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Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
Yeah it feels like a lot of this could still be shakeout from FAANG and FAANG wannabes hiring 10x more engineers than needed. I realize Square is a more complicated business than OnlyFans. But OnlyFans isn't a trivial app and it runs on 42 employees. Block had more than 10k employees pre-layoff.
Feels early to blame AI for most of this. A lot of it still looks like a reset from 2021-era hiring assumptions rather than actual labor replacement
When anyone asks the question: "What is AGI", it is actually this. An "abundance" of nothing else but this. It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers. This is "AGI".
Meanwhile... I had to step in and hand code lots of css today because copilot couldn't do the thing. And I had to step in and manually fix tests yesterday because copilot couldn't do the thing. Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?
No. The VCs and angel investors screaming “abundance” are the paid promoters.
The problem is their “utopia of abundance” is not for us. They know the opposite is the reality (layoffs, offshoring, wage suppression and AI backlash)
They built their own bunkers and moats for a reason. Because true “AGI” will bring an abundance of very angry people going after them.
That is not worth being paid for by any AI lab.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "value" creation is tied to the interest rate. When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable. When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable. Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.
Value creation is more of a function of cash flow potential on a project than the risk-free rate, cost of equity or cost of debt. "labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes." No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Value creation is more of a function of cash flow potential on a project than the risk-free rate, cost of equity or cost of debt. "labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes." No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.
Isn’t it both - ROI must exceed whatever cost benchmark?
"more of".
If you wanna finesse the discount rate by a few percentage points go ahead. Cash flows contribute more toward the end value number.
in b4 some numpty writes about the fed changing a market set rate.
Then covid went away, life went back to "normal", tons of juniors everywhere who moved to IT because of WFH and the salary.
Then comes AI, within the IT field, I am seeing first hand companies firing by the thousands because of AI.
Only Blue collar was being affected in the past, but now is everybody, no matter of your degree, experience, you either already had a hard time or you will have.
If Google Quantum computing somehow finds a massive breakthrough, we are all fu :)
The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so isn't as high-priority. The estimate on the cost is $20-50k of tokens.
$50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. As has been stated in a bunch of threads, much smaller models could also find this bug. The defense is "they didn't" and "once you know it's there, it's easier to find" but again, nobody has been paying BSD bug bounties. Put another way: far fewer people have been looking.
My point is that the economics of these models are still highly debatable. What they will do is allow you to use 1 engineer with AI tools instead of 2-4 engineers.
And we've arrived at the real goal here: to reduce head counts. Why? To suppress labor costs. To get people who didn't get laid off to do more free work.
In addition, AI capex is used as an excuse to cut costs ie reduce labor, for exactly the same reasons.
Lastly, the threat of this happening in the near to medium future is also used to scare labor and reduce costs.
Sufficiently largecompanies can't grow anymore. Their only path forward is to raise prices and redcue costs. For tech companies, labor is a significant cost. That's what's going on here.
[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/762774007353...
Can anyone provide historical data for "job busts" or other types of declines in tech employment, massive layoffs or hire freezes? I seem to read about something like this every few years. Would like some data to see if this trend is stronger than the previous ones or not.
developer jobs are up: postings ~11% YoY, tech workforce +1.9% projected for 2026, BLS 15% long-term growth. Rebound from 2024-25 lows Jevons paradox