u/pixel_creatrice

There is a lot going on with the LLM businesses. The financial aspects are extensively & comprehensively covered, especially all the great work Ed has done.

The major AI labs have been in the news for "AI Safety/Security" and how they must ✨💅pace the frontier💅✨. Most of this narrative I believe, serves two purposes:

1. Kill competition from open weight models and inference providers that host them. These models usually cost anywhere between 1/100th to 1/50th of the latest Claude Doopus or Claude Table offering.
2. To ensure that LLMs and their output isn't perceived as substandard (which has greatly been the case, as of late), as it won't justify the absurd capex.

The future of AI Labs hinges on them maintaining exclusivity in this space, and by the mass incomprehension that this technology is ✨💅general intelligence💅✨ when it's anything but.

All this has caused AI-boosters to be extra confrontational and loud, even on the internet, like here on Reddit. It's not just the anti-LLM crowd they seem to be after this time. It's also the LLM users who refuse to use the latest and greatest Claude Doopus Table model, or buy 5-10 $200 Pro Max subscriptions to LLMs for making a single page website slop.

There is a side, especially on the enterprise, where I believe cracks are starting to show more prominently.

This is my third ever Q4 as a CTO, and it's the same thing I brace for, like every Q4 before it - soon, it will be budget season for enterprise, and it's exactly when AI companies are trying to slip an annual contract with free vendor lock-in™ to get a slice of our 2027 spend. My read based on the last few weeks, is that rising API prices mean that a significant lot of the LLM-wrapper companies are more desperate for cash than ever, like wasps just before the frost sets in.

I have an inbox full of invites from (very likely overpaid) sales execs to try out various LLM wrappers, proudly mentioning how their "solution" is powered by the latest Claude Doopus Table five point something.

I wouldn't want any of these things anywhere near a product I am responsible for. Besides the vendor lock-in™, the user experience is something I can only describe as grotesque, even for an ✨💅Agentic AI-native💅✨ product. We went from a chat integrated into a right panel, to getting rid of the code editor itself, or making it read-only. Any "solution" that tries to take away control & information from the user, is anything but a "solution".

An example I always highlight was a sales executive who found out what transpacific flight I was on, and subsequently got his seat changed to be right next to me, and used the "opportunity" to demo his Claude wrapper (because isolating a lone woman on a 14 hour flight while casually flirting with her is quite a sales strategy, amirite?🥰).

This piece of vibe coded hot garbage was just the disaster it sounds like - a Claude Doopus ✨💅agent💅✨ that interviews real humans on a videoconferencing call, and returns "insights". Who did it interview? What did it ask them? How did it arrive at its "insights"? Based on what data? Locked behind the "Enterprise" Plan at best, hidden away at worst.

Suffice to say, I would be among the small group of people outside those working in the AI Labs themselves, with free access to the latest Claude/GPT models. This especially matters because the same people who tell me that I'm making a mistake by not mindlessly adopting LLMs are the ones without the same amount of access that I have, or the same capacity to evaluate its output.

Here's a verbatim-quoted, unsurprising response, I received sometime in the last 72 hours, when I mentioned that my engineering department has an anti-LLM psychosis culture, citing risks with cognitive debt as primary,

>The plan is to eventually completely replace humans and hence an autonomous agent would be taking in the cognitive debt in its cognitive memory. So it's only a very short term risk. Humans can simply never come even close to frontier models super intelligence. Those who have such rules against LLM use will never be able to take advantage of the power LLM would provide and would be way behind and lose the game.

Whose plan is it? Certainly one that looks like it's from Reddit user "Adjective-Noun-1234".

What even is a "cognitive memory" in a "super intelligence" that has to be regularly stripped off all working context to avoid sabotaging its own efficacy?

What's the road that I have been hearing since the last two years that I will be "way behind" on?

Lastly, what "game" are we playing? If winning the game is the equivalent of lighting a sum greater than my entire software development team's budget on fire, perhaps I'd be glad losing whatever "game" this is.

I have been contacted by leadership in many small & mid-sized companies to help fix the tech side of their product, after they let ✨💅AI agents💅✨ do all the software dev, especially under the instructions of non-tech teams.

I have my own product offering to look after, first & foremost, but these paid consultancy requests usually cost me less than an hour or two of my time weekly, and I get to see first hand, all the consequences of an ✨💅AI-first engineering culture💅✨. The first question I often get is - "Which AI agent will you use to fix it?" (Sure, let's use a blowtorch to clear out an oil spill)

Looking back at all the mess I have been asked to fix by the same people who parroted & paraded that I will be "losing the game", I'm quite confident that the opposite is true.

Note: this is an emotionally heavy post and a trauma dump. If it's not your thing, I understand and wish you a great weekend.

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Trigger warning for sexual harassment, SA, parental abuse, predatory behavior

It's been a whole eight years, since I ran away from home. The decision of the 22 year old that day marked a distinct phase in my life. When each anniversary of that day comes close, I remember all the people who put the child in me through hell.

I do not write this to seek pity. I do it because putting things in words, knowing that someone would read with my anonymity protected, helps me come to terms with it.

The 5 year old me didn't deserve to learn by herself, how to cry without making a sound, because her father found it extremely irritating to listen. She cried right after he hit her with a leather belt, pushed lit cigarettes on her arms, for his frustrations she wasn't responsible for. All this, often under the influence of alcohol.

The 9 year old me deserved parents who protected her from men 2-4 times her age who preyed on her because she developed fuller breasts and an hourglass figure at a very early age. She deserved parents who protected her when she complained about all the discomfort she felt from men (and women) who touched her non consensually with malicious intent because they knew, that her parents aren't there to help her.

She shouldn't have had to learn what the r- word in Hindi meant because bullies from senior classes and her own parents constantly told her she looked like one. She should not have had to get out of her home to escape physical abuse, only to escape to nearby parks and streets where she was groped, gawked & whistled at, at an age where she wanted to just stay indoors and read books.

The 12 year old me shouldn't have been deprived of all food for a week because she created a scene in the class when a boy repeatedly pulled her bra strap almost everyday, and the teachers, her own parents, sided with him and his mom - who asserted that the girl was just overreacting too much.

The 15 year old me shouldn't have had to beg her parents to be able to graduate, a tiresome battle she eventually won, hoping things will be better when she's away from home.

The 16 year old me, who successfully got into a good college to study computer science, deserved parents who didn't think of her education as a pastime, believing that marriage at the youngest possible age is the only thing she's worth.

Like other 16 year olds, she deserved to not think about financing her own education. She survived it, by learning programming from books, building websites on a broken laptop she repaired herself. A laptop she received from a man 5-7 years older than her who promised to give it to her if she would go out on a date with him, and if she'd let herself be groped. She submitted, because she was put in circumstances that demanded so.

She deserved a home that she could go to when her male professor would purposely seize her laptop, and ask her to meet him after class, in the dimly lit staff room, >!where he groped her on multiple occasions.!< He made sure to tell her how much he likes it when she didn't make a sound or complain, as she just teared up a little in complete silence - a skill she learned at home and hasn't forgotten even today.

The 19 year old me didn't deserve to be obligated to hide all the money she made by spending all her time freelancing. And when it was unfortunately discovered, she deserved better than having to suffer physical torture trying to unsuccessfully keep the 3L INR she rightly earned. His reason for taking the money - "the only way you have this much money, is because men paid to get your body". She had to give in, because he knew she was terrified of fire, and used it against her.

The 21 year old me did not deserve to be put into the matrimony market against her will, to have it prioritized over her career. She did not deserve to be going through panic everyday because her manager had to block her parents' phone numbers after they demanded him to terminate her employment as she needs to get married to the man they chose for her.

She deserved to not be left with the only option to escape a forceful marriage with a 31 year old man - to leave her job, her country, and everything else behind, and move to the other side of the world, to a city that spoke her fourth language, French - a language she picked up during her undergrad, because she thought it'd come in handy in the future, and it did!

She made the decision which seemed like madness for some time. Waited to cross into the international zone, was terrified that the immigration officer would send her back home, saw a plane for the first time in her life, and was terrified of the sounds it made as it lifted into the sky, seeing her hometown down below.

The 24 year old deserved better than being all by herself when she lost her voice out of trauma after her >!ex restrianed her to the bed, had his way with her non consensually because she said she wasn't ready to be intimate. !<He told her the same words she heard from everyone who preyed on her - "You are a nice, quiet girl, I like it."

That was when she decided to stop suffering, to stop believing what happened to her was her fault, as she was told to believe all her life. She took matters into her own hands. Built a career, picked up more languages, which helped her be the co-founder of a tech venture.

The 30 year old me, is a CTO today. Successfully leading teams of highly skilled women and men many years older than her. She has more money than she would ever know what to do with, and all the food she desires. She is taking every step to heal the little girl in her, who sacrificed and fought for two decades, and is finally safe and sound.

There is so much more I recall, so much more I recollect and have no courage to talk about.

All the people who did this, the chatter I hear today say that they're suffering as a consequence of their own actions.

While I don't actively wish further misfortune, suffering, and cruelty on them. Instead, I take satisfaction as a mere spectator, knowing that the little girl has successfully managed to get out of reach of their schemes and desires, and she can be assured that all those who wronged her, will never again dare lay a finger on her.

>These companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, they encourage waste. They don't charge on outcomes. They don't charge on success because you can't with large language models. They're inherently hallucination prone, as proven by OpenAI themselves. And so they encourage waste. They want you to spend a lot of money and then they try and pilfer your ideas.

I recalled these words from Ed during his section on CNBC when a managing director & acquaintance of mine reached out to me earlier this week. He asked me, a CTO of a tech venture, to help with a crisis his org was going through. Before I get into the crisis itself, a few things to note:

This is the same person who has constantly told me that my business would be "behind the curve" because I have been cautious with LLMs, especially in engineering. He also has a habit of reminding me that (yet again) Wario Amodei just claimed software engineering will cease to exist in the next six months. All the while ignoring the very obvious conflict of interest in Mr. Wario's statement (something I think should be clear as day to someone at his position).

He mentions that they're blocked on a major release resulting from technical problems and it has started to burn into the goodwill of his customers. Additionally, he mentions how Github Copilot moving to usage based billing came at the worst possible time for the business. His proposed solution - "Move to Claude". A knee-jerk reaction that ignores the root of the problem. To him, Copilot is just going malicious as a business, and Anthropic is going to save him on the finances. It's an arrogant persistance of the management class to never accept that this is a fundamental problem with the idea that AI should be everywhere, do everything, replacing professionals entirely.

The real problem, though, runs deeper. He told me his best developer is "underperforming" because they're "using almost no tokens" and "writing the least amount of code." To anyone who actually understands software engineering, this is the opposite of a problem. This developer is singlehandedly carrying a significant portion of the engineering effort, doing it almost flawlessly, and refusing to use LLMs unless there's an actual need.

Having spoken to his engineering team, I realized that the issues they're facing exist because of the LLMs. The models are doing everything from brainstorming, writing code, & debugging. This resulted in mountains of code and technical debt that the team can no longer understand or maintain. Product & UX teams have complained about how specs & designs haven't been respected (largely because the AI has no knowledge of the Figma file)

The MD's condescending remarks to his team about how "Claude (not AI, but 💅Claude✨) should make you worry about your jobs" only made things worse.

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In a previous post, I mentioned that my engineering leads and I developed a framework with strict rules on when LLMs can be used for development. I had a lot of people reach out to me about it.

While I would need multiple posts to explain it in it's entirety, the broad picture can be explained along the same principle as Cory Doctorow's excellent analogy on centaurs and reverse centaurs.

>A centaur is a person assisted by a machine. So think of a human head on a horse's body. The horse is tireless. It can run faster than you. It's stronger than you, but you are directing it [...] So you ride a bicycle, you kind of look like a centaur, but you use a spell checker, you're a centaur, too. A reverse centaur is the reverse. It is when a human is conscripted to do the tasks the machine directs [...] reverse centaur is a terrible thing to be because you're not just being used by the machine, you're being used up by it.

We want our engineers to be centaurs. Spec-driven and test-driven development is fundamental to how we ship. The brainstorming, decision-making, architecture, and verification of everything we ship is owned by an engineer. Because writing code is but, one small part of software engineering. The first thing I wanted to curb, was the "hey claude build product no mistakes" workflow.

Another major advantage of this approach is that our token usage is minimal. We use open-weight models hosted with a provider that meets our regulatory requirements. Smaller, cheaper models that do everything we need, even if they don't beat the large "frontier" models on "benchmarks". My engineers do not report issues with this approach, and so far, it has justified its cost.

One of the biggest problems with the AI hype cycle is the push to use the "top tier" model for everything. Every single time. Because that's the only way to sustain the delusion that AGI is around the corner and human engineers are obsolete. Suddenly, you can't use last month's model to code, it has to be the most outrageously expensive one that's necessary for the most basic of tasks.

As for the MD I mentioned, as suggested by people around him, he seems convinced that the issue would be resolved now once they have access to 💖✨💅 Claude Fable 5 💅✨💖. I will once again, be proven right, when the endeavour to solve problems made with AI, with moAr AI, will fail prematurely (I know this, because I also know their LLM budget).

I'm sure most you have already come across AI-boosters glaze LLMs to a point where they claim that it's "inevitable". It's a certain arrogant certitude that implies that they will have their way, and the opinions of any other stakeholders, users, domain experts, do not matter to them, even with evidence presented, or after a catastrophic consequence of ignoring credible warnings. A lot of this relates to the trait of the performative business idiot that Ed has previously described in great detail.

As a CTO/co-founder of a small tech venture, I own and have the final say for engineering decisions, but I can only imagine how bad it must be for anyone who has to work under the direction of an AI-boosting executive.

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I could write a book with all the feedback my investors & CEO have received about their "stupid girl who doesn't belong in the c-suite" (a verbatim quote), and how her apprehensiveness about LLMs is going to cause the business to be "behind the curve". It has been the same story since the two years our product offering has existed.

Behind what curve? What's the path ahead? Is it like the one at Uber where they exhausted their annual LLM budget in a single quarter? Like the one at Amazon, Meta, and several other places where a push for tokenmaxxxing 💅 led to colossal disasters in engineering and finances? I'd surely love to be nowhere near the curve in these cases.

I cannot promise features to my customers that heavily depend on black-box systems like proprietary LLMs. It's a regulation nightmare that also undermines the reliability of the output.

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At my position, I'm often aggressively approached by sales executives of "products" with a GPT/Claude API wrapper, asking me to commit to annual licenses.

And I'm not being subtle with the word "aggressively". I once had someone exchange seats to be next to me, on perhaps the worst transpacific journey of my life. They went on and on about how their "Vibe Coding" web-app will help my developers push "more lines of code". They mentioned how it is an "industry standard" to measure developer productivity with "number of lines of code" and "usage of AI tools", implicitly suggesting that I should fall in line.

I'm not falling for that attempt at fearmongering. They chose the absolute worst way to pitch to someone leading an engineering department. All of this came with a bonus of subtly flirting with & attempts at flattering a woman all alone on a flight, restrained to her seat (yay).

I'm extremely proud of our engineering culture, which rewards efficient solutions that aren't needlessly complex. Our clients have overwhelmingly mentioned they love our product offering for its reliability, which is a direct result of how we build & ship software. I'm definitely not putting this in jeopardy by having a leaderboard for token consumption or "lines of code" written.

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All of this has gotten under my nerves because it always comes from someone who neither understands technology, or what our industry demands with all the regulations in place.

My clients have shared this sentiment. A feedback I have often received from our customers, is that we have been the only option for them who took time to understand their business, their issues, be transparent about the issues we can solve (and those we cannot). Particularly, a client told us that they were relieved to finally meet someone who did not talk down to them, preaching the choir about how Claude Doopus four point something is a magic solution their concerns, as it "understands your industry better than you do".

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I would also add that I do not dismiss LLMs altogether, and just like Ed mentions, there are genuine use cases where they can make sense.

My engineering managers and senior developers have made a case for using LLMs responsibly for better developer productivity. Internally we have a framework on how, when, and when not to use an LLM, which enforces accountability for shipped code.

We invested time, effort, and capital in using open weight models exclusively; and I believe this has paid off really well. Because the "hey claude, build this, make no mistakes" is strict no, the practice of building with specs, tests, and restricting LLM use to 'grind' work, yields great results. The models we use do not have to beat the "frontier models" on WoompusBench 2.1, but work well for our use case at a fraction of the cost (which I can justify, as of today).

This is somewhat of a trauma dump, feel free to skip if it's not your kind of read, and I wish you a good weekend.

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Some context, I'm a co-founder & CTO of a tech venture. A position I never thought I'd ever have in my life. The youngest person who reports to me is at least 8-10 years older than me. I'm also the only woman in senior level and up.

Recently, we had a lunch event with the team (a rare occasion, as we are remote-first) and this day, I was the only woman at the table. During some banter, a male senior employee, raised his voice to speak over his colleague. Nothing malicious, it was all friendly.

All of a sudden, I started crying. Having an entire childhood in an abusive home meant I had learned to not make a sound when crying ever since I was 5 years old. But the tears were noticeable, visible, and everyone rushed to console me. I haven't felt this pathetic in a long while. I'm at a C-suite position, and I appeared weak in front of people who need to have faith in my leadership.

TW: Parental abuse, sexual harassment for the following paragraphs ----/

When I trace it back to where it started, it is all starts from preteen years. I'm physically the most vulnerable, from years of passing days & sometimes weeks, not having access to any food. There's not much that a girl of about 40kg at a height of 5'6"+, could do against her father who used physical strength, including putting his entire 100kgs of weight on me if he saw me in bed and wanted me to wake up.

Neither of my parents defended me when I complained about men in power who tried to exploit their daughter in all the wrong ways. They knew each trigger that could frighten me into submission - fire, shouting, physical restraints, etc. They used it to gaslight me to believe that it was my fault when my school complained about me hitting a boy because he groped my breasts repeatedly at age 10, about boys younger than me who pulled my bra straps in the school bus, when girls in senior years bullied me in all the inappropriate ways, and also the building secretary who harassed me in the corridors of our residence. They set a precedence that their daughter is available for exploitation, as she would have it worse at home if she resisted.

I got into a Tier "1.5" college, and took full advantage of subsidized education fees for girls to do my B. Tech in CSE. This helped me escape an early marriage, but each day was walking on eggshells. They determined that my education is equivalent to playtime, and that they are already wasting money.

I started making money to feed myself at age 17, when I joined college. I learnt PHP & Javascript from the library & abandoned books from seniors. I was able to get an old laptop from a guy from 4th year who agreed to give it to me if I go on a date with him (pretty prevelige perhaps, but I had no other way). I started building websites, charging about 10K INR for each. I ran through an entire can of pepper spray chasing away aggressors when I went to visit my clients late at night.

I finally opened a back account in the second year, when I turned 18. Got a better laptop, took up more demanding work after academic hours. I kept it a secret, because I know my father wanted money to pay off massive debts of the high interest loans taken for an out of touch lifestyle.

He unfortunately did find out. I paid off my final year fees with my own money because he threatened to not pay it and get me to drop out for an arranged marriage. I resisted, but he had his way with violent means and took almost 2-3L INR of what I had earned in my college years. It was among the lowest points of my life. I lost everything. He said it was justified because the only way I can have that much money, is by selling my body. Said that maybe I should continue this as I do have the "body of a wh0re", and could help him get out of debt.

It broke me in all ways I can't explain. After two years of work, I managed to find an opportunity to move overseas, given my fluency in French. I left home in a flight after midnight, rushed through the international section knowing he won't be able to catch me there, to a whole new place, starting from scratch.

/--- End of TW ---

After all these years, despite keeping him far away from me, I still feel his presence sometimes. It's like any sort of physical or vocal escalation from a man brings all kinds of bad memories. I'm trying to be strong, doing everything I can, but this is all I can manage.

This isn't against anyone on my team. They are fantastic engineers and I'm proud to have them. It's just me, from years of conditioning. I have noticed that the few male friends I have, that I decided to keep around, are ones with a gentler voice & calm demeanor. Every other man reminds me of my father, and always made me uncomfortable.