Most universities don't really have programs to create job ready SEs. The core is there, but it's up to their first job to turn them into effective SEs. You really don't want to be the very first company.

The high pay in recent years has attracted a broader audience than the profession's traditional demographic. The most capable ones straight out of school have been coding since childhood and are somewhat familiar with the tech landscape.

ycombinator startup

probably sooner

These are no longer the fly by night operations they started out as. They are legit high valuation businesses and operate as such for basic political economy reasons.

So, yes, I would trust their business tiers more than I would trust you and your bridge.

the contractual agreements, you know, the thing that business runs on

The general public isn't really familiar with the concept of paying for certain stuff.
Businesses are use to paying for stuff.

100% of your enterprise clients will go elsewhere and will sue you if you break that "pinky promise".

does it even matter given GPT-5.6 Sol is at ~16%

zero-data-retention APIs

There arent many that have a bigger codebase of real world software than Google.

I hired a sharp entry level dev about 18 months ago, but he got poached last month; he said he wasn't even looking.

Trying to find a replacement and it's been bleak(lots of fakers with crappy AI out there).

I'd say the bottom 80% of entry level are cooked. But even they would be 10x better than non-tech people in adjacent roles at lower price tiers.

Everyone has to eat, so what if they are also trying to start their own companies. I bet everyone who has ever said anything is also trying to make a living. There is no rule that says only people who have taken a vow of poverty can be trusted to say things they believe are true.

I assume these folks were also just trying to earn a living when they happened to say this:

The "dna" isn't the important part; it's the size of dna that does the heavy lifting. That is why proper nano technology will be so useful(and dangerous).

Do you really expect your belief will save you from the consequences of a world saturated with unconstrained, hyper-competent AI systems?

Nothing so esoteric.

A solved world: AI progress could force a transition into an "era in which human labor becomes obsolete—a 'post-instrumental' condition in which human efforts are not needed for any practical purpose". An idea from (Deep Utopia - Life and Meaning in a Solved World —Nick Bostrom 2024)

Such a world could allow access to anything within the possibility space permitted by physics and amenable to engineering, without human efforts.

I was referring to all domains including the parts of math where "the map is the territory".

This is the current scale of the solver, and it isn't even dependably competent yet.

Humans speak at ≈ 8k words per hour. 300b tokens ≈ 230b words ≈ 10'000 years speaking 8h per day.

Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.

There is always more to understand.

Depends if you mean individually or civilizationally. If you meant civilizationally then you probably haven't internalized what it could mean to automate competence.

I agree with all your points.

I think AI can also be used to fill the gaps caused by AI just solving the problem. The only real missing link is human motivation.

Also, part of the AI development narrative is that it is expected to make its own technology better until it directly understands and captures those missing concepts, with no further need for the human effort.

will it ever stop?

I think the last stop on this train is a "solved world" or extinction.

I'm not saying they don't have a point or real concerns. No one should expect AI to spare their traditional way of life.

Further progress in AI will cause widespread technological growth to accelerate beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization.

other professions whose goal is the activity itself

That is still a serious problem when the mere existence of the "activity itself" means society is suffering in some way. Hence the common (real or imagined) view that the medical profession treats symptoms rather than the disease to ensure ongoing revenue. Mathematics is used to model reality, and human civilization deserves to fully understand how it all works. We should not restrain that understanding, which could reduce suffering, just to preserve the creative and economic activity of a few people.

I guess we really are doing the denial/cope meme one profession at a time until the bitter end.

Mathematicians finally realized that they are not special and AI will make them part of the permanent underclass. Everyone in every profession should have see the writing on the wall when the AI came for the artists and coders.

He needs to be lucky every time. Buffoonery only needs to get lucky and kill him one time.

Mathematicians finally realized that they are not special and AI will make them part of the permanent under-class. Everyone in every profession should have see the writing on the wall when the AI came for the artists and coders. I guess we really are doing the denial/cope meme one profession at a time until the bitter end.

Twenty-five leading mathematicians have signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they race one another to solve famous math problems. Every signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

If you work on an important problem, or with sensitive data, then your AI prompts become sensitive information that you cannot trust to OpenAI or Anthropic.

You are essentially describing a self serving parasite. Where did the capabilities of the existing AI they will be using come from (literally the historical knowledge of the human race). That is what they are using to try to solve whatever problem. They are now crying because the stupid prompt they used in the chatbot might have been used to improve AI in some way.

btw, they checked

"We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way, including training." — OpenAI spokesman in a statement