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

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

cio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 249 posts

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

#141

Post by skeeter2020 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #62
bearjaws wrote: post #48

The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment. There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water. We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets. I don't know what comes after, but when yo…

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

and (likely) your entire life we've seen concentration of wealth and resources in the west. It's not about maximum employment but about much more basic things like utilization and purpose. There has been no general productivity diffusion on a national basis. Gains have come from outsourcing the lower productivity jobs without acknowledging the cost: the destination subsidizes by not investing growth in their own people but by maintaining an artificially lower-cost region, and the outsourcer (i.e. the US) finances with their currency.

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

#142

Post by cubefox »

lumost wrote: post #77
cubefox wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASICs only work for very small and heavily quantized models. Moreover, they are fixed function hardware, so whenever you have a new model, you have to throw the current chips away and design and buy new ones. That's like buying a new CPU every time a new OS version comes out.

The latest strategies of etching weights into silicon seem like they can be generalized. We currently design gpu/tpu caching on the basis that the weights change frequently - if the weights do not change at all, or change very slowly - then there are other perhaps more efficient ways of laying out the memory on the chip which are somewhere between permanently etch a model onto silicon and use GPUs designed for graphi…

That would be something like an FPGA. Which have been very unpopular so far due to high cost. And they also only support a relatively small number of weights.

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

#143

Post by piva00 »

ajross wrote: post #126
haxiomic wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actu…

There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change.

Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life.

Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?

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

#144

Post by toast0 »

jcranmer wrote: post #80
bequanna wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression. I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me. Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.

About 20% of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed right now. So far, the economy is coping by drawing down inventories elsewhere and praying that the strait reopens soon , but even then, crude oil futures are skyrocketing (up 50% in a week). If this lasts for a few months--and if a few oil tankers get blown up in the crossfire--this is going to be a repeat of the 1970's oil…

Ignoring concerns about the wisdom of the war; there's about three directions this can go:

Fizzle out: Strait reopens cause Iran needs ocean shipping.

Continue as now: oil trade disrupted, but using lots of missiles and drones and things; increased munitions demand leads to increased manufacturing jobs.

Boots on the ground: oil trade reopened, long term quagmire, probably more munitions production.

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

#145

Post by carefree-bob »

bearjaws wrote: post #48

The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment. There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water. We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets. I don't know what comes after, but when yo…

heh, I guess "bearjaws" is a good name.

I don't see any doom or gloom, but what I do see is that tech companies massively ballooned headcount, and are now scrambling to return to sustainable levels, using anything as an excuse in order to avoid saying "we exercised poor judgment in 2020-2023". It must be AI! It's blockchain! It's tariffs! It's global warming! The list of excuses goes on and on, but just look at what the headcount was for these companies in 2020, and think about whether it makes sense for them to add that many new people.

Management screwed up.

I guess you can take this as a harbinger of Total Collapse, but I don't think that's warranted. Oracle added 30,000 people since 2020 and they are now realizing that this was foolish, given that Oracle's primary source of revenue growth is hiking license fees for legacy products. They don't need 30,000 new people. They don't even need the 130,000 people they had in 2020.

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

#146

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

Sathwickp wrote: post #58

I would assume it's the mediocre people that will be let go first

The mediocre will be the ones most eager to use AI to generate their output, which will satisfy management's short term cost saving goals.

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

#147

Post by foobarian »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #31
throwaway27448 wrote: post #15

Why is oracle invested in ai at all? It seems entirely unrelated to the value they offer.

Indeed. And not only that, all this capex has wrecked their balance sheet. They were in the software licensing printing money business, now they are in the burn huge amounts of money building data centers hoping someone will use them business. Even if people did use them, the margins aren't that great anyway - especially compared to their former software business.

> They were in the software licensing printing money business

I mean what do you expect them to do, I'm sure the OracleDB exodus has been long ongoing and they probably saw the writing on the wall years ago

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

#148

Post by rsynnott »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #98
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.

You don't know what Oracle does? What?

I mean, it's a fair question. I think a lot of people would think of the RDBMS, but obviously they don't have 180k people working on that. They do all sorts of other stuff as well, of course, but I'm not sure people necessarily think of that when they hear 'Oracle'.

A database, plus American SAP, plus a sort of also-ran AWS-type thing, plus the sad remains of Sun, is about it.

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

#149

Post by ajross »

piva00 wrote: post #143
ajross wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actu…

There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change. Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this c…

I mean, arguably AI is faster (but it's equally arguably oversold, certainly we aren't seeing that kind of change yet). But the stuff I cited was faster than you think. In the rural US, in 1900, most routine transport was still done with horses. By the 20's it was basically all in trucks, and trucks don't need hand-forged shoes that the blacksmiths were making[1]. Likewise professional typists were still clacking away in 1982 but by the mid 90's their jobs[2] had been 100% automated.

[1] "Blacksmithing" didn't disappear, obviously, but it survives as an expert craft for luxury goods. That's sort of what's going to happen to "hacking" in the future, I suspect.

[2] Likewise, some of the best positions survived as "personal assistants" for executive staff too lazy to learn to type. Interestingly these positions are some of the first being destroyed by the OpenClaw nonsense.

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

#150

Post by nine_zeros »

darth_avocado wrote: post #60
bearjaws wrote: post #48

The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment. There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water. We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets. I don't know what comes after, but when yo…

> I don't know what comes after You start looking like South Africa, Brazil, India or other large economies with high concentration of wealth at the top.

[dead]
Post reply on HN