Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 580 posts

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#421

Post by nurettin »

ncphillips wrote: post #336
torginus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. All the while management is breathing down your neck and asking 'why isn't it ready yet'. Once the thing is shipped, then all the important people come out of the woodwork, who were surely there all along, 'supporting' you from behind…

> In my experience, if you're working on a green-field project, you're working long hours, making very little visible progress, you have to write a lot of code, make important decisions. Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional f…

I've seen both kinds. GF projects where the senior devs feel that they have to get something right from the beginning, spending a year just on that piece (a set of widgets, a data ingestion framework, a state machine that covers the entire underlying algorithm). And other GF projects which have frequent updates and are open to development with very few speed bumps.

Of course you can call out the former examples as incompetent or hubris, and they will probably occur less and less, but nevertheless they exist.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#422

Post by altcognito »

mattfrommars wrote: post #399

I can assure you a lot of veteran devs in my company who had major impact were let ago because of off shoring to India and Poland. My employer is a very well known financial institution, think Blackrock, Bloomberg etc. Public press paints picture of the firm laying off due to adoption of AI. Yet, I can assure you without doubt its not because of it but due to continued offshore. I think we are at the brink of opening…

But you can make more money. And if you don't, then it's crime against the fiduciary.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#423

Post by throw-52 »

coaksford wrote: post #409
throw-52 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one truly hopeful aspect of a bubble-burst scenario is that extra capacity always finds a use-case, and in this case practically any other use-case would be both less harmful and more real.

Before the AI craze, all the GPUs were being bought up by cryptocurrency miners, and I'm not sure that's better. Even as an AI skeptic I think AI is a better use of all this hardware than cryptocurrency.

You're right of course, I'm taking for granted that we've been there and done that. The question is, would we do it again and would that usage really be allowed to expand to soak up whole data centers? We might since I don't think a cynic has made a bad prediction in years..

IMO the most likely way to soak up the extra capacity is actually yet another iteration of AI rather than say, doing productive but boring work with any other techniques for curing disease or something. Still, a crash and a next iteration might be more likely to involve fresh ideas on architecture, or focus on smaller expert models that have less fake results and actually empower users. Right now I think there's a clear bias in research and execution. OFANG does want results, but also wants results that tech giants. Are subsymbolic techniques really the best techniques, or are they just the best at preserving the moat of big-data and big-compute?

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#424

Post by groundzeros2015 »

com2kid wrote: post #414
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There is a supply problem hindered by politics. But even if all the construction in the world happens, would you be able to buy a 3 bedroom house in SF for 400k? Not a chance. Everyone wants it.

A 3 bedroom townhome in Seattle (actually Redmond WA, more expensive!) when I graduated was 350k, and that was already an inflated housing bubble price. My starting salary was 85k at Microsoft. If 20k people move to a city each year and the city only approves 10k new buildings, the city is sabotaging its own growth. Saying "we don't want growth!" doesn't work. Prices shoot up, wages increase, cost of living goes up,…

I am also pro growth but it doesn’t change that many people want to live there. You say only 20k people move there, but isn’t the pricing keeping out many more who would otherwise like to live there?

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#425

Post by j-bos »

j-bos wrote: post #360

At the fortune 500 I work at there's no sweeping layoffs that I've seen. There is a big emphasis on AI, but more relevant to the concerns, there are scoped hiring freezes for US workers, new offshore hires are greenlit though. And I can't help but wonder, what happens to a state when most of its critical infrastructure directly depends on another external state.

Actually on further consideration, this darkly hilarious, it's doing to knowledge work what's already been done to manufacturing.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#426

Post by j-bos »

krackers wrote: post #374
manquer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training. Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that. Any compute investment is largely local .…

> is just annotation and labeling kind of work Given that this is presumably all data used for RLHF'ing, I wonder how much of this is responsible for things like LLM "sycophancy" or the issue of "hallucinations". What if the reward-hacking entity isn't the LLM/optimizer but the human annotator in the loop.

Sycophancy makes sense as a cultural disconnect, western or americam culture tends to expect superiors to be treated as verbal equals while most other cultures layer obsequience from subordinates to superiors. Thanks for the thought.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#427

Post by Maxious »

etoxin wrote: post #378
nsainsbury wrote: post #354

I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon. And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring. IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs t…

I'm seeing the same thing in Australia. These new tech companies/existing companies were not here for the first wave of offshoring engineers many years ago. basically, the product/service degraded and they brought the product/service back onshore. It's a cycle that will repeat. Product degrades, there will be public outrage, then they will onshore the product to fix the problems caused from offshoring.

Most famously Optus is bringing their network operations back on-shore after a mismanaged firewall upgrade was linked to three deaths from customers unable to contact emergency services https://www.itnews.com.au/news/optus-fast-tracks-network-ope...

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#428

Post by Eisenstein »

pizlonator wrote: post #413
Eisenstein wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be confusing 'devaluation' with 'loss of spending power'. The dollar hasn't really lost value compared to other currencies. The thing that would do that would a loss of faith in the US to pay its debts, not the inability for the dollar to sustain a certain purchasing power.

> The dollar hasn't really lost value compared to other currencies Yes it has. Euro costs 10% more in USD than one year ago

Is that what you meant by devaluation? That the dollar has lost 10% of it exchange compared to the euro?

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#429

Post by frontfor »

lisbbb wrote: post #159
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest unspoken story in tech. The era of American developer exceptionalism is over. Talent abroad has access to the same tools, education, and increasingly, network. American engineers will be replaced wholesale with overseas engineers that cost a fraction of American labor. You can hire talented React engineers for $50k that will work harder than their American counterparts. It's not just React. Overse…

The ramifications of losing all or nearly all of the tech jobs in the US is that the last "good" place to find better paying work that had a fairly low barrier to entry is now gone. I think that has major consequences for the US economy. I'm 52 and I can't just go back to school and re-tool to become a doctor or a lawyer now. I spent so many years becoming excellent and what I do, including higher degrees and certifi…

Exactly my thoughts. A free market tends towards specialization which makes the market more efficient and therefore more competitive. As specialization increases it becomes more critical that one chooses and specializes their career early on. But this is unfair to young people who often have no idea what to do. Hence luck plays an increasing role, which is again the opposite of fairness.

Re: AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is

#430

Post by axelthegerman »

manquer wrote: post #69
alecco wrote: post #29

This week OpenAI, Google, And Perplexity announced free 1 year subscription to Indian devs. It must cost quite a fortune in inference https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o Not a single mention of jobs being moved to India including tens of billions of investments in new offices. Backing links from a quick search earlier this week when an obviously Indian HNer tried to deny this was really happening: Micros…

A lot of “AI” investment in countries like India is just annotation and labeling kind of work . It has so become huge there, that is getting to similar size as the traditional call centre industry, hundreds of thousand of people work on curating data for model training. Google hiring a senior lead who can scale low skill business processing massively is just inline with that. Any compute investment is largely local .…

> [...] just want to get a “degree” /maximize scores to get a job, There is little interest to learn.

Seems to be more and more common these days in general :-/

Post reply on HN