elixirnogood

Are 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.

I am seeing the same. The skillsets degrading rather rapidly, people not able to maintain focus and becoming less sharp in general. The brain rot associated with short form videos is affecting our industry via LLMs. It doesn't give me any joy to see it happening, especially to people I care about.

do we know how much are they paying on average? I just got Gemini Plus that seems sufficient for my family's ordinary usage and it's $37 per year (3 bucks / month). I just don't see the AI companies making any serious money with this type of pricing.

Hmm, sometimes I feel like living in a different universe. Since LLMs can solve any technical challenge (like most of you claim here) and help folks explore new fields and revive all sorts of projects, wouldn't be all seeing effect of that everywhere? Wouldn't the bar for software quality go up (and go up significantly)? Wouldn't we see new innovative apps that people are delighted to use and more than happy to pay money for? Yet when I recently challenged some friends of mine to name just ONE major app / service that became materially better (I'd argue even better at all) or a new/innovative widely adopted by masses outside of pure AI world (Claudes and GPTs), they couldn't name any. Meanwhile, I am looking around and see that banking, insurance, search, social media, cloud computing are getting more bloated, unstable, mediocre and in general of lower quality. Where is all the cool software everybody is talking about? Where are the features from your backlogs that you were finally able to burn through? I am just not seeing it in the real world. Something doesn't add up here.

Does it surprise you that people are getting more skeptical when the software that installs system packages is getting more and more generated by AI?

Do you have any concerns around scaling? I like LikeKit stack, but if not mistaken their agent architecture is based on multiprocessing (one os process per 'session'/'conversation') which doesn't sound very scalable. Btw, great demo, this is a cool technical problem to solve. I've spend a couple of months in this space (using a similar stack) and know for a fact that's not easy.

are you guys using livekit for webrtc? If yes, are you using livekit agents as well?

the demo doesn't mimic my voice unless I misunderstand 'mimic'

I don't think you can get a mortgage with a 6% downpayment anymore. Canadian real estate is a scam. Banks would lend to anyone with a 5% downpayment. The mortgages are insured by the government (CMHC), so essentially all the taxpayers are on the hook if the real estate market implodes. Banks will be fine though as usual.

I've lived in both Bay Area and Toronto. Toronto has become absurdly expensive. You can get a 3-4 bedroom modern townhouse in Dublin/Pleasanton for 850K USD. It's common for a senior software engineer to make 200-230K. You can't buy an equivalent housing in Toronto for 850K CAD. Crappy townhouses in Richmond Hill go for 900K - 1M+ and similar housing will be 1.2 - 1.4M. it's also extremely difficult to make 200K+ CAD in Toronto (senior engineers make ~140K). A relative of mine does mortgages so has accurate statistics on how much people make.