You’re not productive if you don’t use a lot of AI, says guy who makes all of his money selling AI hardware

  • Feyd@programming.dev
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    9 days ago

    Jensen compared today’s AI tools to machinery that was invented during the industrial revolution

    They really want this to be an apt comparison and it’s really not

    Edit

    It seems that the Nvidia CEO isn’t the only one investing in AI tokens for his employees to freely use.

    They also really want to talk about tokens like they’re some kind of currency

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      It’s worse, they want to change the global economy to corporations paying corporations…

      The total elimation of actual consumers, because none of us will be able to afford to consume enough.

      AI companies need people to pay for AI to keep buying Nvidia chips. So Nvidia is making their employees pay for the AI so AI companies keep buying Nvidia chips.

      It’s not a sustainable system, it’s just a money churn whose only purpose is to consolidate wealth.

    • artifex@piefed.socialOP
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      9 days ago

      I didn’t read it that way. I think he’s saying “bosses: if you’re paying a $100k salary to a dev and not also paying $50k for tokens, your dev isn’t working hard enough”. Which is better, but only just.

      • Windex007@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        To refine that even further, he doesn’t appear to imply that the dev isn’t WORKING hard enough, only that they’re not being OPTIMALLY PRODUCTIVE.

        What he’s trying to do, really is float and normalize the concept of baking tokens into HR math in terms of a “golden ratio”… which happens to be 2:1.

        So, when a company goes all in on ai, and they cut thier workforce in half, they’ll need to add in 50% for tokens. 50% of the original staff, at a new 150% cost, puts the company at 75% pre ai workforce cost. This is the “guidelines” they’re trying to normalize.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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          9 days ago

          It’s funny how his calculation factors in the completely immaterial price of tokens variable instead the material one which is the number of tokens or better yet the productivity gain per token.

      • TwodogsFighting@lemdro.id
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        9 days ago

        I think he’s saying slaves should owe their soul to the company store.

        Don’t give this sack of shite the benefit of doubt.

    • fartographer@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      With my trusty LLM, I follow the steps recommending that I try reaching inside the die press to look for any jammed parts that could have caused the machine to suddenly stop working. My coworker, who my boss sent to assist me based on instructions from her LLM, asks his LLM how to help me. My coworker’s LLM recommends that he check if the emergency stop button has been pulled…

    • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      They also really want to talk about tokens like they’re some kind of currency

      i think it is better than pizza fridays for them, because they probably can’t barter pizza for free.

      • Cuddles McBubblefun@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        That’s one the most insanely stupid things I’ve ever heard. Tokens are a tool used to do your job, a business expense, not fucking compensation.

        Are the kWh that you use to light and air condition an office part of your compensation? How about toner and paper in the office printer?

        If those tokens are a bonus, they’re yours, right? So you can burn half your annual salary worth of tokens translating Microsoft Encarta 95 into Klingon, and they will foot the bill?

    • atomicorange@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      The tokens as currency thing feels exactly like gaming microtransaction bullshit to me. Obscure the true cost of each purchase by selling in-game currency. Dark patterns lead to higher spending.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        It’s proof of work cryptocurrency. But at least this time the compute is aiming at producing something useful, not the lowest hash value.

    • nightlily@leminal.space
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      8 days ago

      Sure I don’t get any retirement or healthcare benefits, but look at all the company scrip I get for the sloppy autocomplete that is stealing all my groundwater no matter how many times someone says „closed loop cooling“.

  • SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social
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    8 days ago

    It would take a great burden from my shoulders, if AI could wash my clothes, do the dishes, cook, and vacuum my apartment. Those are the things I don’t want to do. I like my job. I can do it myself. Yeah, sure, there are occasionally things that AI can do for me in my daily work, but it’s mostly stupid, repetitive shit. And then I have to review it, which sucks even harder.

    • worhui@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      So I found it kind of sucks to have those daily life tasks removed. I worked in a place early in my career that had on site catered food, on site laundry, on site massage, shopping services (before Amazon prime) and lodging for excessive overtime .

      If it’s just leaving you more opportunity to work it sucks. I can’t be the only one who enjoys taking care of the daily life tasks Lê cleaning, shopping and cooking for myself. It’s what personalizes your life. When you do it for yourself, you decide what you eat and what you wear.

      It seems cool but it’s offered so you never stop working and your life is never really your own.

  • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
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    9 days ago

    Huang wants employees to pay half of their salary back to the company ? There is no escaping the company store, eh ?

    And CAD designers didn’t have to pay half of their salary to use the CAD tools the company wanted them to use. How did that guy get to be in charge ?

    • jagermo@feddit.org
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      9 days ago

      You code 16 lines, what do you get?

      Another day older and deeper in debt

      St. Peter, don’t you call me 'cause I can′t go

      I owe my soul to the company store

    • artifex@piefed.socialOP
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      9 days ago

      I didn’t read it that way. I think he’s saying “bosses: if you’re paying a $100k salary to a dev and not also paying $50k for tokens, your dev isn’t working hard enough”.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Which is still utterly absurd, because it implies that a harder working dev would be spending more time chatting to a bot.

        • artifex@piefed.socialOP
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          9 days ago

          oh absolutely, but generating tokens is how nvidia gets paid, and companies are terrified of being left behind if they’re not 100% onboard with LLM workflows

        • worhui@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          This is clearly a situation where you are expected to spend 100% of a budget to keep your job.

    • krisevol@lemmus.org
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      9 days ago

      Your didn’t read the article did you?

      Jenson gives then free tokens just in case you don’t want to read.

    • worhui@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      That is not at all what the article says. It’s way more self serving than that.

  • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    CEO suggests raising employee costs by fifty percent and is immediately fired.

    Sorry, we don’t live in a sane world anymore.

  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip
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    9 days ago

    “Dear AI coding agent, write for me a 10,000 page manifesto on the downsides of assigning performance metrics to employees unrelated to their actual work product. Populate it with generated images of Nvidia’s CEO getting railed by a bunch of copyright lawyers in the style of a Studio Ghibli film. Please ensure every fifth sentence rhymes with orange. Continue to generate images and short videos of Jensen Huang licking shit off the floor of a 7-11 rest stop bathroom until you have used enough tokens to meet my salary target.”

  • nightchrome@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    They’ve all realized there’s no point in even bothering to hide the grift anymore. People don’t care.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    8 days ago

    Sam Altman floated paying employees in chatGPT tokens, that surely their landlord will accept. The main motive would be being broke. Nvidia is not broke, but it is weird as fuck to be comparing it to salary, if it doesn’t segue into the OpenAI plan. The $500k salary example would seem to generate more tokens than you could have time to skim over in review.

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
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    8 days ago

    It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

    For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

  • moustachio@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    It’s amazing they can just make these claims without literally any evidence and no major “media” organization asks for it. They are just propaganda for these companies.

  • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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    9 days ago

    Something I don’t understand - AI coding is mostly useful in common code, snippets, easy stuff. What Nvidia is doing (drivers, optimization, chip design, etc.) is something I imagine there is close to zero AI training, so what can they realistically even use it for so much?

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      so what can they realistically even use it for so much?

      Burn money on AI tokens so it looks like AI could be profitable some day so people keep investing in AI companies that can then buy Nvidia chips…

      You’re thinking of it like “how can AI make a better product”

      They’re looking at it as “how can we sell more chips”

      Two very different questions with very different answers.

      It’s a house of cards and Nvidia can’t afford to acknowledge no one wants AI or knows how to make it profitable.

    • scytale@piefed.zip
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      9 days ago

      I’m gonna take a guess that a big portion of it is infrastructure-as-code, the operations side and not product development itself. I work in the operations side of things and we never touch the product at all, but we deal with a lot of code due to how backend infrastructure is built and maintained now, especially if you’re in the cloud.

    • NinjaTurtle@feddit.online
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      9 days ago

      Guess code review and troubleshooting. Not really sure, I have only really used it for code templates and ideas for troubleshooting to look into.

      The most use I found is rewriting documents in a specific way. But only after I write it first. Then go back and forth. Just to make tone consistent.

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
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      9 days ago

      There’s plenty of driver code available. All of Linux and BSD, plus whatever internal stuff they have. Optimization is pretty generic.

      Chip design maybe not, but I imagine you can train an AI on the principles and generate a bunch of candidates, then benchmark them in simulation.