Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do <i>not</i> replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "But only <i>help</i>, they can't come up with the <i>idea</i>." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."<p>It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities were before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer - in the past they just wanted to know the developer was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do.<p>I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.
Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.
In practice, it's more like companies want to spend money on AI because they <i>believe</i> it will save money somewhere else. If instead they see extra cost, then they get all confused. They can't bring themselves to believe that in their particular case maybe the benefit isn't worth the cost; they're axiomatically conditioned to believe they have to keep using it, and so therefore they have to make cuts somewhere else. It's insane.<p>I went through this personally. I had a glut of project ideas I wanted to get through. I signed up for the $200/month thing. I caught up. My agent sat idle. It was hard to decide to cut my plan. I felt initial pressure to search and hunt for other ideas to code, ideas that were pretty stupid. I finally downscaled my plan; I got hold of myself. But that's easier to do for an individual than it is for a company.<p>In normal economic theory it's easier to understand. You're at a particular scale. You have the opportunity to automate, but does it make sense for you? I could go out and buy a riding mower right now, but my lawn is less than a quarter acre. The riding mower lets me scale up, but I don't have something that can benefit from it.
> it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens<p>I'll pay for my own tokens if it means can work one hour per day instead of 8.
Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation.<p>Thats all the management at firms care about.<p>Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!
But it's not going to happen.<p>There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth.<p>These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on like kids playing with a shiny toy, and they're about to discover it's been oversold, underbudgeted, and doesn't work yet.
decades of excess capital have raised company leaders that have bought into structural delusions like 'accounts are all the matter', or 'headcounts are all that matter', and the market has rewarded them for that. Or at least ignored failure because the supply was really quite low. Remember when we all laughed at the .com companies that were going to revolutionize pet food delivery? that never went away, we just normalized it. Very little of this has been based on cost v. revenue just forever. So it's no surprise that they are a little stunned that by following what everyone says is the future things aren't just going swimmingly. The usual reaction is to just blame your team, that's easy.
Not true at all. They do care about what's fashionable and right now what is fashionable is AI.<p>Just because they're in charge of multi billion dollar corporations doesn't mean that they don't get distracted by shiny baubles like a 3 year old or that they don't feel the pressure of being "cool" like a teenager. They're not LLMs.
It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price.<p>Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.<p>I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.
They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making <i>a good product at a fair price</i>. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit.<p>And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a <i>necessary evil</i>. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.
These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is <i>not</i> a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded.<p>The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.
All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism. I am not saying they are unfair, but I think you could have made the same arguments about management and investors doing the same thing in manufacturing in the US. They reduced domestic employment (not in total, but reduced the share and the growth) in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities.<p>If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good? It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.
I think there's something else psychological going on. What you describe is a rational approach based off of bad values. But I think I'm also seeing something weirdly irrational.<p>It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.
i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.
<p><pre><code> I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.
</code></pre>
We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
> You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little<p>And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is <i>not</i> the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
Jack Welch Disciples
That's exactly right.<p>I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog.<p>The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc.<p>At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen".<p>Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at...<p>..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc)<p>So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions.<p>This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that.<p>In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI.<p>And then there is the jevons paradox consideration...<p>It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.
> "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."<p>I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention.<p>There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own.<p>Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline.<p>There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.
Can you give a specific example, ideally that would not have been solved by people-hours amounting to less than the token costs?
> I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of.<p>Who cares that you've had <i>multiple</i> instances? Everyone has had <i>multiple</i> instances. The question is whether that happens in EVERY instance. Because when someone's laid off, that's what the exec believes, that the person isn't needed at all.<p>I'm not arguing that AI won't replace jobs - it's clear that jobs are already disappearing "because of AI". I'm not even arguing that it is immoral (even though it is). I'm arguing that it is short-sighted and unwise.
> I routinely have them design their own experiment loops,<p>Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.
These posts are so boring lmao.<p>if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.
This is an absolutely classic PR "submarine" effort to reframe the impact of AI<p>Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - <a href="https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a><p>(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...</a><p>(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...</a><p>(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.<p>(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.<p>(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431</a> & <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888</a><p>Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?
Yeah, I feel like it has been decided that "AI apocalypse" talk has been deemed dangerous by the masters of the universe, and thusly the talk needs to be different. Dangerous meaning, of course, how bad things will get.
It'll be disruptive, but not apocalyptic. Some classes of jobs common today will be eliminated, while more will grow. Overall productivity will increase, but it'll suck for the people made obsolete.<p>Certainly it will not result in most people working fewer hours.<p>Source: see the adoption of computers/databases across previously pen-and-paper industries 50 years ago. That was more disruptive than this will be.
> "Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese." - PG in 2005<p>Look how low we've stooped in 20 years... Online writing used to be wholly authentic. Now it's like finding a needle in an AI slop haystack.
The most maddening thing is that in our current timeline, the more obviously you lie and bullshit, the more you get rewarded. And winners can lie and bullshit with even less pushback, creating deadly cycle.
They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs <i>by the end of the year</i>" for another 20 years.
If you think there is even a 2% chance you're going to need a government bailout over the next decade, you simply cant be calling your product the grim reaper.
Especially when the chance they'll get that bailout is around 99.9999999%. That bag has already been got. Doesn't matter if AI ultimately turns out to be useless for anything but children's toys because the productivity it adds to IT work is exactly offset by the amount of bugs it both adds and has to find.<p>The psychopaths that are pushing it will be arguing over who gets to be president of the world in 2044. This arguing will not be done in any public forum, but over a grouptext.
“Companies that use AI well will replace the ones that don’t”<p>I’d type that in alternating caps but I’m on mobile.
A significant job loss will trigger a deep recession which will eventually hit most AI customers so they will have too few customers to be profitable. The best (for AI business) scenario is when productivity is increased without mass unemployment.
They're trying to pivot to something that would inspire the retail investor they need to pass the bag to as they gear up for IPO, something out of Elon's playbook like "AI will take us to Alpha Centauri by 2030" or "AI will cure cancer by the end of the year"
That’s the Elon Musk spirit!
Implicit in a lot of "AI jobs apocalypse" predictions is the assumption that most tasks are ridiculously easy compared to AI research, so naturally the smart AI researchers can understand any profession well enough to credibly predict that AI will be able to replace it. I'm personally not sure the apocalypse has been truly disproven as opposed to progress just being slower than some of the overexuberant predictions, but there does seem to be a pattern of famous AI researchers predicting a job would be automated and turning out to be wrong because they focused too hard on a single aspect of it that could be automated while handwaving or ignoring the hard parts. This has prominently happened with radiology, then with customer service, and now they are walking back on programming too. Maybe take these guys with a grain of salt going forward? I trust them to be able to tell us frontier AI models will keep getting better, not to predict the impact that will have on specific industries. Some people will insist we should give them half credit for predicting there would be impact at all (as opposed to the "it's a bubble" refrain) but I think it should be possible to ignore two categories of obviously dumb predictions at the same time.
I think we too often treat other people’s jobs like spherical cows out of ignorance. Not just AI researchers.<p>Long before LLMs, programmers regularly and massively underestimated how hard it is to automate other people’s work. Knowledge workers often think carpenters just bang nails into wood, while blue collar workers think knowledge work as sitting in front of a screen copying values from Excel on the left into a form on the right while sipping a latte.<p>Only like 2.5 years ago, I thought programming would be one of the last knowledge worker jobs to be significantly affected by LLMs, not one of the first. I think AI models will continue to be very impactful. But for quite a while, they may mostly turn knowledge work into a last mile problem rather than eliminating it.
Programming <i>has</i> been successfully automated though. Programmers used to write programs line-by-line in raw binary code or assembly mnemonics, now they just write high-level formal code in languages like C++ or Rust and the computer spends much of its working time processing those lexer and parser 'tokens' and translating the whole thing into assembly and binary code. It all works quite well.
There is a wide chasm between writing code in python vs "write a star craft clone". And that is not where near writing python vs writing binary code.<p>To put in another way, we have been building abstractions to make things easier for us to code. With coding agents you don't even code in the first place. It almost feels like a logical fallacy to compare the two
Before:<p>- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements<p>- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability<p>- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code<p>- programmers write binary/assembler code<p>Now:<p>- programmers spend time in meetings discussing requirements<p>- programmers spend time thinking how to improve performance and reliability<p>- programmers spend time tracking down issues in existing code<p>- programmers write C++/Rust code<p>Pray tell, where do you see the “programming has been successfully automated” part?
Sam Altman and other big figures tend to shape their narratives around their personal and organizational interests. When people were skeptical, they pushed hard into the "God-like AI" narrative. Now that safety concerns are growing and their growth plans are in danger, they're pushing back against what they used to advocate.<p>Even if they genuinely believe what they’re saying, their perspective is still fundamentally biased and should always be taken with a healthy grain of salt.
It is kinda funny the irony of going from "we are going to replace devs" to "we <3 devs, keep burning those tokens"
To recap: 1) they developed and heavily pushed a technology they thought would result in mass unemployment, 2) they now believe they are wrong, so the market/government should definitely support their company going public. Which means that they were both intending to tank the economy and take your job away, <i>and</i> they were also wrong in their predictions, and now want to be rewarded for both with more money.
Are they walking back their PR or their actual beliefs?<p>I think they realize that even if AI takes all jobs, the process to getting there will be less turbulent if they obfuscate and minimize it, until the working class no longer has leverage, rather than sounding the alarm earlier, leading to a more concerted populist uprising, and then AI is regulated far more than they want
I have to admit LLMs are actually quite useful at generating code for me, but I am experienced enough to know what I want. I use it as a next-generation autocomplete.
This is the "whole thing" in a nutshell for me too. It's useful, speeds some things up, but I've been doing this a long time.<p>The state-of-the-art or medium-term future of the tooling doesn't feel apocalyptic in itself, but the macro forces, implications of scaling, and general reactions to it on all sides are a different story.
They are walking it back because they realized they don’t have anything to gain by it at this point. Previously they could get market attention and employer attention to increase their revenue and now that part is done. Their pipelines are full and the employer mindshare is obtained. They can pivot back is what they figured out
the damage is done. Why did they ever think it was a good idea to brag that they were going to destroy all middle/upper class jobs?
To market their product to c-suite people.
Because it helps to raise capital at low costs if your investors and creditors think you're going to replace all labor.
Because the people who funded them from the outset did so because that was their goal? The destroy all jobs talk started at least 10 years ago, it many ways that hype is <i>the actual product</i> itself.
Because that was the truth. Now they have learned they are going to have to lie to the people so the masses can be sleepwalked to the same eventuality.
They were being earnest. People can't handle the truth, so now they're doing PR comms.
Class blindness. Their buddies all love the idea of showing pesky workers their place.
> then began responding to come again manually<p>Presumably they meant to write "to <i>some</i> again manually". On the one hand I'm kind of surprised when typos make it into major publications these days. Now, it's kind of a reassuring sign that an article was written and reviewed by humans though.
They both hired some good publicists who is advising that change your tone and messaging to get the public to like and trust the companies.<p>Initially the goal was to convince investors which is pretty much done and now its the retail/public that will value these companies once they IPO. Either way the job market is definitely impacted and is changing rapidly.<p>Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?
In every AI prediction there is an obvious underestimating of the actual difficulties faced by workers and planners so the tool to automate those intelligent tasks always way underperform what a person is capable of with the notable exception of merging the automation with human tasks as an augment. And that is a totally ‘nother topic. But thanks for the investment money.
Kind of a let down if that were to mean that they are bearish on super intelligence.
OK, this is weird. The article says:<p>> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.<p>But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg</a><p>Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): <a href="https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027a3f" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...</a><p>UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.<p>I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.<p>This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-says-ai-unlikely-lead-jobs-apocalypse-2026-05-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...</a>
There's a partial corresponding quote at <a href="https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/05/sam-altman-close-ai-gap.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/05/sam-al...</a>.
That's a better link, thanks. Not much substance there about this though!<p>> One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”<p>I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.<p>But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:<p>> Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”
For those that write and shill for these orgs, almost full time, I could see how this type of admission is damning.
Altman has said he thought AI would have a bigger impact.
Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News.<p>This Reuters story carries a similar idea: <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-says-ai-unlikely-lead-jobs-apocalypse-2026-05-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...</a><p>I'd warn that this all looks <i>pretty thin</i> - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look strong enough to me support the "walking back AI jobs apocalypse" framing. See also this thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157</a>
I don't know if anyone else feels the same but for me, the more productive LLMs become, the more work I have.
Public sentiment has turned <i>strongly</i> against them. They can try to take it back, but I don't think they will be successful. Nobody is buying the fiction anymore. Everyone knows that any proceeds from the technology will not be shared. The ownership class will take everything and leave the ecological impact to be dealt with by the same people they laid off.
This feels orchestrated (someone made a phone call to them). Look at this a16z tweet : <a href="https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/a16z/status/2059687657840713925?s=20</a>
So in the span of 2 years we've gone from "AI will be our new God and solve all of our problems" to "AI will replace all your jobs and make SaaS companies obsolete", to now "AI will have some impact on the job market - might be positive, might be negative - who can say?"<p>I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At <i>least</i> AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".
" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise "<p>Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.<p>How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.
One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth<p>In my own circles this has led to more work not less<p>Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold<p>Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to write better requirements and do more of their own analytics, lots of worn all around<p>Eventually we will saturate that and need new people again<p>I don’t disagree with the general principle that people will lose jobs, I just a) don’t think it will be as accelerated as people claim and b) more obviously the disruption will be felt in roles that are more rote and mechanical in nature - e.g. peoples whose job is in the family of summarizing data or compiling metrics, generating simple content (slide decks), etc and slowly creep up from there<p>AI is one of those garbage in garbage out things and so far the quality out when the input quality has been great from what I’ve seen. Just a note preemptively to the nay sayers
It does not make sense. If you have tool that makes you more productive and somehow end up overworked, it is not because of the tool. It is deliberate decision of the management. More productivity could mean more earning for the company. It could mean people getting kind of bored as work dries out.<p>What you describe is normal push beyond possible with predictable longer term results.
How about both of them are walked into a prison and we throw the keys away?<p>The amount of suffering these two people (and of course also their fellowship) have caused is absurd and as a society, we should not just let this be swept under the rug. Arrest Sam Altman.
Saying people are going to lose jobs at least sounded like we were at the cusp of something special. Now it just seems like we are going to get Opus 4.8.1 that supposedly helps somehow according to benchmarks.<p>Guess they have found their market and this is it.
Of course, the fact that the statements they made confidently for years are now hastily getting undone in the face of public backlash only further cements their reputation as snakes who can't be trusted farther than one can throw a bowling ball. For a while there I actually respected Amodei for sticking to his guns on the job loss thing, it seemed like it was his genuinely-held belief and he was going to keep saying the truth even if it was unpopular, but never mind.
AI lets me be far more productive, creating far more demand. Before I wouldn’t have made half the stuff I’ve made, because it was too time consuming. The lowered opportunity cost has led to me having more to do.<p>It doesn’t have this effect for morons. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily slop out some garbage, but you won’t be able to iterate on it or maintain it. These models will produce some really stupid outputs unless you actively fight them. Then if you try and add something new, you’re slapping new layers of slop onto the stinking pile.<p>I’m not concerned about losing my job with these current slop models. Most employees can barely read and write, they aren’t suddenly going to produce entire systems just because they can slop stuff out.
The scam was that the US needed private industry to bootstrap technology that's mostly going to be used for surveillance analysis and building kill matrices.
CEOs aren't a big enough target market. They need their slop machines to appeal to the masses as well. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing more advertising with that in mind, something like the ads Apple has but marketing their AI.
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