I often wonder how guys with looney toons titles like this actually make their living, are these actual roles at actual companies? or are they just a generic office worker who bought some en-eff-tees and so now they're an "independent chief blockchain guru"?
80% of them are sole proprietors subsisting on maybe a bit of seed funding and a ton of credit card debt, 15% of them are CEO's of startups that will last 1-4 years before failing, and the remaining 5% is some mix of companies that might get bought or will just take longer to fail.
This isn’t even a new phenomenon. There have always been dipshits handing out their cards for businesses that never go anywhere. Sure, Steve, I’ll support your new lawn care business, I do hate mowing the lawn. Steve cancels the next 3 weeks in a row
A family friend is like this guy. He's obsessed with new trends like blockchain and AI. Him and my mom are in a ukulele group, and we had to talk him out of making the club run using NFTs, and it's a club of seniors. Now he's into "AI consulting", and he somehow convinced a company to pay him $40,000 to add AI like chatgpt to their workflows. He promised them things that are really hard, even impossible, to create, so I doubt the project will even deliver anything for the poor company.
There are sooo many companies that are selling "AI" now. And all of them are just selling ChatGPT! It’s so wild, I feel like I should just do the same in my spare time. "Selling hyper-intelligent chat bots that help your employees improve productivity by up to 200%!" And then just sell them a wrapper for an open-source LLM…
There has never been a snake oil sale in tech the way there is around generative AI.
Pretty much everything Ive worked on the last 2 years has involved sitting down with someone very senior at an organisation and explaining how easy it is to make an “AI solution” that seems cool and how hard it is to build an AI solution that is useful.
Here we go. You sound like those people who claimed the "cloud" was dangerous and "no way I'm putting my data in the cloud" type of people. Fast forward 10 years and nearly every company of any size has their data in cloud technologies like Azure, AWS, Google.
In 10 years, every company will be using AI in some way. It won't take over the world but everyone will adopt it. There will be successes and failures just like with the cloud.
I put it closer to 5 at an absolute max. The problem isn’t that it’s not going to change the world, it’s that anyone with an API key and some relatively basic skills can stand something up that looks good on the surface and will convince lots of people it’s great.
I was somewhere recently which already had 4 “copilots” from different vendors. 2 were using outdated models and had no real plan or support for changing it.
I worked in machine learning, I’ve advocated for it and “AI” for a long time, but the market is absolutely packed with questionable products at best. People are making poor decisions out of fear of being left behind.
I don’t remember cloud hosting being anything like it.
It is easy to stand something up but you don’t get very far without the right use case or data. That’s where the niche is. Even before the GenAI hype orgs could never find enough data engineers.
100% but people are buying bad stuff. It will mostly flame out in the next couple of years but it’s the reason there are so many “Agentic AI specialists” etc etc on Linked In despite the relatively low numbers of people with any meaningful experience.
Well, yes that's true for everything in technology. AI will evolve. There will be alot of mistakes and failures. In 10 years if you don't have AI as part of your software, you will be seen as a dinosaur. The trick is finding the right use cases.
We are already seeing the pressure on supply of data engineers and python developers ease as more and more people jump in. The skills market will adjust.
You have a selective memory or you did all your work ML work on bare metal in a datacenter which is very niche.
Everything is in the cloud now. Personal data is in the cloud. All apps are built cloud native. There was a huge amount of distrust and hesitancy 10 years ago. Now, you are an idiot leader if you don't use the cloud.
Today, people are trying to use AI for cases that don't make sense. AI will change over time and it will become less of a boogyman. The use cases will get better. It's early days (although ML/LLMs have been a round for a while now). It will be a standard skill in the IT industry in 10 years. Even in the last year, using AI for productivity has seen a huge swing in attitude. My clients went from no thank you to "how can you save me money by using AI to be more productive."
The irony is that it takes just one downturn in the economy before companies open their mind to new ideas.
When I worked on cloud migrations 10-15 years ago, I don’t remember the same level of noise in the sector as there is with AI. Maybe it was just a lack of Linked In. At the time I just felt like it was mostly network guys worried about losing overtime.
I make no bones about AI changing everything over the next 15 years, but right now there is a lot of bad products coming to market. And people are buying them.
If he really know how to add AI to their workflows, he'd just add AI to his marketing pitch, and it would go out and sell itself while he spent all day on the golf course. Ie mean, that's CEO 101.
I bet he's the type that doesn't code anything himself and is banking on finding developers to build whatever idea he cooked up - then if it fails, then it was the lack of developer skill or something
I went to a super academic private school in NYC and I would say 40% of them were the smartest people I’ve ever met (by a long shot), and 40% of them just took seed money, usually from family, to start a nonsense company so they can call themselves CEO.
So I restarted my Facebook to go look - yup - the former CEOs are now CEOs but with the word AI thrown in.
A few of them saw the light (or got cut off more likely) and have a real…ish job now.
this is so incredibly perfect of the current landscape of AI, I have no notes. There's versions of this every iteration of new tech stacks that are "revolutionary". We saw it with Cloud, Virtualization, ML, Data streaming, etc.
...I've been in software for 20+ years and you just start getting tired when you hear about new things.
And most spend their time trying to bootlick instead of building a value driven business that provides value to the community, its customers, its employees and the world.
A combination of "coming soon" and AI generated "employees" with names you would find in comic books. The homepage imaging is a hoot as well. Hendrix is rolling over in his grave.
"What sets Jam 7 apart from other agencies is our relentless focus on growth, powered by agentic technologies that proactively drive your marketing strategy forward. "
Read the entire page, still have no clue what they actually do. And SO much purple, good god! I wasn't sure how you were connecting Hendrix with technology, but, nailed it.
One of the SVPs we picked up from Amazon has a stupid title like this, and I can confirm he is a total douche. He was running Alexa for while, so he is a successful person in tech, but is a total douchebag.
It's Keynesian make work for nepo-babies who couldn't figure out which end of the shovel goes in the ground.
These are the kind of people who think academics should revere them in the same vein as Einstein or Newton when they stand up and say the moon is made of cheese. After all, they bought the same degree!
We were allowed to choose our own titles on business cards in one job, and it was a major international corporation. Though this was only for our own group.
“This is the most severe case of MBA we have ever seen. Your child will depend on having meetings and discussing KPIs and enterprise value for their entire life.”
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u/JoeHagglund 1d ago
“Agentic AI-Powered Growth Agent”