Large and small, entire development teams are completely unaware of the basics of “prompt engineering” for coding, and corporate has an entirely regressive anti-AI policy that doesnt factor in the existence of locally run language models, and just assumes ChatGPT and cloud based ones digesting trade secrets. People arent interested in seeing what the hype is about, and are disincentived from bothering on a work computer. I’m on one team where the Engineering Manager is advocating for Microsoft CoPilot licenses, as in, its a concept that hasnt happened and needs buy in to even start considering.

I would say most people really haven't looked into it. Work is work, the sprint is the sprint, on to the next part of the product, rinse repeat. Time flies for those people, its probably most of the people here.

On the one hand, we got an email from high up saying not to use Copilot, or other such tools, as they were trying to figure out the licensing. But at the same time, we had the CIO getting up in front of the company every other month talking about nothing but GenAI, and how if we weren’t using it we were stupid (not in those exact words, but that was the general vibe, uncontrolled AI hype).

We were left sitting there saying, “what do you want from us? Do as you say or do as you do?”

Eventually they signed the deal with MS and we got Copilot, which then seemed forced on us. There is even a dashboard out there for it, listing all people using it, their manager, rolling all the way up to the CEO. It tells the percentage of reports from each manager using it, and how often suggestions are accepted. It seems like the kind of dashboard someone would make if they were planning to give out bonuses based on Copilot adoption.

I’ve gotten regular surveys about it as well, to ask how I was using it. I mostly don’t, due to the implementation in VS Code. I might use it a few times per month at best.

Maybe that would be different if the rollout wasn’t so awkward, or the VS Code extension was more configurable.

That's one result. Another result is, due to "checking how often suggestions are accepted" is to objectively record how much help it is providing.

I assume the sitewide license is costly - this could simply be the company's way of determining if the cost is worth it.

Open weight and open source models can be hosted on your own hardware nowadays, and its incredibly easy.

https://dublog.net/blog/open-weight-copilots/

You can even use something like RayServe + VLLM to host on a big chonky machine for a small team if you're concerned about data exfiltration.

Obviously there are some savy users across all age groups and occupations. But from what Ive see its just not part of most people’s workflow.

OpenAI still hasnt released Sora video prompting for the general public and have already been leapfrogged by half a dozen competitors. I would say its still niche, but only as niche as using professional video editing tools are for creatives

If that is the case, then the AI isn't really adding enough value.

I mean, if it was adding enough value, those companies refusing to adopt it will be out-competed before the next round of retirements, and so won't even be around.

We'll see how the landscape looks in 10 years: if there are still major companies who have not invested some money or time into sprinkling the AI over their operations, then that's a signal that the positive impact of AI was overblown.

If, OTOH, there exists no large company in 10 years who have not incorporated AI into their operations in any way, then that's a signal too - the extra value of AI is above the cost of adding it to the operations.

Public discource will simmer down, as current language models either fizzle out or improve. Some will become background noise as the models gets integrated into search engines or leads to large scale lawsuits.

Unlike the previous neural nets though, those models have an actual tangible use. So you will see them around a lot more.

Then I think we will see another big explosion.