(There may be an argument here re: the move from dense to MoE models, but all research I am aware of suggests that MoE models are not dramatically more efficient than dense models - i.e., active parameter count is not the overriding factor, and total parameter count is still extremely important, though it does seem to roughly follow a power law.)

I want to be clear here: Eton boys were (and are) predominantly middle class, not upper class. In the US, we allowed the idea to be perverted, perhaps because we do not have nobility, and so there is no true "upper class". Given this, the reality is that we are bifurcated into a working class and an owning or capitalist class - though, many would argue (correctly, in my view) that we are in a feudal regime now, rather than a capitalist regime.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, software engineers are house slaves, and, yes, CEOs and billionaires have done a good job of convincing the field slaves that the house slaves are their enemies, and of convincing house slaves that the field slaves are inferior and just want to take what the house slaves have without working for it.

Not that the singularity has any relevance here, either - except maybe that the robots take over, and the billionaires have missed the boat? I don't know.

I'm not particularly swayed by arguments of consciousness, whether AI is currently capable of "thinking", etc. Those may matter right now... but how long will they continue to matter for the vast majority of use cases?

Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument. And I say this as someone who is not in one of those roles. I don't think my job is safe for more than a couple of years at this point.

But on the other hand, with so many tech companies pushing their ICs to use AI - and pushing more and more to use agentic tools - I'm generally in agreement that the fault lies more with the employer than the employed. You can't tell someone to use a tool, then punish them when the non-deterministic tool they didn't want to use in the first place misbehaves.

Maybe if we had decades of history showing these tools could be operated safely this would be different. But asking an entire industry to adopt new tools with minimal training and real-life experience, and asking them to adopt them at scale and in production, is not the same as asking them to use DynamoDB instead of RDS.