others (maybe because I grew up in America), but my parents are not even mindful of my requests. Maybe it's a cultural thing? I expect those who have grown-up (or spent their whole lives) in India would do the same.

Definitely need to test this out app out when I go home.

That's a fair point. Model prices can increase. This raises the next question.

Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/zoom/etc. subscriptions become 10.

And now let's recurse.

These SaaS companies that use AI and dropped 90% of engineering headcount lose revenue because their customers also drop headcount.

Let's say AI costs 89% more than it did before, so the SaaS companies still get 10x productivity from the 10 engineers, but now all their customers headcount is 90% smaller too. So what now? Does every company make a pact to grow headcount ;)

That's a fair point. Model prices can increase. Let's say Anthropics/OpenAI/Gemini figure this out.

Doesn't this mean that any company that depends on headcount growth (every SaaS), loses?

100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/zoom/etc. subscriptions become 10.

But AI companies would want more engineers generating more tokens.

In this case, Anthropic would want 100 SWEs generating 100,000/mo of revenue. Replacing the very headcount that is responsible for token usage would hurt company growth.

Not to mention what happens when companies start doing this recursively. 100 SWE -> 10 SWE, 100 slack/gmail/notion/etc. subscriptions become 10.

And what happens, when enough percent of the population has nothing to lose?