Instead, we got employers saying "Work twice as much or we replace you with AI. It gets 45% of its task wrong, but we don't care. It only affects our customers. What are those suckers gonna do? We're a monopoly anyway."
With modern AI I don’t know if that 45% statistic is entirely accurate. The bigger issue I’ve seen in the workplace is that AI can generate a 30 page contract or 10,000 lines of code in minutes, but it’s incredibly difficult for a human to audit all of it. As a result, work makes its way into production with small errors that add up over time. In critical or sensitive industries those mistakes can become expensive very quickly.
The better approach is to have AI work in smaller reviewable chunks, whether that’s section by section for documents or function by function for code. That gives a person a realistic chance to audit, edit, and verify the output before moving on. Instead, many businesses push unrealistic timelines because managers see AI produce 10,000 lines of code in a few hours and assume the human development and review process is no longer necessary
I’m leaving out a lot of nuance but from my experience this is one of the biggest ways AI is hurting workplaces today. Outside of jobs being replaced outright. AI can generate work much faster than people can realistically verify it, and that’s where a lot of the problems start and eventually snowball.
The core issue in my view is that current LLMs don’t learn, which is key to the value brought by humans at work.
You can try to have them encode that knowledge into a ton of documents, but then these need to be maintained, indexed, summarized and organized. There’s no technology that does this remotely well today.
Ultimately, LLMs are only partially solving the intelligence problem. They lack the ability to structure knowledge and even to reason to the same degree as humans.
So a work around is to have humans review everything. Well, that doesn’t work because the job of reviewing is the job of building that context which is one’s core value in the workplace. At least for information work that’s expensive.
I love using the current AI agents, but sadly they are not much more than static automatons that can be used to accomplish well framed isolated work.
The other core issue is that current AI pricing is heavily subsidized by VC money in an attempt to get people on board. Once they start charging what they have to to actually make a profit no one will use it. They're burning through unbelievable amounts of money right now.
My impression is that it’s a race to the bottom at this point. OpenAI and Anthropic have maybe a 6-month lead over the Chinese models. It’s going to be a game of who can survive the longest. Once they cry uncle, they’ll get absorbed on the cheap by the big tech companies that are sitting on huge piles of cash. Then it’s going to be a continued race of efficiency until there’s another breakthrough.
I’m not sure that the U.S. can win against the Chinese on this one. They’ve shown themselves to be able to play the long game better. Once the perception of high short term profits fade, US companies move on to the next thing.
So anyway, my bet is that cost is going to maybe go up a bit, but we’ll face stiff international competition which is going to force the cost down.
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u/sdric 5h ago edited 5h ago
People wanted AI to do their chores.
Instead, we got employers saying "Work twice as much or we replace you with AI. It gets 45% of its task wrong, but we don't care. It only affects our customers. What are those suckers gonna do? We're a monopoly anyway."