Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

#31

Post by HEmanZ » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

d3ckard wrote: post #12

HEmanZ wrote: post #11

My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.” Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month. But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over a…

My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today. I don’t think this is the case.

How about a concrete example. What jobs at Bank of America will humans have?

I can not imagine a scenario other than complete model stagnation that would lead to the current workforce there of 213,000 people still having jobs to do.

Re: Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

#32

Post by HEmanZ » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

d3ckard wrote: post #12

HEmanZ wrote: post #11

My biggest gripe with this is the reasoning for “no, AI is not going to take everyone’s jobs.” Obviously the state of “workers and AI together” comes first. So there’s not going to be some strawman cliff where suddenly all jobs are replaced in a month. But people like him lay out this future and then act like AI just stops there. Of course there will be an intermediate state. And then that state will be passed over a…

My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today. I don’t think this is the case.

Also it’s such a strawman to assume that “absolutely everything” needs to be covered by systems to basically eliminate office jobs from humanity. In this context they only need to do enough to make hiring humans pointless at most businesses. Even if say you need some strategically important humans for a long time, I don’t see an incoming world where huge job loss doesn’t happen. David filing HR paperwork at Big Corp is not suddenly going to be doing strategy work.

Like it’s a strawman to assume I’m arguing that your nanny or the local firefighters are going to be replaced by an AI soon.

And it also seems like people expect some normative assumption when taking about job loss. I’m not making a normative claim, nor a policy one, just pointing out it seems stupid to not prepare or expect this to happen.

Re: Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

#33

Post by tjs8rj » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

strus wrote: post #28

tjs8rj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI and technology is already replacing jobs. The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people. Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k. This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting…

> because you can go further with fewer people Can you though? From my experience this is just a wishful thinking. I am yet to see actual productivity gains from AI that would objectively justify hiring less or laying off people.

This is pretty obvious when you know what to look for.

How many people did it take to build the pyramids? Now how many would it take today?

Look at revenue per head and how it’s trended

Look at how much AUM has flowed into asset management while headcount has flatlined

Re: Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

#34

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

lubujackson wrote: post #27

nitwit005 wrote: post #21

The claim that companies won't just build everything in-house because of wanting to be able to sue over damages seems extremely weak. If AI tools could genuinely build a replacement for Box with trivial effort, everyone would drop them immediately. There's some strangeness around AI where people will claim it will do amazing things, but somehow not so amazing that no one will need them.

You miss the bigger point about context. Companies pick their focus and what to spend their time on. Post startup-scale, the cost of internal failures becomes exponential. AI might be able to whip up the exact same legal document or CRM or whatever, but when one thing goes wrong, that might lose $1 million in revenue. It is about paying for accountability over outcomes.

Do some math to see if it makes sense. If you have 10,000 employees, any software subscription that's $100 a person for all employees will be a million dollars a year. Many licenses are more than that. Even if you experience the million dollar outage, you'll have easily saved money.

Re: Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]

#35

Post by clpm4j » Fri, Sep 19, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

plasticsoprano wrote: post #10

Man you guys are pessimistic and stuck in your bubbles. Asking if box is relevant when they’ve had growth the last two quarters while Dropbox is on the verge of seeing a drop in numbers. Yes ms and Google are seeing more but the product box is putting out is light years ahead of Dropbox, egnyte, and, honesty, most of FAANG, in terms of supporting the average office worker. They aren’t building sexy AI coders but they…

Aaron Levie strikes me as one of the sharpest and most prescient people in SV. I think you must be 100% correct that he's a true nerd about this stuff, or else he could have gone on to a thousand different things outside of Box by now.. he would probably be an incredible VC (I think I recall he was one of the first seed investors in Stripe as a result of cornering Patrick Collison at a house party, talking his ear off, and thoroughly impressing Collison).