Silicon Valley AI bait-and-switch

[vbresults]

There has been a lot of talk about the US H-1B visa fee being increased from $5,000 to $100,000. What was surprising was this policy's positive reception by Silicon Valley executives. At first, one would think they were just being sycophantic or trying to avoid upsetting Trump.

When AI started going mainstream, I had a realization. Yes, AI is not ready to replace most white-collar work. Instead, these companies are offshoring work to humans who stay in their home country and work at a far lower salary. The new H-1B visa pricing accelerated this strategy.

They can now do aggressive mass-layoffs, displace the blame to "AI" while using offshore consulting firms to obscure cheap new hires, and evade political consequences and social backlash at home. Silicon Valley is not betting on flawed AI, but on offshored AI-augmented humans.

They are making use of AI, partly as malicious compliance. Many think mass displacement requires AGI and it does not, look at Waymo. This blows open the doors to offshoring in-person jobs heavily occupied by new immigrants like taxis and trucking and white-collar jobs.

It's diabolical, but really clever.. and it seems to be working?

 

[ES Dev Team]

Personally.. i could care less about silicon valley.
Their software quality going to crap lately and so much of the output is VC funded too, meaning it's guaranteed that they'll do a first one's cheap, last one's super expensive kind of pricing play.

I got so tired of using their crap as an IT company that i started my own dev shop, then software company, just to get out from under them + give others an escape hatch too someday.

We use AI at our shop for assist, but it is not pivotal so far; to preserve the level of code quality and attention to detail means there's still a lot of manual work to do.. it also involves that we ask our programmers to think differently.. but stay balanced!


On the topic of AI, the signal to noise ratio from Silicon Valley's region is awful.. most of these AI companies are cash burn operations, and if you get dependent on them, one day you are going to get surprised by the real retail cost, lol.

Also whatever you feed into them creates multiple logs and we know how good American cybersecurity is today

To really sour the deal, we find out that all these AI companies are getting used for automated weapons.. which is morally repugnant to me.

For these reasons we built our own AI system ( 1100W ), and run a 197B open source AI model on it.. providing us with what was basically state of the art last year level quality and speed.

..for a mere $13k

But.... small price to pay to get the capability for a dev shop of 8 people.. privacy for our clients.. and to not have to give these companies a dime.