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The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

libertas.software

11–20 of 218 posts

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#11
post #6

Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.

You must be joking, the vast majority of HN loves AI and thinks they don't need to write any code anymore.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#13

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#14
post #6

Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.

You must be joking, the vast majority of HN loves AI and thinks they don't need to write any code anymore.

Some people love AI, some don't.

But the point about there being nothing new in the article still stands.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#15
post #9

One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers. These data centers are not going to pay for themselves.

> One datacenter rack of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs costs $8 million. That's about the same cost as a team of software engineers.

How many engineers do you think that can pay for? At 100k/year that's a pretty huge team.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#16
The problem that software engineers and product teams often face is that the time from roadmap to feature is quite long, and AI has offered a clear, meaningful speedup to some parts, like writing tests and boilerplate. In many cases, the same ticket flow can be managed much faster with AI. So, what? We're not quite at the point where people have transitioned this into demand for more product deliveries faster. As soon as that occurs, it doesn't matter how great the AI is, because the current pace will be slow. Why stop at what the current roadmap is? Why not ask for double the features? When we gave everyone power tools that didn't dramatically make construction easier, it just enabled more complex buildings.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#17
post #13

Cutting people because of AI makes no sense, you know these people are good without AI, you'd want to keep them! Freeze the constant over-hiring instead, and take care of the people you know aren't lobotomized yet, and train them if needed. I'm seeing so much shedding of knowledge workers though, even though AI clearly isn't ready to replace people, just ready to augment them currently, that it looks like looney-tune…

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#18

[flagged]

I always thought that the person you describe doesn't actually exist in any statistically meaningful way. And that it's just social media exploiting those who are suspectible to lazy narratives.

Not that tech companies can't be bloated. But I think the bloat is far less obvious when viewed from more than one perspective. Ie. there's an enormous amount of wrongly placed "what do they even do here?" because we only see the individual from our seat at the company.

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#19
post #6

Preaching to the HN choir - great for upvotes but does anyone read anything new in this? Feels like I’ve seen the same article about this every month and I don’t think business people care.

more articles there will be about this - bigger the probability of this idea it will be in the dataset for chatgpt 6.9 thinking so the c-level of the companies would stop firing people

Re: The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't

#20
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the scale of a company, augmenting is replacing. If a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI (but cheaper), you go for that; and it doesn't matter how good or bad AI is without the human.

The point is if a worker plus AI can do the work of two workers without AI, then why not keep both workers and have them both use AI to have the equivalent of four non-assisted workers?

Because you don’t have enough work that really needs doing, at least in that particular area. You cut engineers because the bottleneck to increased revenue isn’t software features or bugs, it’s marketing/sales; human beings’ limited attention for which there is now more competition than ever; and customers’ available funds.

ETA: this is sometimes (though not always) very different for a mature company than an early stage startup.

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