Artificial intelligence engineers at top tech companies told CNBC that the pressure to roll out AI tools at breakneck speed has come to define their jobs.
But it was all for nothing. The project was ultimately"deprioritized," the engineer told CNBC. He said it was a familiar result. AI specialists, he said, commonly sprint to build new features that are often suddenly shelved in favor of a hectic pivot to another AI project. The Amazon engineer, who lost his weekend to a project that was ultimately scuttled, said higher-ups seemed to be doing things just to"tick a checkbox,"
Last year marked the beginning of the generative AI boom, following the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT near the end of 2022. Since then, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and others have been snapping up Nvidia's processors, which are at the core of most big AI models. "And that is very conducive to burnout just in the sense that it makes it hard to believe in something," Kolman said, adding, “I think that the biggest thing for me is that it's not cool or fun anymore."
An AI researcher at a government agency reported feeling rushed to keep up. Even though the government is notorious for moving slower than companies, the pressure"trickles down everywhere," since everyone wants to get in on generative AI, the person said.There are companies getting funded by"really big VC firms who are expecting this 10X-like return," said Ayodele Odubela, a data scientist and AI policy advisor.
The engineer has worked in machine learning for years, and described much of the work in generative AI today as an “extreme amount of vaporware and hype.” Every two weeks, the engineer said, there's some sort of big pivot, but ultimately there's the sense that everyone is building the same thing. An AI engineer who works at a retail surveillance startup told CNBC that he's the only AI engineer at a company of 40 people and that he handles any responsibility related to AI, which is an overwhelming task.
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