I'm not sure it's completely dead.

We use Claude for design of document templates a lot, and whilst we've built a fantastic pipeline for doing that well, asking Claude to then design anything outside of our guardrails isn't effective.

So I could imagine folks prioritising high quality design of all kinds choosing templates that would guide Claude.

I look at a large number of startup websites and it's very clear which ones are using Claude the excessive CAPS headings alone give it away. They look OK but the Claude aesthetic does leave me wondering whether this is a real business or one person using Claude to build a LP.

This isn’t true. Women have regular smear tests and there’s also the midlife MOT every 5 years, to give but two examples.

When someone is moved to Chair at their startup it’s usually a gentle way to change leadership.

I’d guess Google’s execs are unhappy with the way they’ve been left behind in LLMs.

The position at Anthropic seemed to be that LLMs were not the way forward.

They may prove to be correct over the long term, but commercially that view is “wrong”.

It’s a divide between a research oriented and commercial point of view.

For DeepMind, this is what happens when you take the money. Very rational to do so at the time, but it does have inevitable long term consequences.

For Google, it’s repeating the same mistake they made before: they should be taking the long view and looking beyond the tech we have today to leapfrog their competitors. But tbh I’m not sure such a behemoth can do that (I have no idea how Steve Jobs managed to do that). They’d have been better to reallocate some of the capex to letting Demis do his thing.

Another way of putting it: this is the opposite of “founder mode.”

I think what you’re missing is the long term trend.

Google’s cloud business looks great. I’ve always thought they should have completely focused on cloud - a company full of excellent engineers would always win there.

But its main income stream is advertising, and AI is an existential threat. Google is far behind Anthropic and OpenAI, so right now their advertising business is “default dead”, so to speak.

The company won’t die, but without a radical change in velocity it will be a shadow of its former self.

I’m not so sure - architecture matters, efficiency matters, extensibility matters, and all are impacted by language choice.

If we had developed our tech in Python we’d be a world of hurt now as we scale.

I’m very suspicious of this objection, because when Claude first landed the same people now saying “code is not the bottleneck” were saying “the generated code doesn’t work.” Smacks of moving goalposts.

The only solid objection to “AI is going replace developers” is “AI is an accelerant.” It helps developers move faster. I haven’t seen anywhere it has fully replaced developers.

Whether this leads to a large number of job losses depends on whether you think we can increase software output by the same factor as the acceleration and still be profitable. I think we can, latent software demand is extremely high. I also think we’re nearing the limit of capability with current models.

Situation could change if more advanced models emerge, but some of the more foreseeable advances probably have compute requirements beyond today’s hardware.

Not so much due to length of time, but because of the Opus shockwave than fell within that period.

Yes, it can.

Yes, Manchester has a good collection but the exhibits are sadly lacking on technical details, be warned.