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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

#71

Post by bigstrat2003 »

catigula wrote: post #61
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.

Sorry, but you aren't familiar with frontier models if you think it's not "good enough". The latest models are quite a bit more capable than most people in many regards already.

No, they aren't. Not even at the one thing (programming) which they are supposed to be best at. People are always claiming "frontier models are so much better" but that is a false claim.

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

#72

Post by feoren »

yardie wrote: post #4

Dumbasses the lot of them. Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve. Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believe…

> UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.

Do you mean it's a non-starter in the current political climate? Or that you personally just don't think it will work?

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

#73

Post by zuzululu »

catigula wrote: post #65
zuzululu wrote: post #38

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 s…

Any need to address the huge numbers of foreign workers in America putting direct, nonnegotiable pressure on those jobs? It's time for the program to end.

I don't see the need and I don't think it has the impact you think it does

enterprises thrive when they have the freedom to choose who to hire without government interference

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

#74

Post by foldr »

taurath wrote: post #51
ako wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If someone has a vibe coded website with bad statistics but shows up on a web search, what tools will it use to check those statistics? How will it know what data it needs to validate? What tools will it use?

Humans face the same problem. So this at least shouldn't make AI perform worse relative to humans, even if AI slop degrades the performance of both over time.

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

#75

Post by feoren »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #19

I kind of wish there was a way to flip the script on the companies that gave up on humans and tried to switch to AI. Make them suffer for their idiocy in the same way that workers suffered or continue to suffer. If that makes me a bad person, fine. If a few CEO's wind up working at 7-11 to make rent money, all the better.

> If a few CEO's wind up working at 7-11 to make rent money, all the better.

There are CEOs who have only ever failed abysmally their entire careers, and they generally only ever make more money. Accountability is for losers.

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

#76

Post by grttw1 »

tshaddox wrote: post #58
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 problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran. Or, it eventually becomes clear to enough people that the AI companies ar…

Many jobs imo have been under threat for many yrs.

The tremendous growth in earnings meant some fake excess head count number was viable.

Google faced an activist investor who practically forced sundar to fire a bunch of people. This is what’s coming for big tech if this AI thing blows up. Apple Is safe because they are clever and saw this from a mile away.

Investors want their cake and they will eat it too.

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

#77

Post by taurath »

openquery wrote: post #66
taurath wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential The cost is already outrunning the benefit to a massive amount, and the predicted expotential is not here yet. I predict it'll always be around the corner, a $1T model won't get there, but it will "look promising", but we'll sadly run out of money for the $10T or $100T model..

The only thing the $1T model needs to do is find some algorithmic speedup which allows it to be trained at $100B. I'm not saying that's easy or that it will happen but I just don't see why not.

I don't understand the logic here - a methodology to increase efficiency by 90% in training doesn't exist until it does - could you explain what you mean by "I don't see why it won't exist"? Are you seeing consistent gains by some process?

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

#78

Post by lifestyleguru »

ryandrake wrote: post #69
cmiles8 wrote: post #23

The ultimate irony here is that the biggest jobs wipeout most likely to happen now is when all these “AI exploration lab” type teams that every company quickly created are blown up. Most, if not nearly all, of these teams have little to show ROI wise and the music on the AI bubble is slowing dramatically. They went from seemingly unlimited budgets and headcount when CEOs said “get me some of that AI” to some really u…

Can we just speed this up a little? I just want my $100 RAM prices back.

Not so long ago I felt I outsmarted the system by using my 10 years old computers and laptops, but slowly I'm starting to squeak like a little mouse.

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

#79

Post by taurath »

foldr wrote: post #74
taurath wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone has a vibe coded website with bad statistics but shows up on a web search, what tools will it use to check those statistics? How will it know what data it needs to validate? What tools will it use?

Humans face the same problem. So this at least shouldn't make AI perform worse relative to humans, even if AI slop degrades the performance of both over time.

I find it to not be acceptable if AI's trend is to degrade performance of both AI and humans at the same time, that's kinda not the goal, right? Why are we spending money to make us dumber?

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

#80

Post by yardie »

feoren wrote: post #72
yardie wrote: post #4

Dumbasses the lot of them. Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve. Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believe…

> UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes. Do you mean it's a non-starter in the current political climate? Or that you personally just don't think it will work?

It won't work because it's unnecessary. If these boneheads are right AI will drive the price of goods down. Price of labor goes down. It's deflationary. UBI is a backstop against inflation. And really just there so that rich people's money is worth something.
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