Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

openquery

https://archive.is/Pn7GU

openquery

This is all noise. The leaders of these companies are flip-flopping to whatever sounds best for their current agenda - hiring, fundraising, pre-IPO, etc. The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient noise.

yardie

Dumbasses the lot of them. Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve. Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.

gortok

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient As long as the term “AI” means by-and-large LLMs with additional features sprinkled on top, the answer is no. More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets subsumed into these models. Even without that particular problem, LLMs-as-AI can only give us probabilistic outputs based on inputs; and by definition they’re reliant on humans to provide the training data for their model. Without specialized knowledge or training on that knowledge (And even with it, viz. Meta’s engineering), we don’t have to worry about AI itself. We do have to worry what investors who are looking for outsized returns will do to get those returns, job market be damned. The problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran. Of course, we still lose our jobs, but maybe (!) we get them back when this all fails?

speak_plainly

The damage is done. The truly jarring realization isn't that AI companies made these predictions, but how eagerly countless corporations were willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of profit – even at the cost of economic collapse.

josefritzishere

After watching the AI roll out for a couple years now I'm much more confident that it's just a scam. There is no net positive ROI on AI. It's not good enough, and the "mass job destruction" scenario offsets any marginal gains by eliminating the market for basically all products. That doesn't mean that mediocre C-suites won't try but it only takes 1-2 quarters to feel the burn and back track.

deagle50

Of course they have. Fewer developers means fewer tokens sold. Until AI no longer needs human supervision, it's more profitable to tax as many employees as possible.

drivingmenuts

I kind of wish there was a way to flip the script on the companies that gave up on humans and tried to switch to AI. Make them suffer for their idiocy in the same way that workers suffered or continue to suffer. If that makes me a bad person, fine. If a few CEO's wind up working at 7-11 to make rent money, all the better.

gigel82

Yet layoffs excused by AI (expenses or claimed productivity gains) are continuing by the thousands each day, so... not sure what this is based on.

cmiles8

The ultimate irony here is that the biggest jobs wipeout most likely to happen now is when all these “AI exploration lab” type teams that every company quickly created are blown up. Most, if not nearly all, of these teams have little to show ROI wise and the music on the AI bubble is slowing dramatically. They went from seemingly unlimited budgets and headcount when CEOs said “get me some of that AI” to some really uncomfortable scenes playing out know as the same CEOs realize this has cost a fortune with little to show for it.

kerblang

In case anyone else read the "flipped on" as "flipped the switch on" rather than "reversed course on", no, it's the latter.

zuzululu

article misses an important point that these big tech companies are all listed on the public market, any narrative about their decisions should weigh that reality and why suddenly its being disseminated. personally, I am collecting 3 salaries working remotely. For one of the jobs, I am tasked with hiring other devs but i dont put the effort in as i dont see a point. i just say i can't find a decent engineer and why should i when a frontier models can do most of their work? in our job postings we see thousands of applicants in a very short period of time, i just do these multi stage interviews with a rotation of candidates to basically buy time while i work on another job i see that things are getting very desperate and i feel for those that are still struggling to find SWE jobs, AI is absolutely doing a number and the gap is going to increase not decrease.

hintymad

Remember it was reported that OpenAI didn't think that ChatGPT would be successful? OpenAI thought that ChatGPT was yet another toy before its launch. Yet once ChatGPT became an overnight success, Altman started to talk about how AI would be dangerous, how it would displace or even replace jobs. In contrast, Amodei seemed to always believe in what he said. So, can we say that Altman is a opportunistic businessman, and Amodei is a cult leader?

gaigalas

It will affect jobs because the investment strategy works to degenerate the economy, but not because of the tech. Like a dog that barks at a truck and thinks he scared it away.

cgearhart

My read has been that a lot of leaders were trying to drive “being early” as the catalyst for future success. At the complexity scale of big orgs you’re mostly fiddling with the incentives that the system self-aligns toward. Firing a bunch of people does create an incentive to use AI, if you think it’ll help. The more pernicious effect I’ve been seeing is that we’re living in the golden age of LLMs, but eventually that’ll fade. Tokens are subsidized and cheap, model capabilities leap forward regularly, and there’s competition driving it all. But even now there’s stories about frontier models suddenly becoming less capable, or providers switching to usage-based billing, and new model releases feel a bit more sluggish and less dramatic. (Fable/Mythos notwithstanding.) Eventually the models are going to settle into a rut of being just “good enough” to earn a living rather than all this hoopla. A lot of people will be re-hired. And we’ll do it all again for the next wave.

al_borland

This just tells me they don't know anything and they should probably just stop talking, and everyone else should stop listening.

Macha

Honestly, this is just the inverse of them all getting hyped on AI replacing all the jobs. Between both of these positions, RTO, crypto, VR, it's really shown just how much they're trend chasers. Only a Tech CEO speaks in absolutes, it seems.

1vuio0pswjnm7

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