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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
- givemeethekeys 1y agoMany people are unable to find jobs because they are too old. Even older people prefer to hire younger people.
- throwaway314155 1y agoOkay? What does that have to do with anything?
- givemeethekeys 1y agoLosing one’s job is only half of the story. Finding another one when you’re getting old in the AI age is more difficult than before AI.
- rayiner 1y ago[flagged]
- MangoToupe 1y agoIf anything, CNN's people-forward branding is indication that people want a human mediating the news to them. That's the most charitable thing I can say, at least.
- jmmcd 1y agoIt could certainly replace the author of this article.
- DrillShopper 1y agoI look forward to the day where executive overpromises and engineering underdeliveries bring about another AI winter so the useful techniques can continue without the stench of the "AI" association and so the grifters go bankrupt.
- sevensor 1y agoThe implosion of this AI bubble is going to have a stupendous blast radius. It’s never been harder to distinguish AI from “things people do with computers” more generally. The whole industry is implicated, complicit, and likely to suffer when AI winter arrives. Dotcom bust didn’t just hit people who were working for pets.com.
- pixl97 1y agoJust like the internet was a fad, right?
- DrillShopper 1y agoMore like the dot-com bubble
- threeseed 1y agoInternet only became a fad once it was already large and had tens of millions of users. I remember the pre-Web days of Usenet and BBS and no one thought those were trendy. AI is far more akin to crypto.
- pixl97 1y agoLots of people talk about crypto yet almost no one uses it. Pretty much everyone I know uses AI for something.
- DrillShopper 1y agoThat might be a perspective thing. I can think of three people in my life who have used AI at any point, and two of the three used it for diffusion models right when Stable Diffusion was first released.
- monero-xmr 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_auto... It wasn’t just Elon. The hype train on self driving cars was extreme only a few years ago, pre-LLM. Self driving cars exist sort of, in a few cities. Quibble all you want but it appears to me that “uber driver” is still a popular widespread job, let alone truck driver, bus driver, and “car owner” itself. I really wish the AI ceos would actually make my life useful. For example, why am I still doing the dishes, laundry, cleaning my house, paying for landscaping, painters, and on and on? In terms of white collar work I’m paying my fucking lawyers more than ever. Why don’t they solve an actual problem
- DrillShopper 1y ago> In terms of white collar work I’m paying my fucking lawyers more than ever. Why don’t they solve an actual problem Rule 0 is that you never put your angel investors out of work if you want to keep riding on the gravy train
- Philpax 1y agoBecause textual data is plentiful and easy to model, and physical data is not. This will change - there are now several companies working on humanoid robots and the models to power them - but it is a fundamentally different set of problems with different constraints.
- MangoToupe 1y ago> I really wish the AI ceos would actually make my life useful. TBH, I do think that AI can deliver on the hype of making tools with genuinely novel functionality. I can think of a dozen ideas off the top of my head just for the most-used apps on my phone (photos, music, messages, email, browsing). It's just going to take a few years to identify how to best integrate them into products without just chucking a text prompt at people and generating stuff.
- GardenLetter27 1y agoBureaucracy and regulation is the main issue there though. Like in Europe where you're forced to pay a notary to start a business - it's not really even necessary, nevermind something that couldn't be automated, but it's just but of the establishment propping up bureaucrats. Whereas LLMs and generative models in art and coding for example, help to avoid loads of bureaucracy in having to sort out contracts, or even hire someone full-time with payroll, etc.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?
- FeteCommuniste 1y agoI guess the idea is that the people left working will be made so productive and wealthy thanks to the miracle of AI that they can more than make up the difference with extravagant consumption.
- isoprophlex 1y agoI too plan to buy 100.000 liters of yogurt each day once AI has transported me into the socioeconomic strata of the 0.1%
- FeteCommuniste 1y agoMy many robots will be busy building glorious mansions out of yogurt cups.
- Terr_ 1y agoOr, as per a Love, Death, and Robots short film, the new superintelligence will be inextricable from yogurt...
- darth_avocado 1y agoIf you want to see what that looks like, just look at the economy of India. Do we really want that?
- FeteCommuniste 1y agoCertainly not what I want, but it looks like we could be headed there. And the "industry leaders" seem cool with it, to judge by their politics.
- keybored 1y ago> If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it’s going to ruin the global economy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Exactly. These people are growth-seekers first, domain experts second. Yet I saw progressive[1] outlets reacting to this as a neutral reporting. So it apparently takes a “legacy media” outlet to wake people out of their AI stupor. [1] American news outlets that lean social-democratic
- sevensor 1y agoWhat AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately, the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a result. Whether the rest of us can survive this remains to be seen. The CEOs will be fine, of course.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoConsulting companies like the Big 4 where this happens most are bigger/stronger than ever (primarily due to AI related consulting). Try again.
- sevensor 1y agoWhat makes you think productive work is what consulting companies are selling? They're there for laundering accountability. When you bring in consultants to roll out your corporate AI strategy, and it all falls apart in a few years, you can say, "we were following best practices, nobody could have anticipated X," where X is whatever failure mode ultimately tanks the AI strategy.
- code_for_monkey 1y agoyou hire consultants so you can cut staff and quality, but the CEOs were already going to do that.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoDo you think that it's possible in principle to have a better or worse corporate AI strategy? I do, and because I do, it seems clear that companies paying top dollar are doing so because they expect a better one. There's no reason to pay KPMG's rates if all you need is a fall guy. Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe to, that management strategy is broadly fake so there's no underlying thing for the consultants to do better or worse on. I don't think that's right, but I'm never sure how to bridge the gap. It'd be like someone telling me that software architecture is fake and only code is real.
- whynotminot 1y agoThere’s a hype machine for sure. But the last few paragraphs of the piece kind of give away the game — the author is an AI skeptic judging only the current products rather than taking in the scope of how far they’ve come in such a short time frame. I don’t have much use for this short sighted analysis. It’s just not very intelligent and shows a stubborn lack of imagination. It reminds me of that quote “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” People like this have banked their futures on AI not working out.
- codr7 1y agoThe opposite is more true imo. It's the AI hype squad that are banking their future on AI magically turning into AGI; because, you know, it surprised us once.
- whynotminot 1y agoNot really — even if AGI doesn’t work and these models don’t get any better, there’s still enormous value to be mined just from harnessing the existing state of the art. Or these guys pivot and go back to building CRUD apps. They’re either at the front of something revolutionary… or not… and they’ll go back to other lucrative big tech jobs.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIs there enormous value? AI is burning cash at an extraordinary rate on the promise that it will be an enormous value. But if it plateaus, then all the servers, GPUs, data centers, power and cooling and other infrastructure will have to be paid for out of revenue. Will customers be willing to pay the actual costs of running this stuff.
- whynotminot 1y agoI don’t know if what they’ve built and are building in the future will justify the level of investment. I’m not an economist or a VC. It’s hard to fathom the huge sums being so casually thrown around. All I can tell you is that for what I use AI for now in both my personal and professional life, I would pay a lot of money (way more than I already am) to keep just the current capabilities I already have access to today.
- johnwheeler 1y agoI previously worked at a company called Recharge Payments, directly supporting the CTO, Mike—a genuinely great person, and someone learning to program. Mike would assign me small tasks, essentially making me his personal AI assistant. Now, I approach everything I do from his perspective. It’s clear that over time, he’ll increasingly rely on AI, asking employees less frequently. Eventually, it’ll become so efficient to turn to AI that he’ll rarely need to ask employees anything at all.
- lexandstuff 1y agoI've never had a job like that. My job has always involved helping my company, not just figure out how to build something, but what to build. We typically collaborate on a few ideas and then go away, let them percolate in our brains, before coming back with some new ideas to try. The whole point of the Agile Manifesto is that we don't know what to build in the first place. Sometimes my boss has asked me to do something that in the long run will cost the company dearly. Luckily for him, I am happy to push back, because I can understand what we're trying to achieve and help figure the best option for the company based on my experience, intuition and the data I have available. There's so much more to working with a team than: "Here is a very specific task, please execute it exactly as the spec says". We want ideas, we want opinions, we want bursts of creative inspiration, we want pushback, we want people to share their experiences, their intuition, the vibe they get, etc. We don't want AI agents that do exactly what we say; we want teams of people with different skill sets who understand the problem and can interpret task through the lens of their skill set and experience, because a single person doesn't have all the answers. I think your ex-boss Mike will very soon find himself trapped in local minima of innovation, with only his own understanding of the world, and a sycophantic yes-man AI employee that will always do exactly as he says. The fact that AI mostly doesn't work is only part of the problem.
- golol 1y ago> To be clear, Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate. I truly belive these types of paper don't deserve to be valued so much.
- righthand 1y agoYes we live in a world where no “experts” are required to provide any evidence or truth, but media outlets will gladly publish every false word and idea. For the same reason these Ceos want to wipe their workforce for more money, not a functioning society.
- airstrike 1y agoThe attention economy is ruining society.
- madaxe_again 1y agoAnd the journalist cited what research or evidence, precisely, in his rebuttal?
- idkwhattocallme 1y agoI worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.
- bachmeier 1y ago> I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.
- trhway 1y agoAI has been also consuming Dilbert as part of its training...
- DonHopkins 1y agoWorse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part of its training... "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams "Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you." -Scott Adams "Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people. That’s a hate group." -Scott Adams "Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed." -Scott Adams "I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. ... The only outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams
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- paulluuk 1y agoAround the time when bitcoin started to get serious public attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did not live up to my believe that it would "fundamentally" change currencies and banking. It made some minor changes, sure, but if it weren't for the value of bitcoin, it would still be a nerdy topic about as well known as perlin noise. Although I did make quite a lot of money from it, though I sold out way too soon. As a research engineer in the field of AI, I am again getting this feeling. People keep doubting that AI will have any kind of impact, and I'm absolutely certain that it will. A few years ago people said "AI art is terrible" and "LLMs are just autocomplete" or the famous "AI is just if-else". By now it should be pretty obvious to everyone in the tech community that AI, and LLMs in particular, are extremely useful and already have a huge impact on tech. Is it going to fulfill all the promises made by billionaire tech CEOs? No, of course not, at least not on the time scale that they're projecting. But they are incredibly useful tools that can enhance efficiency of almost any job that involves setting behind a computer. Even just something like copilot autocomplete or talking with an LLM about a refactor you're planning, is often incredibly useful. And the amount of "intelligence" that you can get from a model that can actually run on your laptop is also getting much better very quickly. The way I see it, either the AI hype will end up like cryptocurrency: forever a part of our world, but never quite lived up to it's promises, but I made a lot of money in the meantime. Or the AI hype will live up to it's promises, but likely over a much longer period of time, and we'll have to test whether we can live with that. Personally I'm all for a fully automated luxury communism model for government, but I don't see that happening in the "better dead than red" US. It might become reality in Europe though, who knows.
- paulluuk 1y agoOn a side note, I do worry about the energy consumption of AI. I'll admit that, like the silicon valley tech bros, there is a part of me that hopes that AI will allow researchers to invent a solution to that -- something like fusion or switching to quantum-computing AI models or whatever. But if that doesn't happen, it's probably the biggest problem related to AI. More so even than alignment, perhaps.
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- fny 1y agoI think everyone is missing the bigger picture. This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole sale. There are two more predominant effects: 1. You’ll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is no longer a perfect moat. I’ve seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding class in college, but now she’s writing small apps for her IT company. And for all of you who poo poo that as unsustainable. I became proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte in a day. I’ve written a few shaders too! The code I’ve written is pristine. All those conversations about “should I learn X to be employed” are totally moot. Yes APL would be harder, but it’s definitely doable. This is an example of 3. Overall, this will surely cause wage growth to slow and maybe decrease. In turn, job opportunities will dry up and unemployment might ensue. For those who still don’t believe, air traffic controllers are a great thought experiment—they’re paid quite nicely. What happens if you build tools so that you can train and employ 30% of the population instead of just 10%?
- BigJono 1y ago> I became proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte in a day. I’ve written a few shaders too! The code I’ve written is pristine. All those conversations about “should I learn X to be employed” are totally moot. fucking lmao
- fny 1y agoMy point is you learn X and your time to learn and ship Y is dramatically reduced. It would have taken me a month to write the GPU code I needed in Blender, and I had everything working in a week. And none of this was "vibed": I understand exactly what each line does.
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoYou did not and you are not proficient. LLMs and AI in general cater to your insecurities. An actual good human mentor will wipe the floor with your arrogance and you'll be better for it.
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- AnimalMuppet 1y agoAt least temporarily, it can be somewhat self-fulfilling, though. Companies believe it, think they'd better shed white-collar jobs to stay competitive. If enough companies believe that, white-collar jobs go down, even if AI is useless. Of course, in the medium term, those companies may find out that they needed those people, and have to hire, and then have to re-train the new people, and suffer all the disruption that causes, and the companies that didn't do that will be ahead of the game. (Or, they find out that they really didn't need all those people, even if AI is useless, and the companies that didn't get rid of them are stuck with a higher expense structure. We'll see.)
- josefritzishere 1y agoI don't think we've seen a technology more over-hyped in the history of industrialized society. Cars, which did fully replace horses, was not even hyped this hard.
- spcebar 1y agoSomething is nagging me about the AI-human replacement conversation that I would love insight from people who know more about startup money than me. It seems like the AI revolution hit as interest rates went insane, and at the same time the AI that could write code was becoming available, the free VC money dried up, or at least changed. I feel like that's not usually a part of the conversation and I'm wondering if we would be having the same conversation if money for startups was thrown around (and more jobs were being created for SWEs) the way it was when interest rates were zero. I know next to nothing about this and would love to hear informed opinions.
- swyx 1y agoits not part of the conversation because the influence here is tangential at best (1) and your sense of how much vc money is on the table at any given time is not good (2). 1a. most seed/A stage investing is acyclical because it is not really about timing for exits, people just always need dry powder 1b. tech advancement is definitely acyclical - alexnet, transformers, and gpt were all just done by very small teams without a lot of funding. gpt2->3 was funded by microsoft, not vc 2a. (i have advance knowledge of this bc i've previewed the keynote slides for ai.engineer) free vc money slowed in 2022-2023 but has not at all dried up and in fact reaccelerated in a very dramatic way. up 70% this yr 2b. "vc" is a tenous term when all biglabs are >>10b valuation and raising from softbank or sovereign wealth. its no longer vc, its about reallocating capital from publics to privates because the only good ai co's are private
- mjburgess 1y agoI'm not seeing how you're replying to this comment. I'm not sure you've understood their point. The point is that there's a correlation between macroeconomic dynamics (ie., the price of credit increasing) and the "rise of AI". In ordinary times, absent AI, the macroeconomic dynamics would fully explain the economic shifts we're seeing. So the question is why do we event need to mention AI in our explanation of recent economic shifts? What phenomena, exactly, require positing AI disruption?
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- michaeldoron 1y agoEvery time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ ". Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic? They could have sketched the growth in foundation model capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and the need for companies to show results and not promises. They could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.
- bckr 1y agoThat’s not what major news outlets are for. I’m not sure exactly what they’re for.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAnalysis == Opinion when it comes to mainstream news reporting. It's one guy's thinking on something.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoI'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to support your argument.
- drewcon 1y agoHumans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change. Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.
- ihsw 1y ago[dead]
- bachmeier 1y ago> AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks "Starting" is doing a hell of lot of work in that sentence. I'm starting to become a billionaire and Nobel Prize winner. Anyway, I agree with Mark Cuban's statement in the article. The most likely scenario is that we become more productive as AI complements humans. Yesterday I made this comment on another HN story: "Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way. But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the cost of those gains rises."
- JKCalhoun 1y ago> I'm starting to become a billionaire Suggests you are accumulating money, not losing it. That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting better, not worse. (Or humans are getting worse? Ha ha, not ha ha.)
- bachmeier 1y ago> That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting better, not worse. Well, in order to meet the standard of the quote "wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years" we need more than just getting better. We need considerably better technology with a better cost structure to wipe out that many jobs. Saying we're starting on that task when the odds are no better than me becoming a billionaire within two years is what we used to call BS.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIt it sustainable? I know when I program, it's sometimes nice to get to something that's easy, even if it's tedious and repetitive. It's like stopping to walk for a bit when you're on a run. You're still moving, but you can catch your breath and recharge.
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- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoImagine you had a crystal ball that lets you look 10 years into the future, and you asked it about whether we underestimate or overestimate how many jobs AI will replace in the future. It flickers for a moment, then it either says "In 2025, mankind vastly underestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" or "In 2025, mankind vastly overestimated the amount of jobs AI can do in 2035" How would you use that information to invest in the stock market?
- usersouzana 1y agoHeads or tails, then proceed accordingly. You won't waste any more time analyzing it in hopes of getting it right.
- elcapitan 1y agoIf I had a crystal ball that lets me look 10 years into the future and I wanted to invest in the stock market, I would ask it about the stock market.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI'm already assuming the first answer but nonetheless have absolutely no idea how I would use that to make a guess about the stock market. So it's index funds (as always) with me anyway.
- dehrmann 1y agoAh, so a straddle.
- punkbit 1y agoIn that hypothetical case, you’d invest in the robot industry and security. The poor would try to eat the rich, right?
- phendrenad2 1y agoThese are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of your money on it, you can launch yourself into a whole other echelon of life. I've been a heavy user of AI ever since ChatGPT was released for free. I've been tracking its progress relative to the work done by humans at large. I've concluded that it's improvements over the last few years are not across-the-board changes, but benefit specific areas more than others. And unfortunately for AI hype believers, it happens to be areas such as art, which provide a big flashy "look at this!" demonstration of AI's power to people. But... try letting AI come up with a nuanced character for a novel, or design an amplifier circuit, or pick stocks, or do your taxes. I'm a bit worried about YCombinator. I like Hacker News. I'm a bit worried that YC has so much riding on AI startups. After machine learning, crypto, the post-Covid 19 healthcare bubble, fintech, NFTs, can they take another blow when the music stops?
- SoftTalker 1y ago> The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. Why is that the counter-narrative? Doesn't it seem more likely that it will contine to gradually improve, perhaps asymptotically, maybe be more specifically trained in the niches where it works well, and it will just become another tool that humans use? Maybe that's a flop compared to the hype?
- ls612 1y agoAt the rate the hyperscalers are increasing capex anything less than 1990s internet era growth rates will not be pretty. So far its been able to sustain those growth rates at the big boy AI companies (look at OpenAI revenue over time) but will it continue? Are we near the end of major LLM advances or are we near the beginning? There are compelling arguments both ways (running out of data is IMO the most compelling bear argument).
- rjurney 1y agoWorkers in denial are like lemmings, headed for the cliff... not putting myself above that. A moderate view indicates great disruption before new jobs replace the current round being lost.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up." Silicon Valley and Redmond make desperate attempts to argue for their own continued relevance. For Silicon Valley VC, software running on computers cannot be just a tool. It has to cause "disruption". It has to be "eating the world". It has to be a source of "intelligence" that can replace people. If software and computers are just boring appliances, like yesterday's typewriters, calculators, radios, TVs, etc., then Silicon Valley VC may need to find a new line of work. Expect the endless media hype to continue. No doubt soda technology is very interesting. But people working at soda companies are not as self-absorbed, detached from reality and overfunded as people working for so-called "tech" companies.
- digianarchist 1y agoI saw a tweet the other day that stated AI will cure all diseases within 5-10 years. The tweet cites scientists and CEOs but only lists CEOs of AI companies. https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1927843826183589960 https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1927843826183589960
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoCEOs’ jobs involve hyping their companies. It’s up to us whether we believe. I’d love a journalist using Claude to debunk Dario: “but don’t believe me, I’m just a journalist - we asked Dario’s own product if he’s lying through his teeth, and here’s what it said:”
- geraneum 1y agoI’d love a journalist that do their job. For example when someone like this CEO pulls a number out of their ass, maybe push them on how they arrived at this? Why does it displace 50%? Why 70? Why not 45?
- elktown 1y agoTech has a big problem of selective critical thinking due to a perpetual gold rush causing people to adopt a stockbroker mentality of not missing out on the next big thing - be it the next subfield like AI, the next cool tech that you can be an early adopter on etc. But yeah, nothing new under the sun; it's corruption.
- mjburgess 1y agoIn many spheres today "thought leadership" is a kind of marketing and sales activity. It is no wonder then that no one can think and no one can lead: either would be an fatal to healthy sales.
- bawana 1y agoWhen are going to get AI CEOs as a service?
- leeroihe 1y agoI used to be a big proponent of AI tools and llms, even built products around them. But to be honest, with all of the big AI ceos promising that they're going to "replace all white collar jobs" I can't see that they want what's best for the country or the american people. It's legitimately despicable and ghoulish that they just expect everyone to "adapt" to the downstream affects of their knowledge-machine lock-in.
- bawana 1y agoWhen are we going to get AI CEOs as a service?
- crims0n 1y agoYou may be onto something… sell strategic decisions by an AI cohort as a service, insure against the inevitable duds, profit.
- 0x5f3759df-i 1y agoI asked ChatGPT to be a CEO and decide if everyone should work in office 5 days a week: “ Final Thought (as a CEO): I wouldn’t force a full return unless data showed a clear business case. Culture, performance, and employee sentiment would all guide the decision. I’d rather lead with transparency, flexibility, and trust than mandates that could backfire. Would you like a sample policy memo I’d send to employees in this scenario?” A better, more reasonable CEO than the one I have. So I’m looking forward to AI taking that white collar job especially.
- CKMo 1y agoThere's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity and potential to one day be competent, but the time and resource investment to make that happen is too much. I often find myself choosing to just use an AI for work I would have delegated to them, because I need it fast and I need it now. If I handed it off to them I would not get it fast, and I would need to also go through it with them in several back-and-forth feedback-review loops to get it to a state that's usable. Given they are human, this would push back delivery times by 2-3 business days. Or... I can prompt and handhold an AI to get it done in 3 hours. Not that I'm saying AI is a god-send, but new grads and entry-level roles are kind of screwed.
- mjburgess 1y agoThis is always the case though. A factor of 50x productivity between expert and novice is small. Consider how long it take you to conduct foot surgery vs. a food surgeon -- close to a decade of medical school + medical experience -- just for a couple hours of work. There have never been that many businesses able to hire novices for this reason.
- pc86 1y agoThis is a big part of why a lot of developers' first 1-3 jobs are small mom & pop shops of varying levels of quality, almost none of which have "good" engineering cultures. Market rate for a new grad dev might be X, it's hard to find an entry level job at X but mom & pop business who needs 0.7 FTE developers is willing to pay 0.8X and even though the owner is batshit insane it's not a bad deal for the 22 and 23 year olds willing to do it.
- mjburgess 1y agoSure. I mean perhaps, LLMs will accelerate a return to a more medieval culture in tech where you "have to start at 12 to be any good". Personally, I think that's a good (enough) idea. By 22, I'd at least a decade of experience; my first job at 20 was as a contractor for a major national/multinational. Programming is a craft, and just like any other, the best time to learn it is when it's free to learn.
- Animats 1y agoThe real bloodbath will come when coordination between multiple AIs, in a company sense, starts working. Computers have much better I/O than humans. Once a corporate organization can be automated, it will be too fast for humans to participate. There will be no place for slow people. "Move fast and break things" - Zuckerberg "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - George S. Patton
- catigula 1y agoThis doesn't even make sense. What corporations do you think will exist in this world? You're not going to sell me your SaaS when I can rent AIs to make faster cheaper IP that I actually own to my exact specifications.
- ofjcihen 1y agoThis is always the indicator I look for whether or not someone actually knows what they’re talking about. If you can’t extrapolate on your own thesis you can’t be knowledgeable in the field. Good example was a guy on here who was convinced every company would be ran by one person because of AI. You’d wake up in the morning and decide which products your AI came up with while you slept would be profitable. The obvious next question is “then why are you even involved?”
- catigula 1y agoI agree, I was actually leaving the question open-ended because I can't necessarily scale it all the way up, it's too complex. Why would they even rent me AIs when they can just be every company? Who is "they"? All that needs to be understood is that the narcissistic grandeur delusion that you will singularly be positioned to benefit from sweeping restructuring of how we understand labor must be forcibly divested from some people's brains. Only a very select few are positioned to benefit from this and even their benefit is only just mostly guaranteed rather than perfectly guaranteed.
- sbierwagen 1y agohttps://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/ Robot run iron mine that sells iron ore to a robot run steel mill that sells steel plate to a robot run heavy truck manufacturer that sells heavy trucks to robot run iron mines, etc etc. The material handling of heavy industry is already heavily automated, almost by definition. You just need to take out the last few people.
- ck2 1y agoLLM is going to be used for oppression by every government, not just dictatorships but USA of course Think of it as an IQ test of how new technology is used Let me give you an easier example of such a test Let's say they suddenly develop nearly-free unlimited power, ie. fusion next year Do you think the world will become more peaceful or much more war? If you think peaceful, you fail, of course more war, it's all about oppression It's always about the few controlling the many The "freedom" you think you feel on a daily basis is an illusion quickly faded
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- deadbabe 1y agoSomething I’ve come to realize in the software industry is: if you have more smart engineers than the competition, you win. If you don’t snatch up the smartest engineers before your competition does: you lose. Therefore at a certain level of company, hiring is entirely dictated by what the competition is doing. If everyone is suddenly hiring, you better start doing it too. If no one is, you can relax, but you could also pull ahead if you decide to hire rapidly, but this will tip off competitors and they too will begin hiring. Whether or not you have any use for those engineers is irrelevant. So AI will have little impact on hiring trends in this market. The downturn we’ve seen in the past few years is mostly driven by the interest rate environment, not because AI is suddenly replacing engineers. An engineer using AI gives more advantage than removing an engineer, and hiring an engineer who will use AI is more advantageous than not hiring one at all. AI is just the new excuse for firing or not hiring people, previously it was RTO but that hype cycle has been squeezed for all it can be.
- ggm 1y agoWithout well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy goods and services? Money is just rationing. If you devalue the economy implicitly you accept that, and the consequences for society at large. Lenin's dictum: A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with Comes to mind
- Hilift 1y ago> Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy goods and services? People charging on their credit cards. Consumers are adding $2 billion in new debt every day. "Total household debt increased by $167 billion to reach $18.20 trillion in the first quarter" https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc
- ramesh31 1y ago>Without well paid middle classes, who is buying all the fancy goods and services? Rich people buying even fancier goods and services. You already see this in the auto industry. Why build a great $20,000 car for the masses when you can make the same revenue selling $80,000 cars to rich people (and at higher margins)? This doesn't work of course when you have a reasonably egalitarian society with reasonable wealth inequality. But the capitalists have figured out how to make 75% of us into willing slaves for the rest. A bonus of this is that a good portion of that 75% can be convinced to go into lifelong debt to "afford" those things they wish they could actually buy, further entrenching the servitude.
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- WaltPurvis 1y agoI plugged those two quotes from Amodei into ChatGPT along with this prompt: "Pretend you are highly skeptical about the potential of AI, both in general and in its potential for replacing human workers the way Amodei predicts. Write a quick 800-word takedown of his predictions." I won't paste in the result here, since everyone here is capable of running this experiment themselves, but trust me when I say ChatGPT produced (in mere seconds, of course) an article every bit as substantive and well-written as the cited article. FWIW.
- trhway 1y agoRead on about PLTR in recent days - all these government layoffs (including by DOGE well connected to PLTR) with the money redirected toward the Grand Unification Project using PLTR Foundry (with AI) platform.
- chris_armstrong 1y agoThe wildest claims are those of increased labor productivity and economic growth: if they were true, our energy consumption would be increasing wildly beyond our current capacity to add more (dwarfing the increase from AI itself). Productivity doesn’t increase on its own; economists struggle to separate it from improved processes or more efficient machinery (the “multi factor productivity fudge”). Increased efficiency in production means both more efficient energy use AND being able to use a lot more of it for the same input of labour.
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- smeeger 1y agoif being redundant would lead to mass layoffs then half of white collar workers would have been laid off decades ago. and white collar people will fiddle with rules and regulations to make their ever more bloated redundancy even more brazen with the addition of AI… and then later when AI has the ability to replace blue collar workers it will do so immediately and swiftly while the white collar people get all the money. its happened a thousand times before and will happen again.
- stephc_int13 1y agoThe main culprit behind the hype of the AI revolution is a lack of understanding of its true nature and capabilities. We should know better, Eliza demonstrated decades ago how easily we can be fooled by language, this is different and more useful but we rely so much on language fluency and knowledge retrieval as a proxy for intelligence that we are fooled again. I am not saying this is a nothing burger, the tech can be applied to many domains and improve productivity, but it does not think, not even a little, and scaling won’t make that magically happen. Anyone paying attention should understand this fact by now. There is no intelligence explosion in sight, what we’ll see during the next few years is a gradual and limited increase in automation, not a paradigm change, but the continuation of a process that started with the industrial revolution.
- gcanyon 1y ago...everyone here saying "someday AI will <fill in the blank> but not today" while failing to acknowledge that for a lot of things "someday" is 2026, and for an even larger number of things it's 2027, and we can't even predict whether or not in 2028 AI will handle nearly all things...
- causal 1y agoThe problem is that it's hard to pin down any job that's been eliminated by AI even after years of having LLMs. I'm sure it will happen. It just seems like the trajectory of intelligence defies any simple formula.
- gcanyon 1y agoThere's definitely an element of what we saw in the '90s -- software didn't always make people faster, it made the quality of their output better (wysiwyg page layout, better database tools/validation, spell check in email, etc. etc.). But we're going to get to a point where "the quality goes up" means the quality exceeds what I can do in a reasonable time frame, and then what I can do in any time frame...
- sfblah 1y agoI literally am in the process of firing someone who we no longer need because of efficiencies tied to GenAI. I work at a top-10 tech company. So, there you go. That's one job.
- causal 1y agoThat's really interesting, can you offer any insight on the type of role this efficiency made unnecessary or why firing made more sense than augmenting?
- CSMastermind 1y agoHuge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable. They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities meant more was getting done which meant new tasks needed to be performed.
- anthomtb 1y ago> Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers One of which was the occupation of being a computer!
- janalsncm 1y agoI don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there. On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of people. The Luddites were right. Machines did take their jobs. Those individuals who invested significantly in their craft were permanently disadvantaged. And those who fought against it were executed. And on point 2, to be precise, a lack of jobs doesn’t mean a lack of problems. There are a ton of things society needs to have accomplished, and in a perfect world the guy who was automated out of packing Amazon boxes could open a daycare for low income parents. We just don’t have economic models to enable most of those things, and that’s only going to get worse.
- ryukoposting 1y agoI'll preface this by saying I agree with most of what you said. It'll be a slow burn, though. The projection of rapid, sustained large-scale unemployment assumes that the technology rapidly ascends to replace a large portion of the population at once. AI is not currently on a path to replacing a generalized workforce. Call center agents, maybe. Second, simply "being better at $THING" doesn't mean a technology will be adopted, let alone quickly. If that were the case, we'd all have Dvorak keyboards and commuter rail would be ubiquitous. Third, the mass unemployment situation requires economic conditions where not leveraging a presumably exploitable underclass of unemployed persons is somehow the most profitable choice for the captains of industry. They are exploitable because this is not a welfare state, and our economic safety net is tissue-paper thin. We can, therefore, assume their labor can be had at far less than its real worth, and thus someone will find a way to turn a profit off it. Possibly the Silicon Valley douchebags who caused the problem in the first place.
- joshdavham 1y agoThis type of hype is pretty perplexing to me. Supposing that you are trying to increase AI adoption among white-collar workers, why try to scare the shit out them in the process? Or is he moreso trying to sell to the C-suite?
- globalnode 1y agoi really liked this article, it puts into perspective how great claims require great proof, and so far all we've heard are great claims. i love ml tech but i just dont trust it to replace a human completely. sure it can augment roles but thats not the vision we're being sold.
- osigurdson 1y agoThe real value is going to be in areas that neither machines nor humans could do previously.
- snowwrestler 1y agoHistorically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good ideas and reallocate resources toward them. In the absence of reliable prediction, quick reaction is what wins. Anyway, even if AI does end up “destroying” tons of existing white collar jobs, that does not necessarily imply mass unemployment. But it’s such a common inference that it has its own pejorative: Luddite. And the flip side of Ludddism is what we see from AI boosters now: invoking a massive impact on current jobs as a shorthand to create the impression of massive capability. It’s a form of marketing, as the CNN piece says.
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- beepbooptheory 1y agoSo, we are doomed to work forever, just maybe different jobs?
- absurdo 1y agoBasically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked things are for humanity.
- aianus 1y agoNo, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.
- qgin 1y agoI often see people say “AI can’t do ALL of my job, so that means my job is safe. But what this means at scale, over time, is that if AI can do 80% of your job, AI will do 80% of your job. The remaining 20% human-work part will be consolidated and become the full time job of 20% of the original headcount while the remaining 80% of the people get fired. AI does not need to do 100% of any job (as that job is defined today ) to still result in large scale labor reconfigurations. Jobs will be redefined and generally shrunk down to what still legitimately needs human work to get it done. As an employee, any efficiency gains you get from AI belong to the company, not you.
- sram1337 1y ago...or your job goes from commanding a $200k/yr salary to $60k/yr. Hopefully that's enough to pay your mortgage.
- noisy_boy 1y agoI am more worried about the resultant breakdown of the social order due to the social pressures and hopelessness and it's ramifications. Which next-bonus-cycle CEOs don't give a shit about. UBI is just talk (which few are talking) and even that has issues.
- qgin 1y agoCurrently the United States is in the process of making Medicaid and SNAP / food stamps contingent on being employed. We’re further from UBI than we’ve ever been.
- tdeck 1y agoMaybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in innovative products and improvements to existing products. And we'd expect that to be in a way that would be obvious to customers and users, not just in the form of some blog post or earnings call. For cost center work, this would lead to layoffs right away, sure. But companies that make and sell software should be capitalizing on this, and only laying people off when they get to the point of "we just don't know what to do with all this extra productivity, we're all out of ideas!". I haven't seen one single company in this situation. So that makes me think that these decisions are hype-driven short term thinking.
- CMCDragonkai 1y agoIt's cause there are still bottlenecks. AI is definitely boosting productivity in specific areas, but the total system output is bottlenecked. I think we will see these bottlenecks get rerouted or refactored in the coming years.
- tdeck 1y agoWhat do you think the main bottlenecks are right now?
- kergonath 1y agoQuality control, for one. The state of commercial software is appalling. Writing code itself is not enough to get a useable piece of software. LLMs are also not very useful for long term strategy or to come up with novel features or combinations of features. They also are not great at maintaining existing code, particularly without comprehensive test suites. They are good at coming up with tests for boiler plate code, but not really for high-level features.
- arthurcolle 1y agohttps://github.com/arthurcolle/mlx.erl https://github.com/arthurcolle/mlx.erl
- simonsarris 1y agoI think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 levels. It may never. (Pre-pandemic job postings indexed to 100, its at 61 for software) Maybe AI is having an effect on IT jobs though, look at the unique inflection near the start of 2025: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOv https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOv For another point of comparison, construction and nursing job postings are higher than they were pre-pandemic (about 120 and 116 respectively, where pre-pandemic was indexed to 100. Banking jobs still hover around 100.) I feel like this is almost going to become lost history because the AI hype is so self-insistent. People a decade from now will think Elon slashed Twitter's employee count by 90% because of some AI initiative, and not because he simply thought he could run a lot leaner. We're on year 3-4 of a lot of other companies wondering the same thing. Maybe AI will play into that eventually. But so far companies have needed no such crutch for reducing headcount.
- leflambeur 1y agoIt's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is "be leaner". p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.
- godelski 1y ago> the tune is "be leaner". Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left
- leflambeur 1y agoyet this will continue until it grounds to a halt. It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".
- randomname4325 1y agoOnly way to know for sure you're safe from replacement is if your job is a necessary part of something generating revenue and your not easily replaceable. Otherwise you should assume the company won't hesitate to replace you. It's just business.
- Tokkemon 1y agoYeah I thought that too. Then they laid me off anyway.
- snackernews 1y agoAnyone who thinks an executive considers them necessary or irreplaceable in the current environment is fooling themselves.
- sailingparrot 1y ago> if your job is a necessary part of something generating revenue and your not easily replaceable. First part of this statement is clearly false. People on the phone in a tech support company are very much necessary to generate revenue, people tending to field were very much necessary to extract the value of the fields. Draftsmen before CAD were absolutely necessary etc. Yet technology replaced them, or is in the process of doing so. So then, your statement simplifies to “if you want to be safe for replacement have a job that’s hard to replace” which isn’t very useful anymore.
- econ 1y agoThere use to be a cookie factory here that had up to 12 people sitting there all day doing nothing. If the machines broke down it really took all of them to clean up. This pattern will be rediscovered.
- topherPedersen 1y agoI could be wrong, but I think us software developers are going to become even more powerful, in demand, and valuable.
- ghm2180 1y agoI wonder when the investors and investors in the early printing press or steam engine or excel spreadsheet was invented did they think of the ways — soul crushing homework(books), rapid and cruel colonization(steam engines and trains), innovative project management(excel) — there tech would be used? The demand for these products was not where it was intended at the time probably. Perhaps the answer to its biggest effect lies in how it will free up human potential and time. If AI can do that — and that is a big if — then how and what would you do with that time? Well ofc, more activity, different ways to spend time, implying new kinds of jobs.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoThe trouble with looking at past examples of new tech and automation is that those were all verticals - the displaced worker could move to a different, maybe newly created, work area left intact by the change. Where AI will be different (when we get there - LLMs are not AGI) is that it is a general human-replacement technology meaning there will be no place to run ... They may change the job landscape, but the new jobs (e.g. supervising AIs) will ALSO be done by AI. I don't buy this "AGI by 2027" timeline though - LLMs and LLM-based agents are just missing so many basic capabilities compared to a human (e.g. ability to learn continually and incrementally). It seems that RL, test-time compute (cf tree search) and agentic application, have given a temporary second wind to LLMs which were otherwise topping out in terms of capability, but IMO we are already seeing the limits of this too - superhuman math and coding ability (on smaller scope tasks) do not translate into GENERAL intelligence since they are not based on general mechanism - they are based on vertical pre-training in these (atypical in terms of general use case) areas where there is a clean reward signal for RL to work well. It seems that this crazy "we're responsibly warning you that we're going to destroy the job market!" spiel is perhaps because these CEOs realize there is a limited window of opportunity here to try to get widespread AI adoption (and/or more investment) before the limitations become more obvious. Maybe they are just looking for an exit, or perhaps they are hoping that AI adoption will be sticky even if it proves to be a lot less capable that what they are promising it will be.
- infinitebit 1y agoI am SO thankful to see a news outlet take what tech CEOs say with a grain of salt re: AI. I feel like so many have just been breathlessly repeating anything they say without even an acknowledgement that there might be, you know, some incentive for them to stretch the truth. (ftr i’m not even taking a side re: will AI take all the jobs. even if they do, the reporting on this subject by MSM has been abysmal)
- infinitebit 1y agoSo glad to see a MSM outlet take the words of an AI ceo with even a single grain of salt. I’ve been really disappointed with the way so many publications have just been breathlessly repeating what is essentially a sales pitch. (ftr i’m not even taking a side re: is AI going to take all the jobs. regardless of what happens the fact remains that the reporting has been absolute sh*t on this. i guess “the singularity is here” gets more clicks than “sales person makes sales pitch”)
- absurdo 1y agoHN does the same. We don’t really have a platform on the internet for good discussions so we mostly get regurgitated talking points and a lot of flags/downvotes if it’s deemed a serious enough issue (f.e. pandemic) that taking a contrary stance is strictly forbidden.
- throwaway314155 1y agoCase in point ^
- brokegrammer 1y agoWe don't need AI to wipe out entry-level office jobs. David Graeber wrote about this in Bullshit Jobs. But now that we have AI, it's a good excuse to wipe out those jobs for good, just like Elon did after he acquired Twitter. After that, we can blame AI for the deed.
- JanisErdmanis 1y agoThe productivity gains in activities will be countered by the same gains in counter activities. Everything is going to become more sophisticated, but bullshit will remain.
- kilroy123 1y agoI've thought a lot about this. I think this is exactly what is happening. I've seen this first hand. A lot of the BS jobs are being killed off. Do some non-bs jobs get burn up in the fire along the way, yes. But it's only the beginning.
- rule2025 1y agoThe real "white-collar massacre" is not caused by AI, but you have no irreplaceable, or the value created by hiring you is not higher than using AI. Businesses will not hesitate to use AI, you can't say that companies are ruthless, but that's the pursuit of efficiency. Just as horse-drawn carriages were replaced by cars and coachmen lost their jobs, you can't say it's a problem with cars. History is always strikingly similar, the AI revolution is the fifth industrial revolution, and it is wise to embrace AI and collaborate with AI as soon as possible.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoThere's a popular saying, e.g. used by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, that "AI won't replace you - a human using AI will replace you", which may be temporarily true while AI isn't very capable, but the AI CEOs are claiming AGI will be here in 2 years, and explicitly saying that it will be a "drop-in replacement remote worker". Obviously one of these is wrong - it's either just a tool to be learnt and used, or it is in fact a drop-in replacement for a human. One can argue about the timeline and technology (maybe not LLM based), but it does seem that human-level AGI will be here relatively soon - next 10 or 20 years, perhaps, if not 2. When this does happen, history is unlikely to be a good predictor of what to expect... AGI may create new jobs as well as detstroy old ones, but what's different is that AGI will also be doing those new jobs! AGI isn't automating one industry, or creating a technology like computers that can help automate any industry - AGI is a technology that will replace the need for human workers in any capacity, starting with all jobs that can be conducted without a physical presence.
- notyouraibot 1y agoThe hype around AI replacing software engineers is truly delusional. Yes they are very good at solving known problems, writing for loops and boilerplate code but introduce a little bit of complexity and creativity and it all fails. There have been countless tasks that I have given to AI, to which it simply concluded its not possible and suggested me to use several external libraries to get it done, after a little bit of manual digging, I was able to achieve that same task without any libraries and I'm not even a seasoned engineer.
- jatora 1y agoWhile I agree that the current 'bloodbath' narrative is all hype, I'm honestly confused by a lot of the sentiment i see on here towards AI. Namely the dismissal of continual improvement and the rampant whistling past the graveyard attitude of what is coming. It is confusing because many of the dismissals come from programmers, who are unequivocally the prime beneficiaries of genAI capability as it stands. I work as a marketing engineer at a ~1B company and the amount of gains I have been able to provide as an individual are absolutely multiplied by genAI. One theory I have is that maybe it is a failing of prompt ability that is causing the doubt. Prompting, fundamentally, is querying vector space for a result - and there is a skill to it. There is a gross lack of tooling to assist in this which I attribute to a lack of awareness of this fact. The vast majority of genAI users dont have any sort of prompt library or methodology to speak of beyond a set of usual habits that work well for them. Regardless, the common notion that AI has only marginally improved since GPT-4 is criminally naive. The notion that we have hit a wall has merit, of course, but you cannot ignore the fact that we just got accurate 1M context in a SOTA model with gemini 2.5pro. For free. Mere months ago. This is a leap. If you have not experienced that as a leap then you are using LLM's incorrectly. You cannot sleep on context. Context (and proper utilization of it) is literally what shores up 90% of the deficiencies I see complained about. AI forgets libraries and syntax? Load in the current syntax. Deep research it. AI keeps making mistakes? Inform it of those mistakes and keep those stored in your project for use in every prompt. I consistently make 200k+ token queries of code and context and receive highly accurate results. I build 10-20k loc tools in hours for fun. Are they production ready? No. Do they accomplish highly complex tasks for niche use cases? Yes. The empowerment of the single developer who is good at manipulating AI AND an experienced dev/engineer is absolutely incredible. Deep research alone has netted my company tens of millions in pipeline, and I just pretend it's me. Because that's the other part that maybe many aren't realizing - its right under your nose - constantly. The efficiency gains in marketing are hilariously large. There are countless ways to avoid 'AI slop', and it involves, again, leveraging context and good research, and a good eye to steer things. I post this mostly because I'm sad for all of the developers who have not experienced this. I see it as a failure of effort (based on some variant of emotional bias or arrogance), not a lack of skill or intellect. The writing on the wall is so crystal clear.
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- atleastoptimal 1y agolosing jobs is the biggest predictable hazard of AI but far from the biggest however there seems to be a big disconnect on this site and others If you believe AGI is possible and that AI can be smarter than humans in all tasks, naturally you can imagine many outcomes far more substantial than job loss. However many people don’t believe AGI is possible, thus will never consider those possibilities I fear many will deny the probability that AGI could be achieved in the near future, thus leaving themselves and others unprepared for the consequences. There are so many potential bad outcomes that could be avoided merely if more smart people realized the possibility of AGI and ASI, and would thus rationally devote their cognitive abilities to ensuring that the potential emergence of smarter than human intelligences goes well.
- theawakened 1y agoI've said this before and I'll say it again: The idea that 'AI' will EVER take over any programmers job is ridiculous. These idiots think they are going to create AGI, it's never going to happen, not with this race of people. There is far too much ignorance in humanity. AI will never be able to be any better than it's source, humanity. It's a soon-to-be realization for these billionaire talking heads. Nothing can rise higher than it's source. Even if they cover every square foot of land with data centers, it'll never work like they expect it to. The AI bubble will burst so hard the entire world will quake. I give it 5 years max.
- hansmayer 1y agoIt's so good to see the non-expert types are finally starting to see the whole hype for what it really is -> the long tail of last 20 years of incremental ML development, and not some revolutionary tech. We did not need to have this much hype around web 1.0 which was immediately adopted due to being obviously, well, revolutionary.
- madaxe_again 1y agoYes, the dot-com bubble never happened.
- hansmayer 1y agoWe're talking technology adoption here, no need to sidetrack (although I would argue, the bubble of technology sector burning 200B to produce 10B in revenue will be so much more painful). Back in the day everyone was running to do something on the web, commercial or not, be it out of enthusiasm, greed, noble aspirations, art or even criminal (warez, anyone?). I won't even mention the iPhone moment here. Compare that to five years into GenAI hype, where is the massive adoption and thousands of applications or at least a single important breakthrough? Where is the AGI some of these "leaders" have been promising to arrive in 2025? Chumming along with Tesla's robotaxis?
- madaxe_again 1y agoRight - adoption was slower than people expected at the time, but it did happen, and a lot of the stuff that got thrown at the wall back then did eventually stick. We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time for a new technology to percolate through society, and I use the “mom metric” as a bellwether - if your/my mother is using the tech, you’d better believe it has achieved market penetration. Until 2011 my mum was absolutely not interested in the web. Now she does most of her shopping on it, and spends her days boomerposting. She recently decided to start paying for ChatGPT. Sure, it’s a fuzzy thing, but I think the adoption cycle this time around will be faster, as the access to the tech is already in peoples’ hands, and there are plenty of folks who are already finding useful applications for genai. Robotaxis, whether they end up dominated by Tesla or waymo or someone else entirely, are inarguably here, and the adoption rates (the USA is not the only market in the world) are ramping significantly this year. I’m not sure I get your point about smartphones? They’re in practically every pocket on the planet, now, they’re not some niche thing.
- K0balt 1y agoThe “bloodbath” will be slow but is quite likely to be significant. AI / GP robotic labor will not penetrate the market so much in existing companies, which will have huge inertial buffers, but more in new companies that arise in specific segments where the technology proves most useful. The layoffs will come not as companies replace workers with AI, but as AI companies displace non-AI companies in the market, followed by panicked restructuring and layoffs in those companies as they try to react, probably mostly unsuccessfully. Existing companies don’t have the luxury of buying market share with investor money, they have to make a profit. A tech darling AI startup powered by unicorn farts and inference can burn through billions of SoftBank money buying market share.
- xpe 1y agoI find this plausible. Is the data starting to show this?
- K0balt 1y agoThere might be some, but I think it’s still early. For the moment, AI is enabling a bunch of stuff that was too expensive or time consuming to do before (flooding the commons with shiny garbage and pedantic text to drive “engagement”. Despite the hype, It’s going to be 2-3 years before AI application really fall into stride, and 3-7 before general purpose robotics really get up to speed.
- veunes 1y agoIf the product can't speak for itself, scare people into believing it will soon
- jona777than 1y agoThere will likely be more jobs because of AI. With more “knowledge”, comes more responsibility. Spam folders only exist because of automated emails. That classification process is more work. We may find there are more needs to meet as AI advances, not less. The fallacy is in the statement “AI will replace jobs.” This shirks responsibility, which immediately diminishes credibility. If jobs are replaced or removed, that’s a choice we as humans have made, for better or worse.
- givemeethekeys 1y agoThere is an AI bloodbath that is adding to supply of labor in all low hanging fields that aren’t yet being decimated by AI.
- franczesko 1y agoAI bubble burst will come first.
- Lu2025 1y agodon't think that the white collar layoffs of the last 3-4 years are due to AI. The tech layoffs of 2022 are explained in part by the impact of 2017 tax reform. Before 2022, the research and development expenses could be written off taxes as a tax credit in the same year. It's a dollar to dollar reduction of tax liability. Tech companies classify a lot of their work as R&D. So those overpaid Facebook coders are essentially public charges! Somebody up thread said that programmers are disproportionately highly compensated in the US. They are, because it's not companies who pay for them, it's taxpayers, indirectly. Starting 2022, the deal became a bit less sweet. R&D expenses had to be amortized over 5 years. What happened next is a collusion in response to Great Resignation. Several large tech companies conspired to have layoffs at the same time as a salary compression move. The AI statements are mostly a scare tactic to put pressure on employees. For some industries and applications AI is revolutionary, but for coding it's good at autocomplete and not much else.
- CrossdresserSWE 1y ago[dead]
- nova22033 1y agoDoes anyone have any experience with using AI tools on a massive legacy code base?
- HenryBemis 1y ago> To be clear, Amodei didn’t cite any research or evidence for that 50% This reminds me the "Walter White" meme "I am the documentation". When the CEO of a company that makes LLM says something like that, "I perk up and listen" (to quote the article). When a doctor says "water in my village is bad quality, it gives diarrhea to 30% of the villagers", I don't need a fancy study from some university. The doctor "is the documentation". So if the Anthropic/ChatGPT/LLaMa/etc. (mixing companies and products, it's ok though) say that "so-and-so", they see the integrations, enhancements, compliments, companies ordering _more_ subscriptions, etc. In my current company (high volume, low profit margin) they told us "go all in on AI". They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools) if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on "Confluence-like" tasks. So, paying $20-$30-$40 per person, per month, and that thing improving the productivity/output of an FTE by 20%-30% is a massive win. So yes, we keep the ones we got (because mass firings, ministry of 'labour', unions, bad marketing, etc.). Headcount will organically be reduced (retirements, getting a new job, etc.) combined with minimizing new hires, and boom! savings!!
- theshackleford 1y ago> They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools) if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on "Confluence-like" tasks. If only it worked like this in reality. I used actual notion features literally this week and watched it fail so hard it was hilarious. It continually told me there was no documentation on X despite an entire page worth of documentation existing on it, had to be told this; at which point it apologised and regurgitated it. Wow! What a time saver! I feel more productive already!
- throwaway48476 1y agoThe white collar bloodbath is the jobs that could have been automated pre AI but weren't due to organizational inertia, corporate freedom building and an unwillingness to invest.
- dottjt 1y agoI think a huge tradeoff that people haven't mentioned is that in using AI to replace workers, you're introducing a dependency on AI that you previously didn't have. This poses a terrible long-term risk for companies.
- bayareapsycho 1y agoMy last company (F50, ass engineering culture, pretends to be a tech company) went and fired all of the juniors at a certain level because "AI" The funny part is, most of those juniors were hired in 2022-2024, and they were better hires because of the harsher market. There were a bunch of "senior engineers" who were borderline useless and joined some time between 2018-2021 I just think it's kind of funny to fire the useful people and keep the more expensive ones around who try to do more "managerial" work and have more family obligations. Smart companies do the opposite
- indigoabstract 1y agoSo if I understand correctly, it's basically down between: 1. cure cancer 2. fix the economy 3. keep everybody happily employed. And he's saying we can only pick two, or pick one. Except for the last one, that's not really an option.
- boshalfoshal 1y agoAnd as it stands, AI is nowhere close to (1) and (2), but is pretty close to making all of (3) redundant. This could be because most work is actually frivilous (very possible), but its also easy for them to sell those since ostensibly (1) and (2) actually require a lot of out of distribution reasoning, thinking, and real agentic research (which current models probably aren't capable of). (3) just makes the most money now with the current technology. Curing cancer with LLMs, though altruistic, is more unrealistic and has no clear path to immediate profitability because of that. These "AGI" companies aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts with humanity in mind, its pretty clearly meant to be a "final company standing" type race where everyone at the {winning AI Company} is super rich and powerful in whatever new world paradigm shows up afterwards.
- Warh00l 1y agopierceday.metalabel.com/aphone
- asherlagrand 1y ago[dead]