The tweet also reads a bit off to me too. Carmack positions himself as if he is a some sort of a litmus test for being a great and successful programmer, which I don't doubt that he is but it's a bit strange. Egotripping.
When writing code I also believed in the "beauty" and "elegance" because IMO it opens up all kinds of different opportunities that involve using or organically growing or improving that code. It turns out that if it doesn't solve a quantifiable problem, (mostly) nobody cares. And the pace of innovating in the field outgrows the pace (by a large) of keeping things "beautiful and elegant".
In the last decade or so I have never seen so much layoffs across the industry. This may be suggesting that evidence supporting the latter hypothesis is not maybe too far fetched.
In the last decade, the software engineering industry has turned into a grift that has pushed out hundreds of thousand of low-quality "engineers" through coding bootcamps or online courses. Many of these people have no passion for the craft or interest in building products.
Then, when money was cheap during COVID, companies over-hired unscrupulously. Now, given that markets are cooling off and there's some political, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty, companies are hedging their bets, and laying off is usually the right move, especially as interest rates are going back up.
There are perfectly viable explanations for the situation the industry finds itself in without invoking the AI boogeyman, especially considering that just about every study out there shows that AI use correlates with a fairly modest increase in productivity, and that it won't turn anyone into a "10x engineer" overnight.
Over-hiring could be one way of explaining the effect we are seeing, however, where are those "coding bootcamp" or "online courses" engineers? I honestly ask because I have never worked with one in almost 2 decades of being in the industry, and I worked across many different domains. What I see is on the contrary - the people who are getting laid off are people with legit engineering degrees from legit engineering Universities.
Also, over-hiring by the very definition implies a sudden surplus of engineers on the market. I can't quite understand where did these engineers all of the sudden come from? The number of engineers outputted by the Universities YoY is pretty much close to O(1) so I am not convinced to this theory at all and I see it only as a good excuse that companies are making in order to make them look better.
I spoke with my friends few days ago, and one of them runs the company so he asked me on the opinion of the AI frenzy. I gave him my view and by the end of it he told me that he feels uneasy but that he has to let go part of his employees because he simply does not need them anymore - they are literally replaced by the AI model and one or two or N-M engineers operating the model. Yesterday he needed 10 people for the job, today it is 2 or 3 people.
So, I think that the AI has already changed the landscape dramatically, and what we are seeing are not the post-COVID effects.
Where I'm from and peripheral countries, the industry is riddled with bootcampers and button pushers. My company even has a big bootcamp for reconversions
What are you trying to suggest? That people without the University degree who have been trained for monkey coding do exist? Sure but that's not what I was saying nor does it skew the picture in any significant way.
What I'm trying to convey and you fail to understand is the picture you have in your mind is very much affected by your reality. The fact that you don't see these bootcampers doesn't mean they don't exist.
As I said, your communication style is coming across as arrogant and disrespectful. Instead of asking for more clarification and giving a benefit of a doubt you chose to counterpoint with a trivial example, in which tbh I am hesitant to believe. I say this as someone who has worked across continents and across many different domains. None of the layoffs taking place do not involve laying off "bootcamp" people.
If "the latter hypothesis" of parent commenter was that "AI will replace ~80% of white-collar jobs", then that hypothesis clearly not supported by the current layoffs. AI isn't replacing workers, AI just happens to be an easy excuse for it. Could as well have been "COVID" or "tariffs" or "the economy" or "the end of Zero interest-rate policy"
Why not? I have literally got several first hand examples where people are fired because of how good the AI models became. Why do you find that questionable?
Objective reality is that many people have lost and are still loosing their jobs. If you don't have anything useful to add to your response please refrain from polluting the discussion.
No, it is not the same at all. I intentionally frame my words by saying that after all there may be an indication that such an event or correlation exists but I am explicitly not stating anything, therefore it is rather an invitation for discussion and not one-sided talk.
If I move out a bit of my circle, where people do all kinds of work, I'd say that there's generally a stigma on the "IT" workers. Moreover the stigma is there even within the IT company/industry itself, where sales, marketing, non-engineering parts of management, and other similar types of supporting roles also look down on the engineering. And this unfortunately includes family members too. I learned that people are mostly envy but when you're surrounded by many it can become overwhelming - numerous times I heard phrases like "oh, you're bricklayers of a modern age" ... like wtf
So, by definition, driver of a tram is guilty for the accident the same way the driver would be if he had run into another vehicle. Tram hit the bus from behind.
“Tramways” are a specific type of road dedicated for trams, separated by dividers. “Tram lanes” are regular roads with tracks that are for exclusive use by trams, usually for part of the day and shared with cars for the rest.
The majority of the tram network is on roads shared with regular vehicle traffic (ie. neither a tramway nor a tram lane).
When trams are moving on shared roads they have no right of way special to them EXCEPT at roundabouts.
(I also know a PTV tram operator who lost their job for rear ending a car that suddenly stopped to turn right)
Anyhow, fair point - I principally jaywalked and /or rode a beat up mountain bike getting about Melbourne in my time there & took the road rules more as an aspirational guideline than as Commandments from the Victorian TAC.
Except trams have, as far as I know without exception, specific traffic rules around them. A tram simply does not and cannot stop as quickly as a car (or indeed a bus) can. The reason that that's largely accepted is because the tradeoff is also that a tram can't really make any sudden unexpected motions at all.
If you get hit by a tram it is because you are in a place where you should have known the tram would hit you. The things are on tracks.
local tram drivers union representative from Goteborg where it happened:
"The question is whether, for example, they’ve entered the correct right-of-way rules for trams? All vehicles are required to yield to trams, with a few exceptions, and that could be what’s “triggering” the system,"
Everything that the parent comment said I tend to agree, and I lived in Europe for a long time. One thing he left out, and which is also very important, is a high level of corruption. Your success is defined by a function who you know and not what you can actually do - EU funds being a prime example but even without them every day work is the same.
And they obviously don't hire the right people. Reasons can be many-fold. One possible explanation is that there's not many talent left on the market, and most have been already picked up by other AI labs paying more $$$ while offering more exciting work and more exciting trajectory at the same time. Another possible explanation is that there is enough talent on the market left but their recruitment process doesn't allow them to recognize those people, hence it is broken. When I look into their job postings, I tend to give higher chances for the latter.
You lay out some good arguments but I agree with both: the models relative to few years back really did become the commodity because today you could take the non-frontier model, maybe self-host it or pay the much less price per M tokens to get the performance of a ~2-year old frontier model. At the same time I do think that we are getting into the monopoly/duopoly/tripoly with the frontier models for all the reasons you already mentioned, and this scares me a little bit.
Lower intelligence LLMs can be a commodity, yes. But these won't make much money, if at all. At the end of the day, it costs the same to inference a 1T frontier model and a 1T free model.
OpenAI and Anthropic don't compete in the LLM commodity market. Hence, I had a problem with slide 22.
2-bit quantization? That's a lot of signal being removed. Considering how quickly the AI models are progressing in their capabilities (still exponential curve), I will not want to use the 2025 model in two years time. Similarly, how I don't want to use llama-3 or old Anthropic model from 2023 or 2024. Newer models are so much better that it makes it very difficult to ignore.
Once and if the advancements with the AI models slow down, only then IMHO it will become feasible to design the specialized HW for general-purpose consumption and general-purpose workloads.
Opus 4.6 was a 2025 model and many people (myself included) feel that if that's where models peaked, we won't be disappointed.
Even at 2-bit quantization, DS4 is probably on par with a 2024 frontier model. You can run that today on local hardware, and at a minimum, local models are going to keep pace over the next 12-24 months. Even if they don't close the gap with frontier models, they'll still play an important role in the overall pipeline for cost, speed and privacy reasons.
That's without even mentioning the additional capability that something like a Taalas chip churning out 17k tokens/sec could unlock.
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