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

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 196 posts

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#101

Post by watwut »

gxs wrote: post #92

One of the things missed with AI is that it’s enabled people to do more - either by augmenting skill sets or augmenting bandwidth In my own circles this has led to more work not less Expectations are higher, SLAs are tighter. Which makes sense - if a company can mine more gold with less works, they aren’t going to retire workers they will ask for even more gold Managers are coding again, analysts are expected to writ…

It does not make sense. If you have tool that makes you more productive and somehow end up overworked, it is not because of the tool. It is deliberate decision of the management. More productivity could mean more earning for the company. It could mean people getting kind of bored as work dries out.

What you describe is normal push beyond possible with predictable longer term results.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#102

Post by fletchowns »

> then began responding to come again manually

Presumably they meant to write "to some again manually". On the one hand I'm kind of surprised when typos make it into major publications these days. Now, it's kind of a reassuring sign that an article was written and reviewed by humans though.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#103

Post by zozbot234 »

_23sd wrote: post #87

Implicit in a lot of "AI jobs apocalypse" predictions is the assumption that most tasks are ridiculously easy compared to AI research, so naturally the smart AI researchers can understand any profession well enough to credibly predict that AI will be able to replace it. I'm personally not sure the apocalypse has been truly disproven as opposed to progress just being slower than some of the overexuberant predictions,…

Programming has been successfully automated though. Programmers used to write programs line-by-line in raw binary code or assembly mnemonics, now they just write high-level formal code in languages like C++ or Rust and the computer spends much of its working time processing those lexer and parser 'tokens' and translating the whole thing into assembly and binary code. It all works quite well.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#104

Post by simonw »

windexh8er wrote: post #98
simonw wrote: post #37

OK, this is weird. The article says: > OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk. But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…

For those that write and shill for these orgs, almost full time, I could see how this type of admission is damning.

I don't understand what you're saying here.

(Personally I would love to see Sam and Dario credibly walk back their jobs doomerism talk, but I don't think the facts match the headline in this case.)

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#105

Post by broknbottle »

datakan wrote: post #45
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

Jack Welch Disciples

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#106

Post by simonw »

spprashant wrote: post #81
simonw wrote: post #58

Fortune articles are behind a paywall, which makes them a bad fit for Hacker News. This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa... I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look st…

I agree. With Altman at least it seems he is making the pivot because he thinks its better messaging. Amodei is just re-framing what he actually sees as the endgame here. He says 10x productivity, he means 10x less jobs.

I would hope that if Sam was making a deliberate pivot here he might use a slightly bigger platform to do so than a conversation with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#107

Post by georgeecollins »

ryandrake wrote: post #83
ravenstine wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your bu…

These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and disca…

All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism. I am not saying they are unfair, but I think you could have made the same arguments about management and investors doing the same thing in manufacturing in the US. They reduced domestic employment (not in total, but reduced the share and the growth) in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities.

If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good? It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#108

Post by tunesmith »

chrsw wrote: post #74
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

In practice, it's more like companies want to spend money on AI because they believe it will save money somewhere else. If instead they see extra cost, then they get all confused. They can't bring themselves to believe that in their particular case maybe the benefit isn't worth the cost; they're axiomatically conditioned to believe they have to keep using it, and so therefore they have to make cuts somewhere else. It's insane.

I went through this personally. I had a glut of project ideas I wanted to get through. I signed up for the $200/month thing. I caught up. My agent sat idle. It was hard to decide to cut my plan. I felt initial pressure to search and hunt for other ideas to code, ideas that were pretty stupid. I finally downscaled my plan; I got hold of myself. But that's easier to do for an individual than it is for a company.

In normal economic theory it's easier to understand. You're at a particular scale. You have the opportunity to automate, but does it make sense for you? I could go out and buy a riding mower right now, but my lawn is less than a quarter acre. The riding mower lets me scale up, but I don't have something that can benefit from it.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#109

Post by yalogin »

They are walking it back because they realized they don’t have anything to gain by it at this point. Previously they could get market attention and employer attention to increase their revenue and now that part is done. Their pipelines are full and the employer mindshare is obtained. They can pivot back is what they figured out

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#110

Post by convolvatron »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #88
fg3fg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation. Thats all the management at firms care about. Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!

But it's not going to happen. There may be some localised productivity gains, but in many of these businesses cracks will appear over the next 6-12 months as an all-AI pipeline becomes unfeasibly expensive and there's no corresponding earnings growth. These CEOs have no clue how their companies work. They're in the driving seat of a machine they don't understand, they've been sold corporate FSD, they've turned it on…

decades of excess capital have raised company leaders that have bought into structural delusions like 'accounts are all the matter', or 'headcounts are all that matter', and the market has rewarded them for that. Or at least ignored failure because the supply was really quite low. Remember when we all laughed at the .com companies that were going to revolutionize pet food delivery? that never went away, we just normalized it. Very little of this has been based on cost v. revenue just forever. So it's no surprise that they are a little stunned that by following what everyone says is the future things aren't just going swimmingly. The usual reaction is to just blame your team, that's easy.
Post reply on HN