A new survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and reported on by Apolloseems to show that large companies may be tapping the brakes on AI. Large companies (defined as having more than 250 employees) have reduced their AI usage, according to the data (click to expand the Tweet below). The slowdown started in June, when it was at roughly 13.5%, slipping to about 12% at the end of August. Most other lines, representing companies with fewer employees, are also at a decline, with some still increasing.
Personal Anecdote
Last week I used the AI coding assistant within JetBrains DataGrip to build a fairly complex PostgreSQL function.
It put together a very well organized, easily readable function, complete with explanatory comments, that failed to execute because it was absolutely littered with errors.
I don’t think it saved me any time but it did help remove my brain block by reorganizing my logic and forcing me to think through it from a different perspective. Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.
Then again, I could have accomplished the same thing by knocking off work for the day and going to the driving range.
Hey, look at the bright side, as long as you were chained to your desk instead, that’s all that matters.
At one point I tried to use a local model to generate something for me. It was full of errors, but after some searching online to look for a library or existing examples I found a github repo that was almost an exact copy of what it generated. The comments were the same, and the code was mostly the same, except this version wasn’t fucked up.
It turns out text prediction isn’t that great at understanding the logic of code. It’s only good at copying existing code, but it doesn’t understand why it works, so the predictive model fucks things up when it takes the less likely result. Maybe if you turn the temperature to only give the highest prediction it wouldn’t be horrible, but you might as well just search online and copy the code that it’s going to generate anyway.
But… how else do we sell our tool as a super intelligent sentient do-it-all?
The bigger problem is that your skills are weakened a bit every time you use an assistant to write code.
The bigger problem is that your skills are weakened a bit every time you use an assistant to write code
Not when you factor in that you are now doing code review for it and fixing all its mistakes…
It depends how you’re using it. I use it for boilerplate code, for stubbing out classes and functions where I can tell it clearly what I want, for finding inconsistencies I might have missed, to advise me on possible tools and approaches for small things, and as a supplement to the documentation when I can’t find what I’m looking for. I don’t use it for architecting new things, writing complex and specialized code, or as a replacement for documentation. I feel like I have it fairly well contained to what it does well, so I don’t waste my time on what it does badly, and it isn’t really eating away at my coding brain because I still do the tricky bits myself.
This is exactly how it’s meant to be used. People who think it’s to be used for more than what you’ve described are not serious people.
There is no “meant to be used”. LLM were not created to solve a specific problem.
That is just dumb.
Your skills are weakened even more by copying code from someone else. Because you have the use even less of your brain to complete your task.
Yet you people don’t complain about that part at all and do it yourself all the time. For some it is even the preferred method of work.
“Using your skills less means they get weaker, who would have thought!”
With your logic, you shouldn’t use any form of help to code. Programmers should just lock themselves in a big black box until their project is finished, that will make sure their skills aren’t “weakened” by using outside help.
No that’s not the same thing. It’s the difference between looking up how to do something and having it done for you.
There have been multiple articles recently that show AI weakens skills.
Btw there’s no need to add strawman arguments with scenarios I didn’t mention.
Because they are FUCKING TRASH.
Not for all use cases, but for most it is.
brace for the pop, this one gonna be loud.
They dressed up a parrot and called it the golden goose and now they’re chasing a wild goose.
Wild parrot surely
An undomesticated Psittaciformes.
Kind of a weird title. Of course adoption would slow? The people who want it have adopted it, the people who don’t haven’t.
We were initially excited by AI at my company, but after we used it a bit we didnt find any really meaningful use cases for it in our business model. And in most cases we spent a lot of time correcting its many errors which would actually slow down our processes…
Marx tapping the big sign marked “Tendency of the rate of profit is to fall”, but then looking at the already unprofitable AI spin-offs and just throwing his hands up in disgust.
I think there’s an argument to be made that the AI hype got a bunch of early adopters, but failed to entice more traditional mainstream clients. But the idea that we just ran out of new AI users in… barely two years? No. Nobody is really paying for this shit in a meaningful way. Not at the Enterprise Application scale of subscriptions. That’s why Microsoft is consistently losing money (on the scale of billions) on its OpenAI investment.
If people were adopting AI like they’d adopted the latest Windows OS, these firms would be seeing a steady growth in the pool of users that would signal profitability soon (if not already). But the estimates they’re throwing out - one billion AI adoptions in barely a year - are entirely predicated on how many people just kinda popped in, looked at the web interface, and lost interest.
It would also slow if companies were told insane lies about the capability of “AI” (“it’s living having a team of PHD level experts at your disposal!”) and then companies realized that many of these promises were total bullshit.
For the things AI is good at, like reading documentation, one should just get a local model and be done.
I think pouring as much money as big companies in the us has been doing is unwise. But when you have deep pockets, i guess you can afford to gamble.
Could you point me to a model to do that and instructions on how get it up and running?
I’m using Deepseek R1 (8B) and Gemma 3 (12B), installed using LM Studio (which pulls directly from Hugging Face).
As the other comment says, LM Studio is probably the easiest tool. Once you’ve got it installed it’s trivial to add new models. Try some out and see what works best for you. Your hardware will be a limit on what you can run though, so keep that in mind.
I dont have the hardware so I’m using “open web ui” to run queries on models accessible via huggingface API.
Works really well. I haven’t invested the time to understand how to use workspaces, which allow you to tune models, but aparently its doable.
It’ll right itself when the CEOs stop investing in it and force it on their own companies.
When they’re not getting their returns, they’ll sell their stocks and stop paying for it.
It’ll eventually go back from slop generation to correction and light editing tools when venture stops paying for the hardware to run tokens and they have to pay to replace the cards. .
and they will drop it altogether.
It is absolutely a bubble, but the applications that AI can be used for still remain while the models continue to get better and cheaper. Here’s the actual graph:
This contradicts what I’m reading in that AI model costs grow with each generation, not shrink.
Also that is the cost to train them, not the cost to use them, which is different.
That was published a year ago, highly selective, doesn’t include something like Llama 4 Maverick.
let’s not forget the us is pumping EVERYTHING into ai, 3-4% of the gdp are just the ai economy. here’s hoping it comes crashing down on them
Fucking finally. Maybe the hype wave has crested 🤞
finally. Maybe the hype wave has crested
Well one thing I can tell you is that art is gone, forever. They took that from us and our kids and all generations to come.
Naaa, AI “art” output is trash. You just need to train the eye to notize the patterns.
This is so melodramatic. Nobody is stopping you from drawing or painting or whatever.
I don’t think that’s the case, anyone can still make art. Though it’s true, it’s even harder to make a living from art now than it already was.
oh the horror
The US Census Bureau keeps track of things like that? Huh… TIL
Western growth is predicated on bubbles.
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Tbh, better a corporate slave than a startup slave.
Some decent news at least
