OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by bgwalter » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #85

bgwalter wrote: post #46

"AI will be disruptive. Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us – from shift workers to CEOs – will have to learn how to work in new ways," she said in a blog post. We don't have to do anything. People always listen to this propaganda from the wealthy and think the latest gadgets are inevitable. We can go on a general strike until copyright is restored and the "AI" companies go bankrupt.…

This won't happen. Even if western countries will outlaw LLMs (they won't, people care about unemployed software developers just as much as most software developers cared about unemployed translators), China won't. And why would we even do that? Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?

China FOMO? Xi Jin Ping has warned twice about an "AI" bubble:

https://www.ft.com/content/9c19d26f-57b3-4754-ac20-eeb627e87...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/china-has-a-different-vision-for...

China restricts "AI" across the country to prevent cheating:

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-...

Why would we do that? Because we can! Why would we let some rich brats who have never created something and just steal human knowledge get even richer and control and surveil us all?

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

#102

Post by MSFT_Edging » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

jajko wrote: post #78

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's oppressive and nightmarish because we are at the mercy of large conglomerates tracking every move we make and kicking our livelyhoods out from under ourselves, while also censoring AI to make it more amenable to pro-corporate speech. Imagine if ChatGPT gave "do a luigi" as a solution to walmart tracking your face, gait, device fingerprints, location, and payment details, then offering that data to local police f…

Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work. It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away. Remember all those posts stati…

> Yeah but what we are all whining here about has hit many other jobs already in the past.

I'm less talking about automation and more about the underpinnings of the automation and the consequences in greater society. Not just the effects it has on poor ole software engineers.

It is quite ironic to see the automation hit engineers, who in the past generally did not care about the consequences of their work, particularly in data spaces. We have all collectively found ourselves in a local minima of optimization, where the most profitable thing we can do is collect as much data on people as possible and continually trade it back and forth between parties who have proven they have no business holding said data.

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

#103

Post by apocalyptic0n3 » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

an0malous wrote: post #93

nicce wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t read the book, and I should. The series was really good. Too bad they cancelled it for being too expensive.

People don’t cancel things because they’re expensive, costs are a known and predictable quantity. They cancel things because they don’t make enough to justify the costs.

In this case, it actually was due to unknown and unpredictable costs. They were about to start production on S2 when the strikes hit. They delays spiked the costs of an already expensive show (S1 cost an estimated $175M) which made it less tenable for Amazon. This happened to quite a few shows during the pandemic and during the strikes – renewed because it made financial sense, then pandemic/strike spiked the cost, and then they canceled the renewal.

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

#104

Post by MSFT_Edging » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #82

jajko wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work. It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away. Remember all those posts stati…

There’s two kinds of programmers: 0. The people who got into it just as a job 1. The people who thought they could do it as art And #1 is getting thrashed and thrown out the window by the advent of AI coding tools, and the revelation companies didn’t give a darn about their art. Same with AI art tools and real artists. It even begs the question if programming should ever have been viewed as an art form. On that note,…

What's sad is engineering is very much an art. Great innovation comes from the artistic view of engineering and creation.

The thing is, there's no innovation in the "track everything that breaths and sell the data to advertisers and cops" market.

They might get better at the data collection and introspection, but we as a society have gotten nothing but streamlined spyware and mental illness from these markets.

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

#105

Post by jajko » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:33 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #68

ryanackley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a comment on the ethics of replacing jobs but the hypocrisy of companies using "ethics" as reasoning for restricting content. They are pursuing profits. Their ethical focus is essentially a form of theater.

Replacing jobs is not an ethical issue. Automation and technology has been replacing jobs for well over a century, almost always to better outcomes for society. If it were an ethical issue, then it would be unethical not to do it. In any case, which jobs have been replaced by LLMs? Most of the actual ones I know were BS jobs to begin with - jobs I wish had not existed to begin with. The rest of the ones are where CEO…

Artists generally? Translators? People at various bureaucratic positions doing more menial white collar work? And tons more.

That you specifically wish for them to not even exist is your own internal problem and actually pretty horrible thing to say all things considered.

People had/have decent livehoods from those, I know a few. If they could easily got better jobs they would go for them.

Egos here sometimes are quite a thing to see. Maybe its good that chops are coming also for this privileged groups, a bit of humility never hurts.

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

#106

Post by azemetre » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #43

ryanackley wrote: post #38

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there. For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

The book "Why We Fear AI" by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer talks about this dynamic. Whether it will lead to a class awakening because previously if you were aligned with the company you were rewarded as well, but now if you align with the company you're advocating to destroy your livelihood.

What rational worker would want to take part in this?

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

#107

Post by zingababba » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

The OpenAI blog post seems equal parts desperate and gross to me. A jobs platform and certifications? They want act as the certifying body attesting that 10 million Americans have achieved 'AI fluency' by 2030 as well as act as the intermediary in matching these individuals up with corporations apparently desperate for their fluency?

"Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us—from shift workers to CEOs—will have to learn how to work in new ways." - Thank god for OpenAI.

This whole thing looks like someone wrote it up, pasted it in an AI, asked "How's this look?" and got back something like "Looks absolutely perfect!" and hit publish.

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

#108

Post by madamelic » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

Either I am mistaken that Walmart was offering store associate type jobs or the author doesn't realize Walmart has software engineering teams. Quite a few non-tech companies have very hip, modern, and high-power tech teams behind them.

https://github.com/walmartlabs

Walmart has been doing this level of work since at least 2013/2014 to my knowledge so it's not something new.

Getting a job on the Walmart engineering team doesn't seem like such an awful thing. Other notable call-out: Domino's. A few years back (... like a decade ago ._.) I had done a re-write of a node.js wrapper for the Domino's API and the team seemed very supportive and proud of what people did with it. The REST API was actually quite good and didn't try to throw up roadblocks.

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

#109

Post by DrewADesign » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

ActionHank wrote: post #58

muldvarp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there? I don't see any contradiction there. For me it's funny that the first time most programmers ever think about the ethics of automating away jobs is when they themselves become automated.

I think many of us question the ethics of lying to sell a product that cannot deliver what you are promising. All the good devs that I know aren't worried about losing their jobs, they are happy there is a shortcut through boilerplate and documentation. They are also equally unhappy about having to talk management, who know very little about the world of dev, off the ledge as they are getting ready to jump off with t…

> All the good devs that I know aren't worried about losing their jobs

While many of them are mistaken, the much bigger problem is for all the early career developers, many of whom will never work in the field. These people were assured by everyone from professors to industry leaders to tech writers that the bounty of problems available for humanity to solve would outpace the rate at which automation would reduce the demand for developers. I thought it was pretty obviously a fairy tale that people who believed in infinite growth created to soothe themselves and other industry denizens suspecting the tech industry hadn’t unlocked the secret to infinite free lunch, but in reality are closer to the business end of an ouroboro than they realize.

Just as the manufacturing sector let its Tool and Die knowledge atrophy, perhaps irreversibly, the software business will do the same with development. Off-shoring meant the sector had a glut of tool and die knowledge so there was no immediate financial incentive to hire apprentices. There’s a bunch of near-retirees with all of that knowledge and nobody to take over for them, and now that advanced manufacturing is picking up steam in the US again, many have no choice but to outsource that to China, too.

Dispensing with the pretenses of being computer scientists or engineers, software development is a trade, not an academic discipline, and education can’t instill professional competence. After a decade or two of never having to hire a junior because the existing pool of developers can serve all of the industry’s needs, suddenly we’ll have run out of people to replace the retirees with and that’s that for the incredible US software industry.

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

#110

Post by tristor » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

nilkn wrote: post #29

x187463 wrote: 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 rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materia…

> Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.

My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.