Live data from Hacker News

Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

businessinsider.com

201–210 of 218 posts

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#201
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course, companies which seriously embrace AI advances, but in sensible ways, will do best. The use here of "sensible" exemplifies a good way to predict basically anything you want about the market so long as you don't reveal what "sensible" means in concrete terms.

What I mean concretely is embrace AI code assistants, generally allowing employees to use AI tools, use AI for some content production and customer services (preferably with human moderation and escape hatches). What would count as non-sensible would be company wide mandates that everyone must jam AI into their work. I've heard stories about stuff like this at certain big corps.

The only "reasonable" would be supplying the tools to employees who want and are capable of making good use of them.

But make sure it never guides any downsizing or putting the screws on people to ever inhuman increases of productivity. Thus: it will never happen. Greed wins again

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#202

First time I tried Klarna, their 'payment' workflow was actually a 'grant full access to all bank accounts' workflow in disguise. I was thinking this amount of misleading must be illegal. Further interactions with them always felt sleazy. Maybe they know the regulators will dismantle the company in the near future and are optimizing for extracting the maximum before their implosion?

FWIW, after I gave Klarna a sneak peek into my banking account several years ago, I did a GDPR/DSGVO information request a few days later, and according to that, they did not store the transactions they had access to. Not sure if the information was truthful, of course.

My immediate thought is that "a few days" might not have been enough time for them to _know_ that they had your data.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#203
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of a company I would have heard of that is in the tech industry, just so I can get a better understanding of what y'all are talking about? Is Oracle in the tech industry? Also on the blog post you linked you seem to imply that you do consider Google to be a tech industry company, so I am very confused. > In tech industry, software is the main product of the company. It can be sold to a cust…

It depends on what you consider as core product for Google. For some people (consumer), it would be Google Search, it is a piece of software, so in that sense Google is a tech company because its main product is Google Search. However, for marketers, who use Google Ads, to them they deal with the ads division in Google, and that division's main product is the ads service. So in that indivision, the main product is ad…

Google's main product is ads, not search. Search is also not tech, it's a directory of websites.

Pure tech products is GCP or AWS.

Instagram's business is photos, Facebook is connections. Figma is a design tool, Slack is a way to connect with coworkers.

Most of tech isn't really tech.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#204
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'proper abstraction' I assume you're not talking about chatgpt4o, because in my experience it's absolutely dogshit at abstracting code meaningfully. Good at finding design patterns, sure, but if your AI don't understand how to state machine, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use it. It's great at writing tests and documentation though.

GPT-4o is at least 1 order of magnitude behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet in coding. I use latter.

Claude is better most of the time on the simpler stuff, but o1 is better on some of the more difficult problems that Claude craps out on. Really $40/mo is not too much to pay for both.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's desirable for them to become profitable and successful again, especially if the only reason they're unprofitable is people abusing the rules to extract capital from them unsustainably.

> especially if the only reason they're unprofitable is people abusing the rules to extract capital from them unsustainably Employees don't extract capital from companies, especially unsustainably. Executives and Boards of Directors do though

Sure they do. Unions, abuse of other worker rights laws and voting in socialist parties that raise corporate tax rates to unsustainable levels are all exactly that, and have a long history of extracting so much the companies or even entire economies fail. Argentina is an extreme example of this over the past 100 years but obviously there are many others.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#206
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4o is at least 1 order of magnitude behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet in coding. I use latter.

Claude is better most of the time on the simpler stuff, but o1 is better on some of the more difficult problems that Claude craps out on. Really $40/mo is not too much to pay for both.

That's the kind of thing I'd love to know more about.

You should join my Discord channel so we can chat more: https://discord.gg/S44tzqHqU4

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies and employers do not and have never cared for employees personally. They can not. Being an employer (small medical business, 10ppl), I can tell you that one of two things must be true: Either I am delusional or you are at least in part wrong. 1. I care a lot more about employees than they care about the company, or me (of course not in total, probably). I don't find this surprising, but you seem to think…

> Being an employer (small medical business, 10ppl) This may not be an edge case in terms of # of employers that fit your description, but is very likely an edge case in terms of # of employees with an employer that fits your description. You’re the exception that proves the rule. ————— Edit: Looking into it more, the margin is closer than I assumed; ~half of employees work for a “small business”, that term meaning 1…

Interesting. Thanks for taking the time and sharing!

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#208
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you 100% of the way on this one. Am coding with Claude 3.5 right now using Aider. The future is clear at this point. It won't get worse and there's still so much low hanging fruit. Expertise is still useful to guide it, but we're all product managers now.

There are a lot more photographers now than there ever were painters, and the size of the industry is much larger than it used to be. It is true that our work will change, but personally I think that's great - I don't enjoy the initial hump that you usually have to overcome before you begin to actually solve real problems, and AI is often able to take me over that hump, or fill in things that don't matter. E.g. I'm a…

Your analogy fails because the economy still needed human workers to take the photographs whereas there is a possibility that in 5 or 10 years, the economy will have no need and no use for most people.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#209
post #146
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost like PSD2's open banking part was a huge mistake. I love how my banks, payment providers and random financial apps can now ask for unscoped access, without any way to figure out what I have authorized in the past, what's still pulling my data and how I can revoke any of it. Most OAuth providers have better transparency and control.

PSD2 at least has built-in expiration. I have to re-authenticate every 3 months or so I think.

Problem is that the expiration and "reauth" is handled by the third-party provider (there's no longer an actual cryptographic reauth step), and it's not like anyone is auditing this or is even incentivized to. It's pure security theater.

Re: Klarna CEO: Company stopped hiring because AI 'can do all of the jobs'

#210

First time I tried Klarna, their 'payment' workflow was actually a 'grant full access to all bank accounts' workflow in disguise. I was thinking this amount of misleading must be illegal. Further interactions with them always felt sleazy. Maybe they know the regulators will dismantle the company in the near future and are optimizing for extracting the maximum before their implosion?

FWIW, after I gave Klarna a sneak peek into my banking account several years ago, I did a GDPR/DSGVO information request a few days later, and according to that, they did not store the transactions they had access to. Not sure if the information was truthful, of course.

Nobody is auditing nor policing those GDPR SAR responses, so there's little reason to be truthful. The most likely explanation is, short of actual malfeasance, that the ticket of "include transaction data or data derived from it into GDPR data exports" is rotting in the Jira backlog to this day.
Post reply on HN