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

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

#51

Nearly every CEO I’ve talked to in the past three months (only a handful, admittedly) has said something along these lines, if not quite as extreme. They genuinely believed the current state of the art is polished and powerful enough to replace huge swathes of coders, designers, writers, etc. leaving only a middle-management supervisory layer and some lower-level grunts to herd the bots. Or it’s a good PR ruse to sca…

I'm a software engineer with 7 years of experience. I've built products used by millions of users, I've built ML models and AI coding tools, and I've been using AI to generate 70% of code that's shipped to production in the last few months. I do believe that we can replace a large percentage of software engineers with AI in the next 3 years (2025-2027). Also this 1 million dollar Kaggle competition on AI coding just…

Also my gut feeling, that about 30% of the code I wrote need some kind of engineering skill and I love to reach these problems. Until I am there, there is just a huge amount of boilerplate and patterns to repeat.

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

#53
post #32

Nearly every CEO I’ve talked to in the past three months (only a handful, admittedly) has said something along these lines, if not quite as extreme. They genuinely believed the current state of the art is polished and powerful enough to replace huge swathes of coders, designers, writers, etc. leaving only a middle-management supervisory layer and some lower-level grunts to herd the bots. Or it’s a good PR ruse to sca…

Sounds like 20 years ago when everyone was moving IT to India.

Boeing all over again

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

#54

Nearly every CEO I’ve talked to in the past three months (only a handful, admittedly) has said something along these lines, if not quite as extreme. They genuinely believed the current state of the art is polished and powerful enough to replace huge swathes of coders, designers, writers, etc. leaving only a middle-management supervisory layer and some lower-level grunts to herd the bots. Or it’s a good PR ruse to sca…

> glassy-eyed CEOs

We've been here before: From componanies throwing millions at rebuilding their content-website as IOS app, showing off their crypto or low-code "RnD" or car manufacturers going full-BEVs, Karl Marx's axiom that "social existence determines consciousness" seems to be vindicated with this fad as well.

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

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm open to the idea they see something I don't. I'm not convinced, but I'm open to it.

They see dollar signs

I find it fascinating how the same people can be selfishly interested in their own finances, find bigger numbers (those that a CEO has to care about by mandate) dirty, and square that.

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They see dollar signs

In theory the market will sort this out. Overly stingy firms will reap the rewards of lower quality and be outcompeted in their industries, overly generous ones will run out of money, the “just right” ones will exceed expectations and be rewarded. Where those lines are drawn probably varies by firms. I frankly don’t know how the company that invented monthly payments for shoes with a high interest rate will stay in b…

Yeah the whole BNPL space is very strange from my perspective -- it's basically just small dollar loans for borrowers you don't underwrite, without collateral (you can't repossess my socks) in exchange for super high merchant interchange. I was confident they'd all get ruined in the first real recession as that would be the first debt to go unpaid. 2021 wasn't a real recession I guess, since it lasted all of 5 minutes.

It's just re-inventing credit cards, but with significant structural disadvantages leading to higher costs.

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

#58
post #18
post #9

Looks like it worked - make a controversial statement and now a lot of people have heard of your company.

It's a rather famous scummy company in sweden. Basically digital loan sharks.

Also known in the US as a provider of "buy now, pay later" arrangements for online shopping.

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

#59

Nearly every CEO I’ve talked to in the past three months (only a handful, admittedly) has said something along these lines, if not quite as extreme. They genuinely believed the current state of the art is polished and powerful enough to replace huge swathes of coders, designers, writers, etc. leaving only a middle-management supervisory layer and some lower-level grunts to herd the bots. Or it’s a good PR ruse to sca…

I'm a software engineer with 7 years of experience. I've built products used by millions of users, I've built ML models and AI coding tools, and I've been using AI to generate 70% of code that's shipped to production in the last few months. I do believe that we can replace a large percentage of software engineers with AI in the next 3 years (2025-2027). Also this 1 million dollar Kaggle competition on AI coding just…

I'm a principal SWE with 25 years of experience and I think software today is comically bad and way too hard to use. So I think we can get engineers to write better software with these tools. The talk of "replacement" is going to be premature until we get something remotely resembling AGI. Unless your problems are so simple that a monkey could solve them, AI of today and foreseeable future is not going to solve them end to end. At best it'll fill in the easy parts, which you probably don't want to do anyway. Write a test. Simple refactor. Bang out some simple script to pay down some engineering debt. I've yet to see a system that doesn't crap out in the very beginning on the real problems that I solve on a daily basis. I'm by no means a naysayer - I work in this field and use AI many times daily.

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

#60
post #53
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like 20 years ago when everyone was moving IT to India.

Boeing all over again

All those big old corps got taken to the cleaners for that. We will see how this AI thing turns out.
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