Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

human-in-the-loop.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 272 posts

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#211

Post by grebc »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #209
grebc wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my point is it’s rarely the transformational technology people talk it up to be. 5 years ago absolutely everyone was talking about how blockchains & ledgers were going to solve all the problems of the world, and executives needed blockchain & ledgers in their products. Now, no one cares. Not saying that happens in this case, but don’t believe the hype so easy. Even job losses in the context of a radically dif…

Sure don’t be gullible, of course. I was never sold on blockchain, and there was major skepticism across the industry. I only know one person who works on crypto projects, and no one who uses crypto for purchases. Yet everyone I know in engineering and non-engineers use AI for work and personal tasks. This is a different ballgame. It could be the innovation curve stops here and we only have to adapt to Claude 4 level…

I don’t think it’s reasonable at all, but live your life as you see fit.

It’s easy in retrospect to be say “sure, we were sceptical of crypto”. It certainly was not easy then to voice that, nor is it easy now to be sceptical of AI - without being labelled a Luddite or just negative.

Money is a huge factor in all this, people love to discuss the current in thing and what’s more in than some tech that’s IPO’ing? Investors were making stupid money with crypto. Investors again are about to make stupid money with AI.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#212

Post by dag100 »

skybrian wrote: post #201
awesomeMilou wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death. When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#213

Post by skybrian »

dag100 wrote: post #212
skybrian wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is dystopian speculation. You don't have to believe every science fiction scenario someone famous talks about.

It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.

No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#214

Post by soraminazuki »

vinyl7 wrote: post #129
an0malous wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, I don’t think anyone really cares. I can’t unmute videos on Twitter/X on iOS, it’s been like that for over a year. I get a new disclosure that my data was leaked about every month. Palantir and possible Claude targeted a girl’s school for missile strikes. I still have to tell Claude what day or time it is right now sometimes, or it’ll give me medical advice for my dog and the dosing or some important nu…

> We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore. I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amo…

[dead]

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#215

Post by vanuatu »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #208
vanuatu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is subject to market forces, but there's no clear ceiling you can draw like copywriting, or textiles, or horses and cars with abstractions and complexity there's essentially infinite demand for software

I don’t understand. What do you mean by complexity? Feature requests or something else.

nearly any human desire can be set up as a complex software system to satiate it

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#216

Post by Tanjreeve »

csomar wrote: post #125
lwhi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely you can judge people by results though?

How do you do that in practice though? You won't know the engineer is a con-man until after you have spent $$ and months into the process. Then you are in the position of trusting nobody.

Welcome to the problem of hiring and managing employees generally.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#217

Post by judahmeek »

marcosdumay wrote: post #158
fasterik wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.

The fact that you had to separate them into an age should tell you something. Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.

Are you referring to the antitrust breakup of AT&T in 1982?

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#218

Post by rzmmm »

Ukv wrote: post #94
coffeefirst wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. How do you know that? In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

Price of the current frontier may vary, but price for a given level of capability tends to drop pretty fast. April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16 for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per million output tokens. [0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard

The ranking is not comparable across time like that.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#219

Post by insane_dreamer »

> since the demand is not infinite, not all of them can be hired to do that. One copywriter is now doing the job of 10, but the demand is fixed. The demand is not going to 10x just because you have 10x more supply.

This is the key insight, and one that I find myself repeating to people over and over. Yeah, you'll still need a HITL for some tasks. But because it only takes 1 person to do 10 people's work, that's a 90% workforce reduction, essentially killing off entire professions.

So "find the next thing" will work for the lucky 10%.

And given the $T of investment including all datacenter and energy to run them (we collectively decided to forget about climate change because AI so shiny), the only way to get the desired ROI is to decimate as many professions as possible.

A couple of days ago talked to a parent of one of my kids teammates and it turns out he's an illustrator who has been able to support his family for the past 10 years on his considerable skill. And all of a sudden, AI has taken it away, not gradually, but almost overnight. No one wants to pay for illustrators because midjourney is "good enough". What is that person supposed to do now? It's not like he can find another company to work for, or move to a city where there are "jobs", it's the end of a career that he spend a couple of decades honing his skills for. It was sobering. Yeah, he could sell his own art on Etsy or something, but there's a limited market -- it's not like people are going to buy 10x works of art on Etsy than before. So essentially, that entire profession is on life support. And lest someone say "use the AI tools yourself, become the prompt engineer", they're missing the point that the marketing person who was hiring illustrators no longer wants to do so because they can just prompt-design it themselves and no one cares about quality anymore anyway.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#220

Post by Ukv »

rzmmm wrote: post #218
Ukv wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price of the current frontier may vary, but price for a given level of capability tends to drop pretty fast. April of last year you'd get 1431 ELO[0] from o3-2025-04-16 for $8.00 per million output tokens. April of this year you can get 1436 ELO from deepseek-v4-flash for $0.2 per million output tokens. [0]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/arena-leaderboard

The ranking is not comparable across time like that.

I'm using the current ELO of the models, and both are still running in the arena.
Post reply on HN