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Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

wsj.com

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Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#31

Post by vitally3643 »

gortok wrote: post #26
skybrian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s no longer true that AI tools primarily get knowledge from their pre-training input data. That gives them a baseline, but nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling. So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming.

> nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling. So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming. How do those chat bots discern that the ‘web searches’ they’re using are returning human generated information only that’s been vetted instead of LLM output?

The same way you and I do: vibes

Welcome to the postmodern internet. It's vibes all the way down.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#32

Post by openquery »

FloorEgg wrote: post #6
openquery wrote: post #3

This is all noise. The leaders of these companies are flip-flopping to whatever sounds best for their current agenda - hiring, fundraising, pre-IPO, etc. The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient noise.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential I agree with your sentiment (about the noise), however I think this over simplifies it a bit. We may get AI that is super-human at frontier research and dramatically accelerates the pace, and still have to wait decades before it disrupts the job market (or maybe never displaces all work). Fo…

> I agree with your sentiment (about the noise), however I think this over simplifies it a bit. We may get AI that is super-human at frontier research and dramatically accelerates the pace, and still have to wait decades before it disrupts the job market (or maybe never displaces all work).

I don't see why that's the case when you have super-human researchers on tap. There are indeed physical (supply chain-y) issues to deal with but isn't the whole point that: 1. Super-human at AI research + scaling to millions of instances will probably result in super-intelligence in everything which is not AI research. (a subset of which is white-collar work) 2. Use that super-intelligence to solve any supply-chain issues you might be facing.

> And we may just find that the human mind is way more capable than we thought and even with accelerating research it's just a harder problem than anyone expected, even algorithmically.

I hope so but whenever I do, I feel like I'm coping hard and not dealing with the facts.

I'm not saying we're there yet - I'm saying the trend lines are clear.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#33

Post by gortok »

vitally3643 wrote: post #31
gortok wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling. So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming. How do those chat bots discern that the ‘web searches’ they’re using are returning human generated information only that’s been vetted instead of LLM output?

The same way you and I do: vibes Welcome to the postmodern internet. It's vibes all the way down.

Upvoted you, of course; but it’s worse than that. It’s vibes being marketed as correctness. To the lay person (and unfortunately, to more than a few folks who should know better), computers don’t “make up” information. Maybe some good (in some weird way) that comes from all of this is that we stop using LLMs for recitation of facts.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#34

Post by pier25 »

gortok wrote: post #11

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient As long as the term “AI” means by-and-large LLMs with additional features sprinkled on top, the answer is no. More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets s…

The only thing that matters is the economy of it all.

Open AI et al are hemorrhaging absurd amounts of money. It's not clear whether there will ever be a good balance between cost, value, and price.

Lots of companies are already questioning the value they get from LLMs at current prices which are obviously not enough to generate profits.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#35

Post by ako »

gortok wrote: post #26
skybrian wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s no longer true that AI tools primarily get knowledge from their pre-training input data. That gives them a baseline, but nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling. So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming.

> nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling. So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming. How do those chat bots discern that the ‘web searches’ they’re using are returning human generated information only that’s been vetted instead of LLM output?

They don't need to, they can use tools to validate their assumptions.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#36

Post by grttw1 »

munk-a wrote: post #24
josefritzishere wrote: post #14

After watching the AI roll out for a couple years now I'm much more confident that it's just a scam. There is no net positive ROI on AI. It's not good enough, and the "mass job destruction" scenario offsets any marginal gains by eliminating the market for basically all products. That doesn't mean that mediocre C-suites won't try but it only takes 1-2 quarters to feel the burn and back track.

It's a rather useful tool... and it absolutely has been overhyped repeatedly and sold as a panacea. If you believe AI will 10x you're developers you've drunk the kool-aid, if you believe AI will have no impact on your developers then you're being stubbornly ignorant.

[dead]

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#37

Post by deadbabe »

deagle50 wrote: post #18

Of course they have. Fewer developers means fewer tokens sold. Until AI no longer needs human supervision, it's more profitable to tax as many employees as possible.

You do not need developers to spend tokens, regular people can spend tokens just as easily.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#38

Post by zuzululu »

article misses an important point that these big tech companies are all listed on the public market, any narrative about their decisions should weigh that reality and why suddenly its being disseminated.

personally, I am collecting 3 salaries working remotely. For one of the jobs, I am tasked with hiring other devs but i dont put the effort in as i dont see a point. i just say i can't find a decent engineer and why should i when a frontier models can do most of their work? in our job postings we see thousands of applicants in a very short period of time, i just do these multi stage interviews with a rotation of candidates to basically buy time while i work on another job

i see that things are getting very desperate and i feel for those that are still struggling to find SWE jobs, AI is absolutely doing a number and the gap is going to increase not decrease.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#39

Post by openquery »

grey-area wrote: post #9
openquery wrote: post #3

This is all noise. The leaders of these companies are flip-flopping to whatever sounds best for their current agenda - hiring, fundraising, pre-IPO, etc. The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. Everything else is transient noise.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential. I think we know the answer to that already - LLMs show no sign of improving intelligence and instead providers are going down the ‘agentic’ rabbit hole. There are too many things missing, like a world model, understanding, and taste (in the sense of knowing what is good and what is not good…

> LLMs show no sign of improving intelligence and instead providers are going down the ‘agentic’ rabbit hole.

I'm not sure where you're getting this. I don't work at Anthropic but Fable (Mythos) seems demonstrably smarter than Opus for pretty much any definition of smarter and they claim that Opus was used heavily in Mythos development (yeah I know take this with a massive pinch of salt).

Either way if the models are indeed helping development, even on the engineering, you can iterate on models faster and even if they're not contributing to core research yet you still have a baby exponential by improving the engineering.

Re: Big Tech Has Suddenly Flipped on the AI Jobs Wipeout Scenario

#40

Post by hintymad »

Remember it was reported that OpenAI didn't think that ChatGPT would be successful? OpenAI thought that ChatGPT was yet another toy before its launch. Yet once ChatGPT became an overnight success, Altman started to talk about how AI would be dangerous, how it would displace or even replace jobs. In contrast, Amodei seemed to always believe in what he said. So, can we say that Altman is a opportunistic businessman, and Amodei is a cult leader?
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