The real reason they keep saying AI will take your job

There is a cancer spreading right now,

and it is called the token budget. And

make no mistake, this is one of the most

dystopian, deranged things to ever come

out of Silicon Valley. And that's saying

a lot. First, I want to talk about my

guy Dario Amodei, the guy who I am

convinced has a dashboard in his office

where every time a 22-year-old gets a

job, an alarm goes off, and he runs out

and grabs the nearest intern and smacks

him across the face and goes, "Hey guys,

what the Like, how did this person

get this job? I want zero humans

employed." That's their OKR, man. Like,

these people do not want to see humans

employed. They want to see their AIs

employed instead. Dario's constantly

going on the news talking about how

humans are going to be jobless because

that's the best marketing pitch you can

possibly imagine. And what this does, in

effect, is it lowers the price of labor

because it terrifies the laborers. It

says, "Hey, you're not even going to

have a job in 3 years. So, take whatever

pay you can get now. Hold on your job

because there ain't another one coming."

It spooks the labor into accepting lower

wages. And meanwhile, that creates room

for these corporations to take the

savings and spend it on Anthropic. So,

every time someone loses their job,

Anthropic makes a little money. So, the

whole ecosystem really enjoys this

narrative that AI is working. But, the

truth is, on the inside, AI is not

working for anyone. But, these companies

have to pretend it's working because it

creates leverage and it creates a good

investor narrative that they're

forward-moving and technology-adopting.

Now, the question is, what do we do

about this? For starters, I think we

need more people to speak the truth.

Like, talk about if AI is working in

your company or not. Spill the beans.

Come on like YouTube. Come on TikTok.

Talk about how your company is using AI.

Talk about what's not working. We need

more stories because right now, the bull

story is just so goddamn good for the

capitalists. And the workers are sitting

here without a cause, like without a

unified story, without a front, just

panicking. And look, I'm not an

anti-capitalist. Like, I'm sorry, I'm

not. I'm not some lefty warrior. But,

this AI thing just hits way too close to

home for me. The truth is, you're way

more valuable than these AIs. It's not

even close. In fact, your salary should

double. Like, that's how useful you are.

But, instead, the capitalists are

playing this to the team, man. Like,

doing a great job of spooking you into

accepting less pay or at the very least,

making sure you don't negotiate a raise.

Like, God forbid. Imagine you go ask for

a raise right now. They'd be like,

"Dude, are you kidding me? You know AI

could do your job, right?" And you'd be

like, "Oh I'll take a 20% pay cut.

Please don't fire me." That's what's

happening. So, back to the original

story, token budgets. Facebook has a

token leaderboard where you have to be

constantly producing slop at a

ridiculous pace and make sure you're

burning enough of the company's money.

Otherwise, it seems like you're not

being productive. And this is crazy

because there's an inverse relationship

between being on top of that leaderboard

and the quality of your work and how

much code you're actually able to

review. The number one person on that

board is reviewing zero code. Like, zero

code. This is a completely dystopian

thing. It's an employer's wet dream.

They're like, "Finally, we have a way to

track these people. We tried using lines

of code before, but the nerds told us

that less lines of code is better. So,

we couldn't use that. We tried

monitoring their screens, but you know,

that's not going to go over well. But

now, there's a perfect proxy that spins

a great narrative, like a good investor

image, but also completely keeps the

employees in check. This is worse than

anything going on in China, man. Like, I

don't know what narratives we're

spinning about how miserable and

dystopian China is.

But, you're telling me this is happening

in Silicon Valley? That there's a token

budget? A slop budget? Like, are you

kidding me? This thing is not making

people more productive, man. It's just

creating a second job for them. Like,

congratulations, dude. You have a second

job and you're being paid less. AI came

and increased our workload. Like, how

the did that happen? They told us

we were never going to have to work

again, and now we're going to have to

work like double time to clean all this

up. You have Nvidia's Jensen

talking about how if you're not spending

$250,000

per year per employee on tokens, you're

not being productive. What it'll take is

for people to be honest about what's

happening. That's the only way. People

need to come out and say it. There's a

couple like Dax, the founder of Open

Code, who tweeted that a lot of people

are saying that AI is making them more

productive while we're sitting here

going, "Dude, we don't know how to use

this. Like, we don't know how to make

this work in our company." So, you're

telling me this nimble-ass startup can't

figure it out and you think these

Fortune 500 companies are figuring out

how to use AI? Like, with their 80,000

employees across 40 time zones? They

have no idea. Artificial

intelligence, my ass, dude. Like, this

is like an insanely unreliable

auto-complete that is extremely

imprecise. And the more precision you

need, the less useful AI is. That is a

fundamental law. We need to call it the

Bittar lesson. It's a pun on the the

bitter lesson. The Bittar lesson is that

the more precise you need to be, the

less useful AI is. Just It's just a

fundamental law. It'll never change

because LLMs approximate language and

language approximates intent,

and then this approximation is used to

approximate like code or arts or emails.

There's just an infinite wall between

the thing you want and what AI can

actually do. You can guide it and guide

it, but it never reaches. It never makes

contact. You get 80% there and it stops.

It's like an 80/20 thing. It can do 80%

of the work. That's great. But, the 80%

was always the easy part. The last 20%

is still human work. The people

insisting on slop budgets, they're going

to lose. Meanwhile, the people focusing

on keeping it slow, focusing on quality,

focusing on what the customers actually

want, that's the hard part. The AI is

not going to help you with that. In

fact, AI will mislead you if you rely on

it too much. Honestly, when I first

changed my mind about AI earlier in the

year, I thought that soon all of these

sort of negative, honest sentiments I

was giving would start to get outdated

very quickly and I would soon look like

a fool against the constant advancements

in AI. But, what I'm actually finding

instead is that these takes are just

becoming more and more accurate over

time and more people are waking up to

this.

Thanks for watching.