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OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

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Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#11
post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#12
post #5
post #2

For full irony they take your data, then use that data to replace your job.

It's not irony so much as it is brazenly criminal. No one should be in a position of training someone else's AI to replace their job function without consenting to it and without being compensated. The most valuable thing AI can do right now is write code, and it couldn't do that without thousands of StackOverflow volunteers.

No more laws to be enacted on AI in the USA for 10 years thanks to the billionaires. Pouring money into the elections have been a great ROI for the ultra wealthy.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#13
Why a company like OpenAI, that is so big and has a clear challenging goal, cares about online academies, etc? What's the % they can get from it? It's even worth it? They should focus all their minds to their (demanding) main goal, but it seems they are distracted with this stupid things.

This sounds so weird to me, and I feel I am missing something.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#14
post #13

Why a company like OpenAI, that is so big and has a clear challenging goal, cares about online academies, etc? What's the % they can get from it? It's even worth it? They should focus all their minds to their (demanding) main goal, but it seems they are distracted with this stupid things. This sounds so weird to me, and I feel I am missing something.

It feels like a proactive PR move to me. When the shit hits the fan in a few years and jobs are vanishing, they can point to this as one of the many examples of how they're fighting the good fight for humanity

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#15
post #11
post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

this stuff is all a cover from CEOs. We're in the middle of a downturn and they're pretending layoffs like this are due to AI so as not to spook investors.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#16
post #11
post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

You have to trust they are actually telling the truth and not using it as a convenient scapegoat. What sounds better to shareholders “we’re replacing jobs with AI” or “we hired too many during the COVID hiring glut and need to lay more people off”?

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#17
post #11
post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...

Does anybody really believe that SalesForce of all companies has successfully replaced 4000 real and necessary jobs with AI? Or is that more likely just an excuse to justify more layoffs in the tech industry for the usual reasons.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#18
post #13

Why a company like OpenAI, that is so big and has a clear challenging goal, cares about online academies, etc? What's the % they can get from it? It's even worth it? They should focus all their minds to their (demanding) main goal, but it seems they are distracted with this stupid things. This sounds so weird to me, and I feel I am missing something.

Probably because they have thrown as much money and manpower as they possibly can at the core problem and investing more into it is diminishing returns. Building out a platform is the logical next step and there are probably 100s of revenue positive businesses they can build on top of it by just throwing some software developers at the problem. They are going to be releasing a _lot_ of products over the next few years that aren't just "GPT 6" or whatever.

You might as well ask why google built an ad company or email or video, or a browser or a phone OS etc, when they should have spent more money on their core search engine.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#19
post #3
post #2

For full irony they take your data, then use that data to replace your job.

they don't even replace any jobs, they suck out all money out that was previously going to employ people doing useful things. I feel like we need a new word for money going to datacenters instead of paychecks. 'AI taking jobs' implies AI is doing the work , which is not the case.

It also seems like a lot of these layoffs due to AI are just regular layoffs.

Let's reduce headcount and spin it as AI disruption! That way we dont have to acknowledge we overhired during covid AND our stock price will go to the moon as they say.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#20
post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year.

Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation skills and managing the toil of the “heavy” work.

Basically, we’re able to train interns to do 80% of the processing work with LLM tooling. So we’re doing to promote two of the existing staff and replace 2/6 vacancies with entry level new grads, and use the unit to recruit talent and cycle them through.

In terms of order of magnitude, we’ll save about $500k in payroll, spend $50k in services, and get same or better outcomes.

Another example is we gave an L1 service desk manager Gemini and made him watch a YouTube video about statistics. He’s using it to analyze call statistics and understand how his business works without alot of math knowledge. For example, he looked at the times where the desk was at 95th percentile call volume and identified a few ways to time shift certain things to avoid the need for more agents or reduce overall wait times. All stuff that would require expensive talent and some sort of data analysis software… which frankly probably wouldn’t have been purchased.

Thats the real AI story. Stupid business people are just firing people. The real magic is using the tools to make smart people smarter. If you work for a big company, giving Gemini or ChatGPT to motivated contracts and procurement teams would literally print money for you due to the stuff your folks are missing.

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