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Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

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Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#121

Post by oxag3n »

pipo234 wrote: post #65
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe AI will drive efficiency. I’m less certain about whether that’s already happening or will happen in the future and when in the future. However, I’ve already seen a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go. Efficiency is output/input.…

> Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily. First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average. Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially ? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cook…

> Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially?

Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB.

Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc.

Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#122

Post by k32k »

gopher_space wrote: post #116
hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly believe AI will drive efficiency. I’m less certain about whether that’s already happening or will happen in the future and when in the future. However, I’ve already seen a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go. Efficiency is output/input.…

… and in the background the next hiring wave slowly builds into a tsunami. Sometimes I feel like the only person left who remembers the pre-dotcom vibe. OpenClaw etc. should have set off alarms that we are back in the land of the Quick and the Dead.

Yeah OpenClaw for me was the alarm sounding... not just because of the project itself, but the fight between Altman and Zuck to pursue him. It shows a fundamental lack of product sensibility/visionary thinking within OAI and Meta. Having lots of dosh clearly doesn't solve that problem in-house.

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#123

Post by mejutoco »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #67
Ekaros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Line MUST go up. If it doesn't you get replaced by someone who will make it go up. There is very deep belief in infinite exponential growth. And not following that belief gets you replaced by someone who shows that belief. And then you stop being paid...

I think it's wrong to characterize this in terms of belief. This is the behavioural outcome of the influential pressure of a systemic structure. Infinite exponential growth is something we ALL "believe" in when we put a dollar into savings and expect to get a dollar and 5c out the next year. The problem to me seems more that we tie all sorts of OTHER structural societal constructs to this one. To the degree that if w…

> Infinite exponential growth is something we ALL "believe" in when we put a dollar into savings and expect to get a dollar and 5c out the next year.

Isnt that linear growth?

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#125

Post by AndroTux »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #73
kelipso wrote: post #43

With the ASICs being so efficient at inference, I’m getting the feeling even the infrastructure investments are going to be severely outdated in a couple of years..

GPUs mean lifetime is around 3 years at scale. They are going to need to be replaced anyway

That’s okay by me. I’m ready to buy one or two on the cheap

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#126

Post by ajross »

haxiomic wrote: post #99
monero-xmr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Otherwise let productivity gains diffuse out - that’s the only way to increase true wealth

You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norwa…

> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.

Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own?

I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers.

Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine.

AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#127

Post by k32k »

adventured wrote: post #85
k32k wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read this comment all I see is: LLM at the edge - or close to it - will become available. And whoever provides the best eco-system across digital lifestyle and business wins. Oh... Apple? lol. Well that'd be funny wouldn't it. Oh and dont forget Apple got rid of its reliance on Intel too. No reason why this can't happen again.

There will be continued hyperscale AI in the datacenter for some use cases, and AI in the smartphone (or PC) for other use cases. It is guaranteed to split that way. Apple's remarkable capabilities around custom chips will enable it to continue to stay out in front in smartphones.

" It is guaranteed to split that way."

There's no guarantee whatsoever.

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#128

Post by Ardren »

Hamuko wrote: post #109
kelipso wrote: post #43

With the ASICs being so efficient at inference, I’m getting the feeling even the infrastructure investments are going to be severely outdated in a couple of years..

Jensen Huang put it quite decently: "When Blackwell starts shipping in volume, you couldn't give Hoppers away." All of the current GPU investments are gonna hit zero, and probably a lot faster than the companies buying them realise. Definitely a lot faster than the investors realise.

When did Blackwell start shipping in volume? A H200 is still > $30,000.

I'd settle for some free 80GB A100 cards! ($7,000 2nd hand on ebay right now)

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#129

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AndroTux wrote: post #125
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs mean lifetime is around 3 years at scale. They are going to need to be replaced anyway

That’s okay by me. I’m ready to buy one or two on the cheap

By mean lifetime I mean “failure”. They won’t be any good

Re: Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat

#130

Post by internet101010 »

saos wrote: post #51

Just checked. They have 162,000 employees. So thats like 18% cut? I don't even know what that company does. I'm sure it's valuable for a reason, just never understood what they do. Edit: Google says they sell Database software. OK.

They sell unsexy infra. For example, if you are a retailer everything from the POS system to the accounting system behind it to the ERP system that sits on top of that.

Absolutely terrible products to work with both from a user and developer standpoint, but once they are up and running they are built like tanks.

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