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Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

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Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#381

Post by asadotzler »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #288
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are develo…

NFT:s never had any real value. It was just speculation hoping some bigger sucker will come after you. LLM:s create real value. I save a bunch of time coding with an LLM vs without one. Is it perfect? No, but it does not have to be for still creating a lot of value. Are some people hyping it up too much? Sure, an reality will set in but it wont blow up. It will rather be like the internet. 2000s and everyone thought…

NFTs weren't a trillion dollar black hole that's yet to come close to providing value anywhere near that investment level. Come back when AI companies are actually profitable. Until then, LLM AI value is negative, and if the companies can't turn that around, they'll be as dead as NFTs and you won't even get the heavily subsidized company killing free of cheap features you think are solid.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#382

Post by bhelkey »

jhp123 wrote: post #371
bhelkey wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [LLMs] won't get any better. Can you pinpoint the date which LLMs stagnated? More broadly, it appears to me that LLMs have improved up to and including this year. If you consider LLMs to not have improved in the last year, I can see your point. However, then one must consider ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.5, Deepseek, and Gemini 2.5 to not be improvements.

Sept 2024 was when OpenAI announced its new model - not an LLM but a "chain of thought" model built on LLMs. This represented a turn away from the "scale is all you need to reach AGI" idea by its top proponent.

If September 2024 marks the date in your mind stagnation was obvious, surely the last improvement must have come before?

Whatever the case, there are open platforms that give users a chance to compare two anonymous LLMs and rank the models as a result [1].

What I observe when I look for these rankings is that none of the top ranked models come from before your stagnation cut off date of September 2024 [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04132

[2] https://lmarena.ai/

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#383

Post by jmull »

decimalenough wrote: post #88

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…

> ...where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk

I doubt it.

Search already "obsoletes" these fields in the same way AI does. AI isn't really competing against experts here, but against search.

It's also really not clear that AI has an overall advantage over dumb search in this area. AI can provide more focused/tailored results, but it costs more. Keep in mind that AI hasn't been enshittified yet like search. The enshittification is inevitable and will come fast and hard considering the cost of AI. That is, AI responses will be focused and tailored to better monetize you, not better serve you.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#384

Post by asadotzler »

msp26 wrote: post #188
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once they have you hooked they’ll start jacking up the prices.

It's a race to the bottom for pricing. They can't do shit. Even if the American companies colluded to stop competing and raise prices, Chinese providers will undermine that. There is no moat. Most of these AI APIs and products are interchangeable.

OK, so they won't raise prices, they'll simply EOL their too expensive to maintain services and users won't feel the impact on their wallets, they'll just lose their tool and historical data and what ever else of theirs was actually the property of the company.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#385

Post by asadotzler »

mchusma wrote: post #220
decimalenough wrote: post #88

I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…

Yeah, 2023 I would expect no effect. 2024 I think generally not, wasn’t good or deployed enough. I think 2025 might be the first signs, it I still think there is a lot of plumbing and working with these things. 2026 though I expect to show an effect.

That's now what the AI boosters and shills were saying in 2021. Might be worth a refresher if you've got the time, but nearly every timeline that's been floated by any of the leadership in any of the OG LLM makers has been as hallucinated as the worst answers coming from their bots.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#386

Post by zo1 »

mcmcmc wrote: post #182
atrus wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. How exactly is this different from getting advice from someone who acts confidently knowledgeable? Diet advice is an especially egregious example, since I can have 40 different dieticians give me 72 different diet/meal plans with them saying 100% certainty that this is the correct one. It's bad…

In the case of dieticians, investment advisors, and accountants they are usually licensed professionals who face consequences for misconduct. LLMs don’t have malpractice insurance

Good luck getting any of that to happen. All that does is raise the barrier for proof and consequence, because they've got accreditation and "licensing bodies" with their own opaque rules and processes. Accreditation makes it seem like these people are held to some amazing standard with harsh penalties if they don't comply, but really they just add layers of abstraction and places for incompetence, malice and power-tripping to hide.

E.g. Next time a lawyer abandons your civil case and ghosts you after being clearly negligent and down-right bad in their representation. Good luck holding them accountable with any body without consequences.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#387

Post by tunesmith »

I think the effects are more indirect. For instance, GenAI can enable Google to serve summarized content (rather than just search results) that users find useful, which then cuts in to the margins of companies that manually generate that content. Those companies lose revenue, and lay off head count, inhibiting their ability to generate that custom content. So they start using GenAI instead.

At no point did that company choose to pivot to GenAI to cut costs and reduce headcount. It's more reactive than that.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#388

Post by asadotzler »

ravenstine wrote: post #289
JohnMakin wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do pay for it though. Compute isn't free.

Could I really have been more clear? I am not talking about whether I have to pay more or less for anything. My problem is not paying . I want to pay so that I don't have to make something myself or waste time fiddling with a free template. What I am proposing is that, in the current day, a human being is less likely to be at the other end of the transaction when I want to spend money to avoid sacrificing my time. Su…

For your amateur use case, maybe. For real professions in the real economy, the article you're commenting under disagrees.

Re: Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists

#389

Post by asadotzler »

jll29 wrote: post #282

Read Paul Tetlock's research about so-called "experts" and their inability to make good forecasts. Here's my own take: - It is far too early to tell. - The roll-out of ChatGPT caused a mind-set revolution. People now "get" what is possible already now, and it encourages conceiving and persuing new use cases on what people have seen. - I would not recommend any kinds to train to become a translator for sure; even befo…

We're ten years and a trillion dollars into this. When we were 10 years and $1T into the massive internet builout between 1998 and 2008, that physical network had added over a trillion dollars to the economy and then about a trillion more every year after. How's the nearly ten years of LLM AI stacking up? DO we expect it'll add a trillion dollars a year to the economy in a couple years? I don't. Not even close. it'll still be a net drain industry, deeply in the red. That trillion dollars could have done some much good if spent on something more serious than man-child dreams about creating god computers.
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