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IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

fortune.com

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Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#191

Post by slopinthebag »

fragmede wrote: post #107
slopinthebag wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it say those cuts were senior software developers? Obviously they want new workers to use AI but I don't really see anything to suggest they're so successful with AI that they're firing all their seniors and hiring juniors to be meatbags for LLMs.

probably aren't going to find a lot of articles discussing how water is wet, either.

LOL great example. There are tons of articles on this topic:

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet https://centreforinquiry.ca/keiths-conundrums-is-water-wet https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-17... http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=6097 https://parknotes.substack.com/p/is-water-wet-or-does-it-jus...

...etc. Turns out, it's not a solved question!

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#192

Post by vidarh »

fragmede wrote: post #139
Ancalagon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors my experience exactly. Vibe coding straight up does not work for any serious code.

Todo web apps aren't serious code, I can buy that, but in your mind, what is? Are compilers "serious code"? https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler Like, I'm sure it's just laundering gcc's source at some level, but if Claude can handle making a compiler, either we have to reframe a compiler as "not serious", or, well, come up with a different definition for what entails "serious" code.

Well, Claude is fixing code generation bugs in my Ruby AOT compiler written in Ruby, and it certainly can't launder any source for that.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#193

Post by ChadMoran »

slopinthebag wrote: post #189
ChadMoran wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Looks cool. Are you a Rivian owner who solved their own problem or did you stumble upon it randomly??

Thanks! I used to own a Tesla and there were similar platforms out there. Bought a Rivian and wanted something like that. I started building this before AI-assisted coding was very popular. But it greatly increased my productivity.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#194

Post by _delirium »

edoceo wrote: post #91
slopinthebag wrote: post #76

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

> measurable productivity Which measure? Like when folk say something is more "efficient" it's more time-efficient to fly but one trades other efficiency. Efficiency, like productivity needs a second word with it to properly communicate. Whtys more productive? Lines of code (a weak measure). Features shipped? Bugs fixed? Time by company saved? Time for client? Shareholders value (lame). I don't know the answer but th…

Economy-wide productivity can be measured reasonably well, although there are a few different measures [1]. The big question I guess is whether AI will make a measurable impact there. Historically tech has had less impact than people thought it would, as noted in Robert Solow's classic quip that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". [2]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/measuring-producti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#195

Post by ineedasername »

edoceo wrote: post #91
slopinthebag wrote: post #76

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

> measurable productivity Which measure? Like when folk say something is more "efficient" it's more time-efficient to fly but one trades other efficiency. Efficiency, like productivity needs a second word with it to properly communicate. Whtys more productive? Lines of code (a weak measure). Features shipped? Bugs fixed? Time by company saved? Time for client? Shareholders value (lame). I don't know the answer but th…

These days productivity at a macroeconomic scale is usually cited in something like GDP per hour worked.

Most recent BLS for the last quarter ‘25 was an annualized rate of 5.4%.

The historic annual average is around 2%.

It’s a bit early to draw a conclusion from this. Also it’s not an absolute measure. GDP per hour worked. So, to cut through any proxy factors or intermediating signals you’d really need to know how many hours were worked, which I don’t have to hand.

That said, in general macro sense, assuming hours worked does not decrease, productivity +% and gdp +% are two of the fundamental factors required for real world wage gains.

If you’re looking for signals in either direction on AI’s influence on the economy, these are #s to watch, among others. The Federal Reserve, the the Chair reports after each meeting, is (IMO) one of the most convenient places to get very fresh hard #s combined with cogent analysis and usually some q&a from the business press asking questions that are at least some of the ones I’d want to ask.

If you follow these fairly accessible speeches after meetings, you’ll occasionally see how lots of the things in them end up being thematic in lots of the stories that pop up here weeks or months later.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#198

Post by [deleted] »

rustystump wrote: post #155
sarchertech wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but why haven’t you seen a drastic increase in single person startups. Why are there fewer games launched in steam this January than last?

Because ai doesnt work like this “make me money” or “make stardew valley in space”. The hard part is the painful exploration and necessary taste to produce something useful. The number of these kind of people did not increase with ai. Eg, ai is a big multiplier but that doesnt mean it will translate to “more” in the way people think.

[deleted]

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#199

Post by joquarky »

velcrovan wrote: post #160
halamadrid wrote: post #150

I pay $20 for OpenAI and codex makes me incredibly productive. With very careful prompts aimed at tiny tasks, I can review, fix and get a lot of things done. I’ll happily pay up to $2k/month for it if I was left with no choice, but I don’t think it will ever get that expensive since you can run models locally and it could have the same result. That being said, my outputs are similarish in the big picture. When I get…

I would like to know what models people are running locally that get the same results as a $20/month ChatGPT plan

And what hardware they needed to run the model, because that's the real pinch in local inference.

Re: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

#200

Post by shusaku »

bawolff wrote: post #144
slopinthebag wrote: post #76

You know when someone is singing the praises about AI and they get asked "if you're so much more productive with AI, what have you built with it"? Well I think a bunch of companies are asking this same question to their employees and realising that the productivity gains they are betting on were overhyped. LLM's can be a very useful tool and will probably lead to measurable productivity increases in the future, at th…

Meh, i think a lot of companies just wanted an excuse to do lay-offs without the bad press, and AI was convinent.

“AI will steal your job” never made sense. If your company is doing bad, sure maybe you fire people after automating their job. But we’re in a growth oriented economic system. If the company is doing good, and AI increases productivity, you actually will hire more people because every person is that much more of a return on investment
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