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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#571

Post by federiconafria »

idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

"my VP more headcount and therefore more clout"

This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by comparing AI spending?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#572

Post by kergonath »

ricardobayes wrote: post #557
digitcatphd wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

Frankly, we don't know. That "turning point" that seemed so close for many tech, never came for some of them. Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing. Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now. And still is probably a decade away. Only time will tell if GenAI/LLMs are color TV or 3D TV.

> Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing.

3D printing is making huge progress in heavy industries. It’s not sexy and does not make headlines but it absolutely is happening. It won’t replace traditional manufacturing at huge scales (either large pieces or very high throughput). But it’s bringing costs way down for fiddly parts or replacements. It is also affecting designs, which can be made simpler by using complex pieces that cannot be produced otherwise. It is not taking over, because it is not a silver bullet, but it is now indispensable in several industries.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#573

Post by wiseowise »

tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

I will never understand this argument. If you have a super tool, that can magically double your output, why would you suddenly double your output publicly? So that you now work twice essentially for the same money? You use it to work less, your output stays static or marginally improves - that’s smart play.

Note: I’m talking about your run of the mill SE waggie work, not startups where your food is based on your output.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#574

Post by shswkna »

autobodie wrote: post #522
xkcd1963 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the impression I got. Things overall get just worse in quality because people rely too much on low wages and copy pasting LLM answers

Get worse for who? The ruling class will simply never care how bad things get for working people if things are getting better for the ruling class.

The central problem with this statement is that we expect others to care, but we do not expect this from ourselves.

We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we cared about ourselves, then we don’t need another class, or race, or whatever other grouping to do this for us.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#575

Post by throwaway2037 »

tdeck wrote: post #437
bjt12345 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem seems to be two-fold. Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the few. This is a rather obvious statement, sure. But the impact is a lot of companies "have tried language models and they didn't work", and the capex is laughable. Secondly, there's a corporate paralysis over AI. I received a panicky policy statement written in legalaise forbidding employees from using LLMs in any form. Written…

This is a good reminder that every org is different. However some companies like Microsoft are aggressively pushing AI tools internally, to a degree that is almost cringe.

I don't want to shill for LLMs-for-devs, but I think this is excellent corporate strategy by Microsoft. They are dog-fooding LLMs-for-devs. In a sense, this is R&D using real world tests. It is a product manager's dream.

The Google web-based office productivity suite is similar. I heard a rumor that at some point Google senior mgmt said that nearly all employees (excluding accounting) must use Google Docs. I am sure that they fixed a huge number of bugs plus added missing/blocking feature, which made the product much more competitive vs MSFT Office. Fifteen years ago, Google Docs was a curiosity -- an experiment for just how complex web apps could become. Today, Google Docs is the premiere choice for new small businesses. It is cheaper than MSFT Office, and "good enough".

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#576

Post by audunw »

drodgers wrote: post #537
jaggederest wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.

No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go. Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size,…

I don’t think it’s hard to know. We’re already seeing several signs of being near the plateau in terms of capabilities. Most big breakthrough these days seems to be in areas where we haven’t spent the effort in training and model engineering. Like recent improvements in video generation. So of course we could get improvements in areas where we haven’t tried to use ML yet.

For text generation, it seems like the fast progress was mainly due to feeding the models exponentially more data and exponentially more compute power. But we know that the growth in data is over. The growth in compute has a shifted from a steep curve (just buy more chips) to a slow curve (have to make exponentially more factories if we want exponentially more chips)

Im sure we will have big improvements in efficiency. Im sure nearly everyone will use good LLMs to support them in their work, and they may even be able to do all they need to do on-device. But that doesn’t make the models significantly smarter.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#577

Post by godelski »

chii wrote: post #533
godelski wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the tune is "be leaner". Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left

> If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.

I never thought to extend the analogy like that, but I like it. It's showing. I mean look how people think my comments imply I don't know what triage is. Not knowing that would be counter to everything I'm saying, which is that a lot of these value numbers are poor guestimates at best. Happens every time I bring this up. It's absurd to think we could measure everything in terms of money. Even economists will tell you that's silly

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#578

Post by badsectoracula »

ivape wrote: post #454
tdeck wrote: post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

Companies are not accepting that their entire business will mostly go away. They are mostly frogs boiling in water, that's why they are kinda just incorporating these little chat bots and LLMs into their business, but the truth of the matter is it's all going away and it's impossible to believe. Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking v…

> Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking voice with zero programming

When I used a not-so-simple LLM to make it act as a text adventure game it could barely keep track of the items in my inventory, so TBH i am a little bit skeptical that an LLM can handle entire project management - even without voice.

Perhaps it might be able to use tools/MCP/RPC to call out to real project management software and pretend to be your accountant/manager/whoever, but i wouldn't call that the LLM itself doing the project management task - and someone would need to write that project management software.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#579

Post by jaggederest »

drodgers wrote: post #537
jaggederest wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.

No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go. Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size,…

The wonderful thing about a sigmoid is that, just as it seems like it's going exponential, it goes back to linear. So I'd guess we're not going to see 1000x from here - I could be wrong, but I think the low hanging fruit has been picked. I would be surprised in 10 years if AI were 100x better than it is now (per watt, maybe, since energy devoted to computing is essentially the limiting factor)

The thing about the latter 1/3rd of a sigmoid curve is, you're still making good progress, it's just not easy any more. The returns have begun to diminish, and I do think you could argue that's already happening for LLMs.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#580

Post by kergonath »

autobodie wrote: post #518
jameslk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption,…

Keynes lived in a time when the working class was organized and exerting its power over its destiny. We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

He was extrapolating, as well. Going from children in the mines to the welfare state in a generation was quite something. Unfortunately, progress slowed down significantly for many reasons but I don’t think we should really blame Keynes for this.

> We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

I think it has always been that way. Looking through history, there are many examples of turkeys voting for Christmas and propaganda is an old invention. I don’t think there is anything special right now. And to be fair to the working class, it’s not hard to see how they could feel abandoned. It’s also broader than the working class. The middle class is getting squeezed as well. The only winners are the oligarchs.

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