I can’t remember exactly when I first read Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall, but I do know it was pretty shortly after it was written. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the piece affected how I viewed the AI hype fest that was to follow. I had already been exposed to “big data” in my professional career and since I do love me some delicious confirmation bias, the article made me feel validated for viewing AI as entirely overrated. It thoroughly heightened my skepticism.

A couple years later, at a startup where I had made my disgust for AI well known, a co-worker shared Nik Suresh’s excellent essay I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again and asked if I was the actual author. I was flattered, but no. I am not Ludic1.

As good and validating as both of these pieces are, there is a person out there far more important and influential on my stance as absolutely anti-LLM and anti-generative AI. Let’s call this creature “Steve” because that’s his real name. Steve loves AI. He was (and in a sense still is, I suppose) a co-worker. My antagonism of his vapid points and ill-formed conclusions about pretty much anything he talked about were part of our early company culture.

It’s easy to call Steve an idiot because if you so much as moonlight as an intellectual—even if you’re not good at it—Steve most certainly checks all the boxes. He’s virtually incapable of contemplating depth on any subject and as such Twitter is his main source of information. He has no idea what hard work is. In fact, I don’t think he understands work at all, beyond delegation and taking credit for the fruits of said delegation at the expense of the delegates. If you approach work with any sense of honor or integrity, Steve embodies exactly the opposite of what you want.

This should have meant a competent founder at a cash-strapped startup would have immediately recognized dead weight for what it was as well as the toxicity a certified layabout brings to a small company of mostly very hard workers. Sadly, Steve was not the only individual in our organization lacking competency and so he not only stayed, he motherfucking thrived.

While it is certainly easy to call Steve and idiot, the way the startup played out and depending on the metric you use, Steve is a goddamn genius! The real chumps were the programmers and other team members putting in 12-16 hour days trying to keep their little startup alive. Another co-worker who loves pissing me off2 would often say to me, “And you know he makes more than you,” when I would complain about all the time I was putting relative to this professional pudknocker.

The idea was so utterly absurd I dismissed it. A comment meant to enrage me was typically defusing because in no just universe—hell, even in the entirely unjust universe that we actually inhabit—could that be the case. It was too silly—so silly that I would just laugh about it. No one running a company would look at the output of Steve compared to me or even the lowest ranking member of the engineering team and think, “This fucking guy deserves C-level pay.”

When we were acquired by a larger company and equity positions as well as compensation were revealed to me, I would learn some things about Steve and about myself:

  • I’m the fucking idiot.
  • Steve is actually a genius.
  • Life is not fair.
  • Never, ever trust a CEO. Ever. They’re all fucking vipers.

This dude had been making a killing to the tune of a full 50% more than the company’s principal engineer. I should add that in my first in person conversation with the CEO he asked, “How do we clone you?” This is because my output is kind of insane3. I guarantee this question was never asked of Steve.

I don’t even want to talk about the equity because it was much worse.

When the developers became aware of this disturbance in the Force, many echoed my thoughts. “Huh. I always thought Steve was just a lazy moron. It sounds like we’re actually the fucking morons.”

Aside from the CEO, everyone on the team knew the guy did no work, phoned in everything he could, exploited those who reported to him, and used and abused unlimited PTO with impunity. The thing is, no one actually noticed when he was gone except that the constant barrage of non sequitur Twitter posts about AI and crypto ceased. In person he was nothing but a collection of stories about life hacks and platitudes. No depth. All Twitter. A man whose view of life is that it is a loophole to be abused while lesser people toil away dirtying their hands with work.

Again, if you think you could even pretend to be an intellectual, you’ll recognize this creature for what he is. What CEOs see in Steve, however, is a younger version of themselves. They see vision. They see potential. They see themselves because in reality, CEOs and grifters have a lot in common. They not only despise the act of labor but they despite compensating labor. Instead, they elevate and compensate fellow parasites who suck the very blood of makers and doers. They are the abominations for whom neoliberalism was designed.

This might surprise you, but this is not really about Steve aside from the fact that he represents a very specific and very real sort of archetype in business. I’ll bet many of you recognize the many Steves you’ve worked with in your life. Steve could be your manager. He could even be your CEO. If you’re what the leadership calls a “worker bee” then you probably fucking hate these people and would not be sad to see them fed to lions in the Coliseum for your entertainment4.

People like Steve actually do serve an important purpose if you know what to look for. In a sense, if you can stomach listening to any of the word salad they pass off as conversation they are the canaries in the coal mine. While academics and intellectuals study and measure and consider things, people like Steve have a sort of uncanny ability to identify and advocate for the very worst ideas possible at the moment of their inception. They don’t need to wait and see. They don’t need to think. They can piece together the code words used by other grifters and smell the sweet, sweet aroma of exploitation from miles away. This is misidentified by other grifters and self-styled “entrepreneurs” as a “go getter” attitude and is rewarded as such.

For me, Steve was the clearest sign that LLMs were a fucking joke compared to their hype. In 2022, I didn’t really know a ton about LLMs, but I knew ChatGPT had to be something horrible because Steve absolutely loved it and could not shut the fuck up about it. Steve also loves crypto. If you don’t have the time to educate yourself on the depth of bad ideas, just find the Steve in your life and use them as a barometer for the very worst decisions for your business.

This fucking guy could not get through a meeting without saying, “Maybe we can use AI.” That was the only “contribution” he had—and even writing that is a complete abuse of the word. You can, of course, see why this guy was making C-level money and C-level equity while also being the least useful and least productive member of the team. Post acquisition he, of course, charms the Product department and continues to ascend.

Steve is the person for whom AI is especially appealing. When you don’t know anything about anything, everything spewed forth from LLMs looks like brilliance. When you struggle forming basic thoughts, ChatGPT does indeed look like an army of PhDs bundled into a godlike technical edifice. When you hate work but want to get paid, generative AI is your meal ticket. When you’re not intelligent, educated, or skilled you lack the ability to know when your messiah is hallucinating. The inability to notice turns out to be no problem at all when the grifters you surround yourself with live in a wicked and hellish echo chamber that somehow controls the power and capital.

I have often said that a person’s actual abilities in a given discipline are inverse to their enthusiasm for AI. The Steves of the world bear this out pretty well.

He’s still making bank though! So good for him, right? Do you study? Do you work hard? Do you approach life with a sense of honor? Joke’s on us you gullible dipshit!

  1. His blog is amazing. The Worlds Left To Conquer might be too inspiring right now. ↩

  2. This fucking guy knows who he is. Also, it’s not hard to piss me off but in our years of working together he’s made a sort of art form out of it. ↩

  3. CEOs love workaholics. They are the easy to exploit and their production is magnificent. I do not recommend. ↩

  4. Okay. Maybe you don’t feel that violently about that. That’s okay. I still do. I would absolutely be entertained and the world would be a better place in the aftermath. ↩