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I asked cracked engineers for their hottest takes on AI. They didn’t disappoint… 1) GPT-7 will not be AGI. AGI is not coming from ever-greater zero-shot reasoning models. 2) In a weird sense, AI is the great equalizer, e.g. you cannot hide. If you’re that talented, you can amass extraordinary leverage. Great engineers are harder to find, but easier to distinguish. 3) Sam is just driving the AGI narrative, which is fine for the broader ecosystem, but will cause downstream disappointment when a zero-shot reasoning model cannot act as a general intelligence agent. 4) Small (localized) LLMs + great data will be good enough for 90% of GDP shift. The world is running on spreadsheets. 5) AI is an amplifier. Just like giving people money amplifies who they truly are, AI shows you how good you really are. 6) The superior your engineering knowledge is, the greater the leverage AI can bring. The difference in leverage between ok engineers, and 10x engineers is not 1.5, or even 5, it’s probably 20x, 100x. 7) There are some still very key problems with AI. Biggest of which is "sleep-time compute" (continual learning outside of context). This probably represents the biggest gap between AI and humans right now. 8) AI is VERY good at memorizing. If all you bring as an engineer is memorized facts there's no reason to hire you. 9) The infinite context window / sleep time compute thing is pretty far away. Memorization / recalling the training data is not. 10) The biggest advantage you have as a human is understanding everything and only having to pay that cost once. Once I understand a codebase I won't have to be reprompted with ALL the context, whereas every time i start a new chat I will need to give the AI all that context. 11) I use AI to replace the "memorizing" parts - specific syntax, etc. I still make the decisions, but I can delegate to AI because i know "whether the thing is possible or not". 12) If you're a dev and you think AI sucks at working in your codebase, you probably have a shitty codebase. 13) AI isn't going to fully replace software engineers because that would require everyone being able to describe exactly what they want in their software (i.e. writing code). This is the age old problem of the requirements never being quite specific enough. 14) Everyone thinks junior devs are fucked but I actually think if they have solid fundamentals and can use AI, they will have a better shot than a senior engineer who learns slower and claims "AI isn't that good". Companies are getting rid of the least efficient engineers, not the least senior ones.