I don't trust most CEOs perspectives on AI at all, they are far too removed from the actual work to know what AI can and can't do.
When I hear a CEO say this, what I hear is that they are going to use AI as an excuse to do massive layoffs to juice stock price and then cash out before the house of cards comes tumbling down. Every public company CEOs dream. The GE model in the age of AI.
Will AI drastically reshape industries and careers? Absolutely. Do currently CEOs understand or even care how (outside of making them richer in the next few quarters)? No.
CEOs are just marketing to investors with ridiculous claims because their products have stagnated. (See Benioffs recent claim that 50% of work at Salesforce is AI. Maybe that is why it sucks so much)
The argument, I think, is that if AI cannot actually replace these jobs, either other companies will pop up to fill the holes, or they will quickly reverse their position once negative results start coming in.
Sure, you can have all of SalesForce run entirely by AI, but people may just find a better solution that actually works. Claude ran a vending machine after all, but it was deemed a failure.
So yeah, maybe there's a rocky month or two, and I'm not trying to downplay the severity of that...but the demand for the roles these services fulfill will still exist, and become market opportunities
I think it’s more likely that AI will make everyone in a department 25% more efficient. This means a department of 5 people will become a department of 4 people.
And then the ~~outsourcing~~ AI replacement may slow down or reverse.
Its happened before, it'll happen again, and ~~Visual Basic~~ AI may or may not change the landscape. I'm not that impressed with the current guise, but after a few revisions it may be better.
At some point the people who were laid off start competing against the company they used to work for at a fraction of the price. A company that only has a few real people and the rest AI that has cushy executive margins can be out priced by those who have access to the same AI features and just want a reasonable wage.
We could also see CEO wages fall as their job can be done by anyone because of AI.
I actually thought LLMs worked well (and I do a lot of LLM work) until a couple of days ago when I started trying to do some weird things and ended up in hallucination land, and it didn't matter what model I used.
Literally everything hallucinated even basic things, like what named parameters a function had etc.
It made me think that the core of the benefit of LLMs is that, even though they may not be smart, at least they've read what they need to answer the question you have, but if they haven't-- if there isn't much data on the software framework, not very many examples, etc., then nothing matters, and you can't really feed in the whole of vLLM. You actually need the companies running the AI to come up with training exercises for it, train on the code, train it on answering questions about the code, ask it to write up different simple variations of things in the code, etc.
So you really need to use LLMs to see the limits, and use them on 'weird' stuff, frameworks no one imagines that anyone will mess with. Even being a researcher and fiddling with improving LLMs every day may not be enough to see their limits, because they come very suddenly and then any accuracy or relevance goes away completely.
It's an easy thing to say without giving specific time frames. At least when Elon makes grand pronouncements he risks getting it horribly wrong.
"told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools."
Here's a time-frame a bit more specific then "in the coming years", but still vague:
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years"
Repeating a comment I've read on HN before: Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well. Minimising the number of people coming through Gate 1 will necessarily reduce the number of people going through Gate 2 (yes, you can hire in people to go straight through Gate 2, but they'll have had to go through Gate 1 somewhere).
I knew a great graphics design artist ... really talented. Besides logos, slogans, art she could run print lines. Then www came out and she became despondent. Any fool can do this now she said. She was in NYC at the time. I told her 82 million times yes, but the top 10% can now charge more for the discerning customer who didn't want the bottom 75% of junk. She didn't buy that. And gave up. It's a shame in a way.
There are always more entry level jobs, and some number of those entry level staff will inevitably exit the field or fail to progress to senior levels.
The only fields where this is not true are where the entry level pipeline has disappeared, but that’s a temporary effect because those more senior people will eventually move on also.
The first line is just some cope people use to tell themselves they are different.
Someone using AI won't "take" your job, they'll just get more done than you and when the company inevitably fires more people because AI can continue to do more work autonomously, the first people to go will be the people not producing as much (i.e, the people not using AI).
In the limit both groups are getting their jobs taken by AI. Knowing how to use AI is not some special skill.
It's the opposite.Every use case needs its own distinct workflow ("context engineering"). We need a massive amount of engineers in order to implement LLMs in real-world business environments.
But in most cases, LLMs will be prompted by practitioners, i.e. designers who mockup designs in Figma, engineers who generate code in their IDE - and then invariably need to correct it.
All in all, LLMs will cause an employment boom if widely adopted.
'AI' doesn't make hiring, layoff, or corporate strategic decisions. Public pronouncements speak of AI as some disembodied, inevitable agent out there directing the world, when really it's just humans engaging in competitive capitalism.
TL;DR: We always have a choice. And as we often do, we're choosing capitalism.
LLMs are second to none in generating somewhat believable BS, while being mediocre to absolutely abysmal in executing actual tasks. Remind you of anything?
Not what I am seeing with the current state of AI. Yes using AI makes me more productive. But it needs a lot of hand holding and prompting to do the right thing, requiring somebody who knows what they are doing to use it effectively.
"In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses..."
True, but other CEOs often like to be dramatic and the center of attention, wanting to be seen as bold, cost cutting, and at the forefront of trends, whether or not they are accurate in anything they say.
I've been around long enough to see that boldness become a source of regret at times. If someone refers to AI slop, it's widely understood what's meant. Putting slop at the center of your company personnel strategy doesn't sound quite as appealing.
The quotes at the end of the article seem more thoughtful to me, more realistic and measured.
It replaces one type of work with another, and reduces quality.
Automating, then, commoditizing, then centralizing has lead to a drastic reduction in food quality and a critically vulnerable food-supply chain.
We’ve started down a similar path where we do not know how to manufacture.
The logical conclusion isn’t just losing workers, but the science and understanding, due to short-term gains and inability to train the next generation.
> I don’t know many assembly programmers. They’ve been “wiped out.”
There never where enough assembly programmers to create all the business and leisure software we have in assembly anyway.
There are quite a few left, but they do foundational work at CPU or other hardware companies or are building compilers and runtimes others use. In other words: you're not in the same circles.
Could be a FUD article for clicks. But in my limited circle I've noticed lots of people simply... drop out. Like they get fired or quit then basically retire in their mid 30's. I don't know where these people are getting money from. Some people have kind of half-assed business ideas, like one of my buddies is designing his dream board game, another buddy is building an online wine merchant portal or something. In general I notice that the smartest people in my life have bifurcated into two camps. Half of them have retired, more or less. The other half have been afflicted with frenetic energy, trying to grasp all they can before the window closes. I dunno.
Quite possibly. Along with all the other crosscurrents right now, you have a fabulously wealthy boomer generation starting to give their wealth to their children. If I'm not mistaken, the millenial generation has a lower average wealth than previous generations, but the millenials with inheritances or family money are doing much better than almost any generation before.
I don't trust most CEOs perspectives on AI at all, they are far too removed from the actual work to know what AI can and can't do.
When I hear a CEO say this, what I hear is that they are going to use AI as an excuse to do massive layoffs to juice stock price and then cash out before the house of cards comes tumbling down. Every public company CEOs dream. The GE model in the age of AI.
Will AI drastically reshape industries and careers? Absolutely. Do currently CEOs understand or even care how (outside of making them richer in the next few quarters)? No.
CEOs are just marketing to investors with ridiculous claims because their products have stagnated. (See Benioffs recent claim that 50% of work at Salesforce is AI. Maybe that is why it sucks so much)
Doesn’t really matter why you lost your job though, does it? Especially when the job loss is wide spread.
The argument, I think, is that if AI cannot actually replace these jobs, either other companies will pop up to fill the holes, or they will quickly reverse their position once negative results start coming in.
Sure, you can have all of SalesForce run entirely by AI, but people may just find a better solution that actually works. Claude ran a vending machine after all, but it was deemed a failure.
So yeah, maybe there's a rocky month or two, and I'm not trying to downplay the severity of that...but the demand for the roles these services fulfill will still exist, and become market opportunities
I think it’s more likely that AI will make everyone in a department 25% more efficient. This means a department of 5 people will become a department of 4 people.
AI will have taken one person’s job.
Well, that means they will continue to do it until it starts hurting their bottom line. Targets missed, sales down, etc.
And then the ~~outsourcing~~ AI replacement may slow down or reverse.
Its happened before, it'll happen again, and ~~Visual Basic~~ AI may or may not change the landscape. I'm not that impressed with the current guise, but after a few revisions it may be better.
At some point the people who were laid off start competing against the company they used to work for at a fraction of the price. A company that only has a few real people and the rest AI that has cushy executive margins can be out priced by those who have access to the same AI features and just want a reasonable wage.
We could also see CEO wages fall as their job can be done by anyone because of AI.
I actually thought LLMs worked well (and I do a lot of LLM work) until a couple of days ago when I started trying to do some weird things and ended up in hallucination land, and it didn't matter what model I used.
Literally everything hallucinated even basic things, like what named parameters a function had etc.
It made me think that the core of the benefit of LLMs is that, even though they may not be smart, at least they've read what they need to answer the question you have, but if they haven't-- if there isn't much data on the software framework, not very many examples, etc., then nothing matters, and you can't really feed in the whole of vLLM. You actually need the companies running the AI to come up with training exercises for it, train on the code, train it on answering questions about the code, ask it to write up different simple variations of things in the code, etc.
So you really need to use LLMs to see the limits, and use them on 'weird' stuff, frameworks no one imagines that anyone will mess with. Even being a researcher and fiddling with improving LLMs every day may not be enough to see their limits, because they come very suddenly and then any accuracy or relevance goes away completely.
It's an easy thing to say without giving specific time frames. At least when Elon makes grand pronouncements he risks getting it horribly wrong.
"told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools."
Here's a time-frame a bit more specific then "in the coming years", but still vague:
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years"
Repeating a comment I've read on HN before: Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well. Minimising the number of people coming through Gate 1 will necessarily reduce the number of people going through Gate 2 (yes, you can hire in people to go straight through Gate 2, but they'll have had to go through Gate 1 somewhere).
I suspect that if you’ve got your feet planted in the tech industry as an engineer, you have a long career with stagnant wages ahead of you
Followed by a huge boom in salaries once the workforce shrinks.
For example, go look at the hourly wage of a cobol programmer.
I knew a great graphics design artist ... really talented. Besides logos, slogans, art she could run print lines. Then www came out and she became despondent. Any fool can do this now she said. She was in NYC at the time. I told her 82 million times yes, but the top 10% can now charge more for the discerning customer who didn't want the bottom 75% of junk. She didn't buy that. And gave up. It's a shame in a way.
> Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well
Only if the amount of employees in each level is uniform.
I.e. if there are more entry level jobs than senior that wouldn't necessary be true.
There are always more entry level jobs, and some number of those entry level staff will inevitably exit the field or fail to progress to senior levels.
The only fields where this is not true are where the entry level pipeline has disappeared, but that’s a temporary effect because those more senior people will eventually move on also.
"AI won't take your job. Someone who uses AI will."
That someone is your co-worker and will soon be your co-worker's co-worker.
I don't see how the rate of job creation can come close to the rate job loss we'll see for a few years.
I really don’t see how someone is going to take another developers job unless the subject is developing cookie cutter landing pages or todo apps.
Other comments here say things like lower 80% will be laid off etc. but current LLMs are more like bottom 10% would be laid off, maybe.
The first line is just some cope people use to tell themselves they are different.
Someone using AI won't "take" your job, they'll just get more done than you and when the company inevitably fires more people because AI can continue to do more work autonomously, the first people to go will be the people not producing as much (i.e, the people not using AI).
In the limit both groups are getting their jobs taken by AI. Knowing how to use AI is not some special skill.
Those cheap contractors overseas who rarely deliver are a great place to start.
Then we can hire more on-shore faces and use them to actually deliver what we have them sell. Think of the profits. Execute.
It's the opposite.Every use case needs its own distinct workflow ("context engineering"). We need a massive amount of engineers in order to implement LLMs in real-world business environments.
But in most cases, LLMs will be prompted by practitioners, i.e. designers who mockup designs in Figma, engineers who generate code in their IDE - and then invariably need to correct it.
All in all, LLMs will cause an employment boom if widely adopted.
All of whom want to trade on expectations of future labor cost reductions which haven't actually happened yet, so take with a grain of salt
That is supposed to be the quiet part?
Of course it won't wipe out part of the half that attends the "Aspen Ideas Forum". No way.
The other part of that half that doesn't get wiped out will have more work while, at best, being paid the same.
Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, all right.
'AI' doesn't make hiring, layoff, or corporate strategic decisions. Public pronouncements speak of AI as some disembodied, inevitable agent out there directing the world, when really it's just humans engaging in competitive capitalism.
TL;DR: We always have a choice. And as we often do, we're choosing capitalism.
As opposed to what?
Starting with theirs hopefully.
All I see is bullet points being poorly communicated through LLMs these days.
+100
LLMs are second to none in generating somewhat believable BS, while being mediocre to absolutely abysmal in executing actual tasks. Remind you of anything?
Not what I am seeing with the current state of AI. Yes using AI makes me more productive. But it needs a lot of hand holding and prompting to do the right thing, requiring somebody who knows what they are doing to use it effectively.
http://archive.today/nVVRE
Article via Mint.
"In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses..."
True, but other CEOs often like to be dramatic and the center of attention, wanting to be seen as bold, cost cutting, and at the forefront of trends, whether or not they are accurate in anything they say.
I've been around long enough to see that boldness become a source of regret at times. If someone refers to AI slop, it's widely understood what's meant. Putting slop at the center of your company personnel strategy doesn't sound quite as appealing.
The quotes at the end of the article seem more thoughtful to me, more realistic and measured.
...they've been saying that out loud for a few years now.
Yes?
What do you think technological advancement does?!?
It removes work.
Now, if you say that unlike for every other time there isn’t more opportunity created…I guess you have an interesting point.
But yeah — duh.
I don’t know many assembly programmers. They’ve been “wiped out.”
It replaces one type of work with another, and reduces quality.
Automating, then, commoditizing, then centralizing has lead to a drastic reduction in food quality and a critically vulnerable food-supply chain.
We’ve started down a similar path where we do not know how to manufacture.
The logical conclusion isn’t just losing workers, but the science and understanding, due to short-term gains and inability to train the next generation.
> I don’t know many assembly programmers. They’ve been “wiped out.”
I know quite a few. Turns out there’s still a lot of value in understanding how computers work.
They make enormous amounts of money reverse engineering binaries and developing exploits for sale, mostly to governments.
> I don’t know many assembly programmers. They’ve been “wiped out.”
There never where enough assembly programmers to create all the business and leisure software we have in assembly anyway.
There are quite a few left, but they do foundational work at CPU or other hardware companies or are building compilers and runtimes others use. In other words: you're not in the same circles.
Hi I write in assembly for fun. Definitely not paid for that though.
Could be a FUD article for clicks. But in my limited circle I've noticed lots of people simply... drop out. Like they get fired or quit then basically retire in their mid 30's. I don't know where these people are getting money from. Some people have kind of half-assed business ideas, like one of my buddies is designing his dream board game, another buddy is building an online wine merchant portal or something. In general I notice that the smartest people in my life have bifurcated into two camps. Half of them have retired, more or less. The other half have been afflicted with frenetic energy, trying to grasp all they can before the window closes. I dunno.
> I don't know where these people are getting money from
Inheritance?
Definitely inheritance.
Quite possibly. Along with all the other crosscurrents right now, you have a fabulously wealthy boomer generation starting to give their wealth to their children. If I'm not mistaken, the millenial generation has a lower average wealth than previous generations, but the millenials with inheritances or family money are doing much better than almost any generation before.
I don't know if actually being able to afford real estate is 'doing better', it's more a 'not doing worse' situation imo.
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