Corporate America is Just Office Space in Real Life

That is backwards.

Office Space was based on real life corporate America.

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It's a documentary.

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- Exactly.
  
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- Absolutely.
  
  Source: I worked there, under a different name
  
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“AI” is great for first drafts/seeing a different wording, and automating very tedious crap. For instance, I really like taking proposals I write, dropping them into ChatGPT and saying “write me a 200 word executive summary,” then taking whatever it spits out to start making my own.

“Co-pilot” is a great way of thinking about it. I have no idea if that actual product is any good, but I know when I started thinking of AI tools as kind of a copilot of sorts, it made a lot more sense to me. It illustrates the limitations as well. Though I’d say more it’s more accurately “assistant to the pilot.” If you take me out of the seat, it can’t drive the vehicle and everyone will be upset with the results

Too many companies are falling for the loudest marketing in the room when it comes to AI. They see a shiny, perfectly curated demo and go “huh that seems neat we should do it” regardless of its relevance. They’re looking for shiny features and add-ons. What they should be thinking about is the very tedious, particularly manual tasks that eat up an inordinate amount of their time on a weekly basis. The AI solutions they should be looking for are ones that reduced or eliminate those tasks.

AI can be very useful at saving time. Too many people are using it as a solution in search of a problem. I think the best application for AI involve our day-to-day work, not consumer facing solutions.

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Yeah on the "assistant" part. An actual copilot would be fully able to fly the plane.

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Unfortunately improving existing products does not bring additional subscriptions / revenue 🤡

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Line must go up

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Unfortunately improving existing products does not bring additional subscriptions / revenue 🤡

I mean, it technically does, just not by next quarterly report, which seems to be all some organizations are capable of caring about, lately.

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Frequently it absolutely does. Just not in a gold rush kind of way which is what too many people want.

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Sounds so painful. We're integrating AI right N now instead of doing what customers asked us to do or instead of fixing a ton of bugs we have.

I hate corporate

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Whenever we say some work is going to be difficult and time consuming now, management reflexively ask if we can fix it with AI. It’s like an excitable little kid getting a bicycle for their birthday and wanting to do everything on their bicycle now, including eating, sleeping and homework.

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If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we've found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn't mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.

AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology's strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.

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making them better would mean more work, stress and ill conceived requirements for the programmers. I'm more in favor of marketing thrashing about on their own.

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I'm more in favor of marketing thrashing about on their own.

Lol. Me too. But let's not say that part too loud, it'll be nice if they don't catch on, for awhile longer.

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MLOps is a meaningful term!

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Being able to sell shares to other buyers really fucked things up.

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It's sad that the best most startups can hope for is to be bought by a giant corporation. Not a lot of people are interested in just having a successful long-term business.

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I actually want AI enhancements to many of the programs I use. I find them useful.

Now watch as I get tossed out the window.

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The problem is that the areas us consumers would want it is not going to be place that companies put it. They're gunning as hard as they can to monetize and minimize costs. Not what is most useful

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- But I really do find them useful, so they are getting it right in at least some cases.
  
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ask the AI how to make the product better, duh

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