Joseph Bou-Younes's Website

Tag: ai

  • Jevon’s Paradox and AI

    Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don’t even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn’t have been started, the contracts that wouldn’t have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn’t have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn’t have been launched otherwise.

    — Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work

    Via Simon Willison’s Webblog.

  • The math behind an LLM

    The best, shortest and sweetest explanation of how an LLM works.

  • Be YouTube, not Qwest

    Today, no amount of model training is too much. No price for that training is too high. The builders bet is that inference will be orders of magnitude cheaper in 5 years. Build for that. Be Netflix or YouTube, not Qwest.

    This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group of companies have ever spent to do anything. Notably, these companies are not remotely close to earning $400 billion on artificial intelligence.

    That’s why you’re starting to hear some people wonder whether the AI build-out is turning into the mother of all economic bubbles.

    The prospect of an AI bubble should scare us. Roughly half of last quarter’s GDP growth came from infrastructure spending on AI, and more than half of stock market appreciation in the last few years has come from companies associated with AI. If the AI spending project blows up in the next few years, as our next guest says it might, the implications for technology, the economy, and politics would be immense.

    – This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst – Plain English with Derek Thompson

  • It’s going to be a tough summer for tech headcount

    Several tech companies are reshaping their workforces as they focus on AI. Earlier this year, Salesforce Inc. planned to cut over 1,000 employees as it hired for AI-focused sales roles, particularly in sales. CEO Marc Benioff also said the company will reduce its hiring of engineers in 2025 due to the use of AI. When Workday Inc. announced a layoff in February, CEO Carl Eschenbach said hiring would continue in strategic areas like AI.

    Beyond software engineers, many of the hardest-hit Microsoft personnel ran software projects. Product management and technical program management roles together made up almost 600 of the reductions in Washington, or about 30% of the total. 

    The job cuts also targeted some managers and workers assigned to AI projects, according to a person familiar with the cuts.

    – Bloomberg: Microsoft Layoffs Hit Coders Hardest With AI Costs on the Rise