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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'

#91

Post by SpaceNoodled »

suraci wrote: post #90
Ekaros wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are selling to market. AI is the hot new thing, so they sell it... It is all about short term now. Make a next few quarters sound hot and line goes up.

What I mean is they really believe it, not just for market selling For example, I know a boss add AI as a factor in performance reviews, where someone was evaluated as 'not AI-capable' for not using ChatGPT. He also asked for 3x output from the teams and said, 'If you feel it's too hard to complete, go learn how to work with AI.'

I'd tell that person that they are an idiot.

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

#92

Post by polotics »

suraci wrote: post #67
ablation wrote: post #20

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 confused about why there are so many managers/CEOs who mythologize AI. Some of them use AI as an excuse for layoffs, but many of them do believe that AI (or ChatGPT, specifically) is some kind of magic that can make (1 employee + ChatGPT) equal to 3 employees. I mean, they must have used ChatGPT, right? How does ChatGPT give them the conclusion about this?

The clear answer is that a GPT can bullshit convincingly, and the nature of these managers' jobs involves a lot of convincing bullshitting. As everyone thinks they represent some kind of model, they assume that a GPT will also perform as well on other's main skills as it performs on theirs.

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

#93

Post by jstummbillig »

avidiax wrote: post #77
jstummbillig wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're suggesting there is some cognitive dissonance there. I think there's some truth to that, but it's also ignoring a true difference. Personal finances can be viewed (somewhat incorrectly) as not being zero-sum. Me making more for my work or investments seems like it doesn't take from anyone else. While a CEO deciding that AI should handle as much of the labor in a company as possible seems like a decisio…

I don't think I am. You put the facts pretty succinctly. I just evaluate them differently.

Having thousands of smart humans optimizing for their personal goals in their individual ways, at the expense of company goals, is an issue that exists in every company, bankrupts companies and super frightening to deal with as a CEO.

People are not obviously more noble, when working towards personal goals instead of company goals, and a lot of people working towards their personal goals instead of company goals, is a serious issue for any company. Not having a single entity and one big number to deal with makes it actually much more powerful and scary.

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

#94

Post by 28304283409234 »

TheChaplain wrote: post #41

Klarna was recently fined for money laundering, and in Sweden they had long fights with the unions (and lost). But their services are pretty decent.

Decent? They create debt among teenagers. As if they don't have enough angst they now also have to worry about fines for having bought something marketing scum manipulated them into buying and Klarna allowed them to pay-now-regret-soon.

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

#96

Post by 9dev »

avidiax wrote: post #87
gyre007 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most ironic thing is thar the middle managers are somehow surviving this. So far, anyway, but I think they’ll be found too sooner or latet

This is a pretty cynical take, but I would think that having AI management would be highly undesirable for companies, and not because it would be bad at managing. Even in good, reputable companies, there is a certain amount of legally/ethically dubious behavior that is nonetheless desirable. An H1B candidate for a position has been found, but it must be demonstrated that there is no local candidate for that position.…

You know… all the things you mention are actually bad. I want them to stop, for the sake of our society. If the price for that is getting rid of human managers with a broken moral compass such as yours, I’m all for it.

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

#97

Post by orwin »

paradite wrote: post #63
ein0p wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny enough, now I write better code than I used to thanks to AI because of two reasons: - AI naturally writes AI code that is more organized and clean (proper abstraction, no messy code) - I've recognized that, for AI to write code on an existing codebase, the code has to be clean and organized and make sense, so I tend to do more refactoring to make sure AI can take over them and update them when needed.

> 'proper abstraction'

I assume you're not talking about chatgpt4o, because in my experience it's absolutely dogshit at abstracting code meaningfully. Good at finding design patterns, sure, but if your AI don't understand how to state machine, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use it.

It's great at writing tests and documentation though.

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

#98

Post by majewsky »

9dev wrote: post #96
avidiax wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty cynical take, but I would think that having AI management would be highly undesirable for companies, and not because it would be bad at managing. Even in good, reputable companies, there is a certain amount of legally/ethically dubious behavior that is nonetheless desirable. An H1B candidate for a position has been found, but it must be demonstrated that there is no local candidate for that position.…

You know… all the things you mention are actually bad. I want them to stop, for the sake of our society. If the price for that is getting rid of human managers with a broken moral compass such as yours, I’m all for it.

Here's the thing. You assert confidently that GP is acting on a "broken moral compass". But you can also make the case that it is moral to act in interest of the company: After all, if the company fails, a potentially large number of people are at risk of losing their household income (and, in broken economical systems, also stuff like health insurance).

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

#99

Post by mklepaczewski »

28304283409234 wrote: post #94
TheChaplain wrote: post #41

Klarna was recently fined for money laundering, and in Sweden they had long fights with the unions (and lost). But their services are pretty decent.

Decent? They create debt among teenagers. As if they don't have enough angst they now also have to worry about fines for having bought something marketing scum manipulated them into buying and Klarna allowed them to pay-now-regret-soon.

Teenagers are allowed to take high interest loan? Where? I think in Poland it would be possible for every parent to refuse repay such a loan.

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

#100

Post by paradite »

orwin wrote: post #97
paradite wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, now I write better code than I used to thanks to AI because of two reasons: - AI naturally writes AI code that is more organized and clean (proper abstraction, no messy code) - I've recognized that, for AI to write code on an existing codebase, the code has to be clean and organized and make sense, so I tend to do more refactoring to make sure AI can take over them and update them when needed.

> 'proper abstraction' I assume you're not talking about chatgpt4o, because in my experience it's absolutely dogshit at abstracting code meaningfully. Good at finding design patterns, sure, but if your AI don't understand how to state machine, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to use it. It's great at writing tests and documentation though.

GPT-4o is at least 1 order of magnitude behind Claude 3.5 Sonnet in coding. I use latter.
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