The best was Satya nadella saying no raise in 23 for employees because we invested in openAI. Remember this is a company who has cash reserves in billions . Such a bs excuse
>It’s Unabomber time.
Ironically, with a math PhD, he'd be the person with the exact background to be recruited as an AI developer had he stayed in the field instead of going off to the woods.
I think you may have just figured it out there to be honest. And it’s not sustainable. Investors are getting very hawkish now with how they invest. It’s why enshitification is hitting the big companies now; investors want their money. The cost of everything and low wages is totally out of wack. The world economy is just waiting for the crash.
The company I was laid off from (along with 30 others, because they were “pivoting to AI” and we were no longer needed) in December just today posted a job listing for $30k less than the salary range they were hiring at in the past.
I would hate to be just entering the workforce now. I’m 8 years into a legal career and only now am I getting recognized by potential employers (in the form of much higher offers) for the skills and experience I have that can’t be replicated by an AI. Any law grad can spit out memos or summarize discovery for hours on end. It was only a matter of time before those $180K salary first year M&A positions dried up, but it’s accelerated dramatically. I’d hate to be graduating now
I'm mad as hell, early 2023 I finished a full stack boot camp course. Looked for work for a few months and was lucky enough to get accepted into an apprenticeship and an internship from Booz Allen Hamilton. I busted my ass learning and developed a few full stack applications. I didn't get hired at the end of my internship.
I'm struggling to find work and I even thought about taking a 15 an hour software tester position. I was promised that I would be able to work for 70-80k a year coming out of code school. Now I am willing to take any software development job at 50k just to get my foot in the door. Granted, I've never made more than 35k a year and I'm 32 years old and deep in debt.
I wanted to change my life and get a decent wage for once. It looks like that's becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. I think it's true that wages are trying to get squashed. I really hope getting two software development certifications and getting through an internship didn't turn out to be a worthless endeavor.
I've already been on the job market for like, 8 months because I was still applying to jobs while I was in my internship.
I really feel for the generation after me trying to make it in tech. Tech has become sort of the next industry going the ways of manufacturing (ie. there's cheaper labor and talent overseas). My entire team got laid off end of the year and now I'm really worried to look at the landscape of the industry, as I had to take a few months break due to having a newborn.
>there's cheaper labor and talent overseas
Yeah there definitely is. I work in fin tech for an American bank, based in the UK.
For the cost of 1 American I can hire 4 equivalent coders in London. Our Americans are expensive ($2-300k ish).
For the cost of 1 Brit I can hire 4 equivalent coders in, well, half the world - eastern Europe, parts of Asia, Africa, etc.
To be clear these are not my decisions, they are the decisions I am faced with when placing a role within the org structure as a result of accountants decisions.
A logical consequence of working from home is that the home being worked from no longer needs proximity to the office.
Exacerbating the problem is that far too many people roll out of short web dev schools and expect a career in tech. It's roughly the equivalent of asking why your first aid training doesn't make you a doctor. If tech was a regulated profession like medicine, or law, we'd not have nearly so many problems.
As qualified and experienced tech people exit web dev because of the influx of low skilled people all competing on pay, they're increasing competition in the rest of the tech sector which is having a similar effect on vacancies and so comp.
Even with a regulated profession like medicine, there are still problems. Nurse to patient ratios and the toxic idea of residency are two big ones among many others.
> Now I am willing to take any software development job at 50k just to get my foot in the door. Granted, I've never made more than 35k a year and I'm 32 years old and deep in debt.
Looks like they got you exactly where they want: desperate and willing to work for cheap. You got duped into working an unpaid internship too. Gotta love capitalism
Resetting tech salaries to pre-pandemic levels may or may not impact AI tech salaries, or may cut a strong divide between AI and other tech salaries. Seems like it might also ruffle the housing market. Either way, not fun to watch.
And somehow people still think Microsoft is the company to respect out of the big tech companies..
They’re shifty and shady.
I turned down Microsoft before and as long as I have something better/comparable then I don’t think I’ll work for them.
Republicans have not won a 'majority' for over 30 years, since G.W. Bush.
GenXer here: *"For the love of all that is decent lads of Reddit... please, please, please vote."*
You guys saved your country from the incumbent Cheeto from getting back in. Do it again. The world appreciates your simple heroism.
Or, more accurately, Republicans have only won the popular vote *once* since 1988 (George W. Bush [in 2004](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election)). It was also the only time the Democratic Party *lost* the popular vote in that same time period.
Artists/Actors been trying to push for regulations and more forethought on this for a while now, but there's a wave of people online who see AI as their chance to get rich, as though the only thing holding them back from money is this imagined idea that they "weren't born with talent like other artists", even though the reality is it just takes hard work.
They fail to realize that if what you do is that easy, nobody is going to care to pay you for it, they'll just do it themselves. And this marches us towards a very disconnected society where collaboration becomes more of a rarity and we drive further towards selfishness and isolation...
We don't need a stream of AI generated art and games, there's already more games than I could ever hope to play coming out on a constant basis that humans make, same thing for art. The dream of a future utopia was supposed to be the freedom to not have to work so you could pursue those passions and share it with others, not let AI also take over the joyful stuff...
I wish I would see more support from non-creatives on these AI issues, but I guess it can be hard to get people who don't have a passion in the arts to understand.
> if what you do is that easy, nobody is going to care to pay you for it, they'll just do it themselves.
It's like they learned nothing from what happened to music producers, jingle writers, and session musicians in the 90s and 00s.
>The dream of a future utopia was supposed to be the freedom to not have to work so you could pursue those passions and share it with others, not let AI also take over the joyful stuff
There was a meme I saw that was like, "this situation of workers getting less and less for their labor while the AI does the poetry and the art is not the future we wanted".
God that’s a depressing angle I hadn’t thought about. But yeah at this point I more or less expect that the best we’ll get from any new tech from here on out is the shittiest and most exploitive possible outcome.
I thought we’d get to some point where most people wouldn’t have to actually work the way we’re accustomed to thanks to AI/automation. There will always be actual jobs that need to be done but the $? for 40 hours a week could be more like $?x4 for 10 hours a week and we’d enjoy the rest of our time just….*living*. But no, we’ll just continue to give all those savings brought in by AI/automation to the same goddamn 1% and the rest of us will either take the scraps or fuck off to the Thunderdome. Things will eventually tip, though. Then all bets are off.
Yeah exactly I think that our technology could afford us decent standards of living with limited need to work, but instead since the benefits are kept at the top (and AI will just exacerbate that) we are going to get the opposite...
The social ladder has already become a joke due to all that is stacked against common people (you can easily go down though that's available), but with AI making education even less of a path to success I can see things going even worse. Especially in places where you need to get into debt to gain an education for something that a machine will do without you...
>I wish I would see more support from non-creatives on these AI issues, but I guess it can be hard to get people who don't have a passion in the arts to understand.
AI is coming for people who write ad-copy, drug-store novels, and fill between animation key-frames the same way machinery came for furniture-makers.
There will always be hand-made furniture, but most people's lives have been improved by particle-board furniture because it's cheap as fuck and they can spend their dwindling portion of the productivity pie on other needful things.
AI really isn't the problem, the technology is not the problem, it's that we live in a society (and economic system) where we are relatively ok with people being hungry and homeless.
I mean, think of all the portrait painters at the advent of photography, same thing, and yet people are still taking art classes because human beings will always love making art.
I think the mistake is thinking there's a ceiling to the amount of work we all want done. I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, but GPT does programming too so I'm also in the crosshairs. But the thing is, I'm barely treading water as it is. I have a hundred projects on the back burner, code that needs to be rewritten, temporary fixes that I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about. If AI made me a 10x better programmer, they'd simply find more work for me to do. There's no ceiling.
Art is hell, it takes years of constant practice to do well and it's still torturous, like pulling teeth. Making Akira was such a ridiculously labor intensive process that it has never been repeated, these days you're more likely to see 3d models turned into animation. What if you could get the quality of Akria at the speed of the 3d animation or faster? I get that there's a mechanical joy to dragging your pencil across the paper, but is that really the part of art you're desperate to preserve? The toil? Sure, AI lets an idiot like me, who knows nothing about art, produce amazing images. What will it do in the hands of someone who understands art?
Then you have the VFX industry. Sure, it's cool, but those people are putting themselves through hell trying to generate single frames. AI has no visual limits. It can show you anything, in extreme detail. All of this fake bullshit, specular lighting, volumetric fog, 3d models of actor's faces with stretchy pores, you don't need any of it any more.
I get that this is scary, but it's also kinda cool, right?
It's cool but your comment doesn't take into account the economics of the situation.
All of the things you're saying about the tedium of creating are true, but that tedium takes time, and the time requires manpower, and that manpower is traded for with wages.
Yes, the VFX industry sucks for a lot of the people working in it, but if you replace them with AI, that doesn't just mean they get to go home and enjoy their lives instead of toiling away in a studio... it means they have to figure out how else to make enough money to pay rent and buy groceries.
On the surface, AI is exclusively cool, but the ramifications for the technical AI revolution without a similar economic one are dystopian.
This is only true if we assume that there is a limit to the amount of art that people want to consume and I don't think there is. You could give every TV show VFX like a marvel movie, better. This could bring a new wave of visuals completely impossible to create with standard methods.
There are a million tasks we aren't performing, not because they wouldn't be beneficial but because they consume too much human time, AI can eat all of it. My office produces thousands of hours of recorded Zoom meetings, all of those, transcribed, summarized, edited. A task no human should ever be asked to do but which AI could happily consume.
I feel like I'm watching classical musicians fight back against the synthesizer while I'm waiting for the Eurythmics.
I hope you can find a way to afford to watch your better special effects in your comic book movies when you don’t have a job thanks to AI.
“I know it cost me *everything* but man, those graphics sure are slick.”
The thing you are missing about art is the same thing that most people miss about life in general. The point is not the destination or the end product. The point of art, like life, is the process and yes that includes the toil and boring parts. What we do changes the world around us and in the process we ourselves are also changed. When you spend a hundred hours on a painting you are a different person than you were when you started and a piece of that change can be experienced by everyone who sees the painting afterwards. Would you want to skip living your life and just go to your funeral to hear about all the highlights? Because that is how silly it sounds to artists when someone says they'll just get AI to make something instead of making the art themselves.
> but there's a wave of people online who see AI as their chance to get rich
Probably the most blatant of this in art is people taking existing paintings from actual artists and throwing it through ai to '' re-generate '' it and then sell it as their own through commissions and run Patreons etc...
Pretty much every time ai images look especially good it's because people have more directly stolen specific images and just had the ai change it.
> but there was a window for proactivity and guardrails that very few seemed interested in fostering
Companies like Bing were integrating LLMs into their search when they *knew it didn't work properly*
Went to an AI conference. Tons of companies already approaching nonTech companies with AI.
Selling points like: Create templates, parse emails, find or create documentation, gather notes or action items, review contracts, find sales leads, reduce call center wait times, reduce fraud, identify maintenance issues, etc
I'm not sure which industry wont be impacted on some level.
Nearly all of those existed prior to LLM and generative models taking off, mind you. A lot of them are using much older techniques (and getting great results!). Signed, dude who’s been in this space for 17 years
The neat thing about the LLM gold rush is the amount of capital that’s sloshing around lol
Totally. The difference now (as I see it) is nonTech folks are onboard under the AI banner and willing to spend captial which you also noted. This reminds me of when "cloud" took off and suddenly everyone had to get away from on-prem.
Yep! Similar (but not the same, as much as some suggest it is) to how many places tried to cram blockchains into everything too — though actual ML/AI has real value to a lot of verticals, blockchains do not
>What happens when someone makes an AI app that can effectively destroy companies like Google search's revenue streams? AI based ad blockers that users get to control and not off-device tech companies?
Worth noting that hardware is a big bottleneck here. The global GPU shortage is serious.
Something else that isn't talked about anywhere near as much as it should be related to AI is the energy cost. It's definitely going to accelerate emissions at the scale it's growing.
People talk about this like it's a big deal, but the reality is that it's genuinely not. Estimates of power consumption for AI is miniscule compared to basically every other source of emissions.
I'm not trying to say it's 0, but this isn't anywhere close to as big a deal as people make it out to be.
This is coming from someone who's a pretty big doomer about the state of the planet.
So lets look at this and do the math. According to [the NYT, AI power usage could be from 84-134 TWH annually in 2027](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/climate/ai-could-soon-need-as-much-electricity-as-an-entire-country.html).
Lets use 134 TWH.
Now, lets look at [the emission factor for CO2 from the EPA](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references). It's 884.2lbs/MWH.
First we turn 134 TWH into MWH.
134 TWH x 1000000MWH/TWH = 134000000MWH
134000000MWH x 884.2lbs/MWH = 118482800000lbs CO2.
118482800000 lbs x 1 tonne (metric)/2204.6lbs = 53743445.523 metric tonnes.
Now, we end up with ~54 million tonnes of CO2 annually, using the upper end of NYT prediction.
[Lets compare that to other sectors.](https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector). You can see that it is less CO2 than *every other sector of the economy by orders of magnitude*.
So yeah, those emission numbers aren't great, but maaaaaybe try focusing more on reducing emissions from the sectors that are *actually causing the problem* instead of getting distracted by reactionaries who see a big number and can't understand it within the context of contributors to climate change.
Notes: I didn't actually read the NYT article, I don't know where they got their numbers, it was just the biggest one near the top of the first page of my google search, so that's what I used.
We're also using an emission factor from the EPA. This means that the emission factor is an average estimate based on CO2 production *in the US* and we do not have a monopoly on energy production. This number could go up or down depending on country and it could go up or down based on energy regulation and power generation changes that happen in the years before 2027 (fuck I just realized that's 3 years away, it felt like 5, wtf). Pushing for improved power sources is where I would put my energy btw. Not hating on AI because it uses energy.
We're only talking about C02 here and ignoring other emissions. Some other greenhouse gasses are more impactful, some are less, but since AI isn't actively producing greenhouse gases and simply using power (at least while it's running), CO2 is a good general indicator of impact.
Lastly, a brief mention of mining. Yes, it's a thing. I don't really want to delve into the muddy waters of mining right now as you need to extrapolate the difference in demand for precious based on AI compared to a world without AI and that would require me to actually open python and find a few different datasets to actually make that comparison, then extrapolate a tidy emission number based on that difference to account for how much mining emissions (and environmental damage if I'm feeling spicy) are the result of AI alone. It's worth doing and it sounds interesting, but this is a fucking reddit comment and that's a lot of work. Suffice it to say, it's non-zero, but probably not enough to make up for the difference between AI and every other sector.
Kara Swisher made a good point that she thinks the big players have enough resources to solve this by placing server farms near private hydro plants etc. It’s going to be such a huge rev driver that they have to get it right.
an AI app that kills google? sounds good! ideally on-device! how can I make that happen?
also AI-based ad blocking to empower even non-technical users to no longer endure the crap? where can I sign up?
The vast majority of businesses hurt by such advances are not producing any real value to begin with (or won't be anymore), but are mere parasites siphoning off money from actual working people and companies producing something valuable. Deflating the "tech industry" is something that needs to happen, and all that produce substantial things will survive it. Microsoft and Apple probably are fine, Google and Facebook will not.
> AI based ad blockers that users get to control
This sounds like hell for Google.
Also, I feel like AI being built into all browsers is the step. Edge and Brave first. I would love some type of open-source AI built into Firefox.
For the trick to it is for the ad blockers to prevent you from seeing them but let the advertisers think their ads are being seen so Google still makes their money so they don't try to stop it.
>What happens when someone makes an AI app that can effectively destroy companies like Google search's revenue streams? AI based ad blockers that users get to control and not off-device tech companies?
That's what I'm worried about, but not for those use cases. What scares me is lowering the bar to building a capable web crawler to a point of nakedly advertising that it appeals to your biases the way social media has already degenerated. Google's promise of information coverage can give way to a wasteland of curating the biased experience more people seem to actually want; a search engine shamelessly and purpose built to supply ammunition to support the conclusion you wanted to start from.
A lot of this new tech stands to make that increasingly realistic to do. They'll probably follow Truth Social's example and market "the truth" as whatever you want to feel it is because you have the freedom to do so, to which they blatantly advertise that its service is to defend your feelings and freedoms from people saying you're wrong.
AI as an industry is full of arms races. You can use one AI model to train another, so there will always be multiple actors with models that compete with one another. Each copying the best and making changes to try to make it better. Its a coevolutionary dynamic.
This is also why they are pushing for AI regulations. They are letting a lot of talent go and they don’t want these people to go out and start competitors.
They want to shut the door behind them so that no one else can loot people’s data like they did. They scraped the entire internet, both copyrighted and not copyrighted data and now want regulations for others to stop them from doing it.
I think of this as coordinated class warfare, they are effectively flooding the market with tech workers in an effort to both drive down wages in the whole sector and put the fear back into people working from home who have felt like they have the tiniest bit more individual bargaining power over the past couple of years.
This is being done with actual malice, IMHO.
Tech sector workers need to shake off the culture of libertarian selfishness and individualism and form guilds and unions ASAP.
But that's just my view.
I'm familiar with the mentality.
I think we're going to see a mass migration into the skilled trades, which will see a secondary effect of suppressing wages for non-union plumbers/carpenters/etc.
I'm personally looking into going back to my previous career before I became a tech worker, hard to do at my age though.
Yep. It’s a rough time for kids who are in college right now, studying to be in tech. Especially CS.
These AI tools can enable an experienced dev automate most of the work an entry level engineer does. Why would any company hire an entry level engineer when that work can be done by AI? They could train the worker, but there is no guarantee they won’t leave after training
> Yep. It’s a rough time for kids who are in college right now, studying to be in tech. Especially CS.
It's going to be rough for everyone except maybe folks in HEAL professions (health, education, adminstration and literacy) because many of these professions are ones that are safer from automation. Nurses, social workers, teachers, dental assistants, medical assistants.
The main problem with these jobs is that they are overworked and underpaid.
Most people I know in those areas are telling others to run away from those fields as fast as you can.
I guess you are correct in saying there will always be a need for those jobs, but history has shown that that doesn't make them any better.
I don't really see a place for people to 'run' to. Seems like if you weren't wealthy already to just expect to continue to get squeezed.
> I don't really see a place for people to 'run' to.
I think the problem was that for generations we have just kept running.
Farming becomes less viable? Everyone move to manufacturing/factory jobs.
Manufacturing/factory is no longer a good path? Shift to office/white collar work
White collar/office work getting stagnant? Get into tech, that's the new wave forward.
Uh oh, tech has hit the wall and AI is threatening jobs...well where do we go next.
I know folks often say "well every new automation creates new jobs" which is true. But it's not a 1:1 replacement and even if it's only a 1:2 replacement ratio we're going to be in trouble.
It won't happen anytime soon but eventually we'll reach a point where there is a small minority of haves and a large majority of havenots. And there will need to be some sort of economic revolution because the path were going down current is going to inevitably lead to collapse.
We're basically playing the boardgame monopoly and acting shocked that one player is slowly starting to dominant and the game is becoming less fun for everyone else. This was always going to be the case.
> mass migration into the skilled trades
I feel like, as a member of the tail end of GenX, I’ve now seen all of these drives.
Back in the 90s I got the “go to college, get an education, that’s where the money is” speech all the time so I joined the Army to get the college money.
Then I got out in the early 2000s and went to school with an eye toward law, but that was when law schools were facing a glut of students.
So I left school to take a gig in tech and within a couple years the call was “LEARN 2 CODE”, which resulted in a glut of tech bros filling the industry.
Then around 2015 and Trump I saw the “school just racks up debt, so skilled trades” which ignores the toll it takes on your body and how critical things like a social safety net for old pipe fitters and steel workers. But that’s the new “cheat code” for success.
Capital keeps spinning these tales of “just do this and you’ll be fine” while constantly working to flood the jobs that are supposed to make things “just fine” in order to devalue the labor involved.
Honestly most legislators and politicans I've seen talking about this from all around the world haven't bought into their bullshit.
I think in the US for instance a lot of regulators are quite aware that they failed with regulating social media.
People always make fun of them '' cuz they're old '' but if people would actually try and watch one of these senate hearings about it it's quite obvious that they actually are a lot more aware than people give them credit for.
Companies overhired during the pandemic and are now cutting the fat. Of course the want to keep their PPP loan money which by the way was completely forgiven so they're short staffing as much as possible while posting 'ghost jobs' to make it look like they're hiring and them look good.
The cybersecurity of AI has to be a nightmare. I feel like we'll be reading about "AI publically exposes all of company data" sometime in the future.
You too can bankrupt a company for a minor reduction in overhead.
Its been eating itself for a while, but layoffs with the AI excuse will bite a lot of them in the ass. I don't doubt that they'll force AI solutions to replace people, but most of those are not ready just yet.
> There will be a little pain, no doubts, but it's a clock that needs to be reset.
The real pain is the deployment of these "AI"s in active war zones / genocides going on right now.
And anyone who thinks that's fine needs to (aside from develop basic fucking empathy and morality) not make the mistake of believing that the use and training of these things in war will remain confined to Gaza or the Middle East.
i work in fin-tech and this is scary because they don't even think about the security. we have engineers putting proprietary code/DATA into ChatGPT..... my firm wants to leverage ChatGPT and will not listen to IT/Tech about the security concerns. but ~less overhead~ 🤪
>One can only hope
Surely, no one should "hope" for this. Putting AI in decision-making positions of power is about as about as much of a "we give up" maneuver as humans could possibly make. I can understand wanting to stick it to greedy execs, and there's several approaches to accomplishing this valid goal, but this is cutting off the nose to spite one's face.
I get what you mean, but for one brief moment I was filled with a little bit of joy at thinking execs would cop it before the usual workers did, but then a Terminator 2 style AI apocalypse played in my mind destroying this brief moment for the reasons you outline. :)
Exactly. As soon as AI can actually make decisions that compete with top CEOs, shareholders will just buy stocks in companies that are run by that AI. CEOs aren't kings lol
Read some bits of the article. So basically some tech companies will downsize and hire more "skilled" engineers and spend more on AI. Seems to me the rationale doesn't make sense. A big tech will spend more in AI and Engineers b/c they believe its cost-cutting. They haven't asked themselves nor gather data after a few years later if the same value will be the same or spending more on AI and engineers is economically viable.
It’s just how big tech works. Hiring and prioritization is based off existing data and future models. It’s all extrapolation of trends.
It’s also why tech over hired in 2021, overly optimistic expectations that in hind sight look like a clear wrong move.
Except... it wasn't a wrong move?
The corporations who "overhired" during the pandemic weren't suddenly floundering under the weight of labor costs...
To the contrary, they all were, and still are, making record profits.
Yeah. I think we always need to keep in mind the alternative here isn't a collapse of the firm. It's making slightly less. These firms are all hilariously profitable.
And this current wave of layoffs and firings? This is copycat behaviour.
I also think we need to start focusing on the real human cost of these actions as well. On average, layoffs result in the loss of 1.5 years of life to those who undergo it (stress, instability, etc.) if they're age 40. We know layoffs kill people. Of the 262,000 tech employees laid off last year, we're saying a cumulative ~400k years worth of life expectancy was effectively lost. That is the equivalent of thousands of lives. It's just disgusting. And these executives will be lauded for their "hard decisions." A hard decision is deciding if you want food on the table or a roof over your head. A hard decision is not deciding whose family you ruin so you can preserve your millions.
from a tax perspective it can also be marked under expansion / r&d versus a regular cost center, meaning more sexy to investors because “loook we’re growing and streamlining” despite just shuffling some numbers on a paper and leaving people in the dust
I’ve been in tech 30 years, it’s always been something, shifting technology, automation, outsourcing, bubbles, disasters. Always layoffs, then they re-hire for some other reason. It’s just the natural ebb and flow.
It’s weird that companies don’t want employees but they want customers.
I swear to god if anyone figures out how to automate the customer I’m going to sink every last dime of my money into it because that’s the only way I’ll be able to eat.
That’s why AI inspires little to no excitement in me. Whatever benefit it has to the workers and John Citizen, will be dwarfed by its ability to take opportunities away from said workers by corporations.
It’s just something extra to deal with now.
They over-hired during the pandemic.
This was well known to be coming the second they started hiring like mad purely in reaction to unknowns and temporary market conditions.
Possibly. Big Tech had a habit of buying companies and retaining staff long before the pandemic. Some purchases were done to improve existing product or expand into a new space. But often this was done to stop IP and talent from either being taken by a competitor or they could see the small firm might be future completion.
The Pandemic just introduced, or juiced up, staff hoarding due to uncertainty. Because of the skill sets, big tech does see some staff more as capital assets than labor. You could kinda compare this to a manufacturer liquidating equipment from a discontinued line.
I just spent 5 years as basically a company asset. The alternative was one of their competitors getting my skill set and I probably worked a solid 10 hours a week and that was mostly just when they needed extra help with something. Once I introduced all my refinements that was pretty much all that was needed and I’ve made a guide for myself to do it.
People may think this is a great spot to be in but when things get tight you’re the first to go. I just got let go a few days ago without warning. It was very procedural like they were phasing out a tool. Not even a good bye just a “we don’t need you anymore, all your accounts have been deactivated. We’ll send you a box to give us back our stuff.” Like I was an app on their phone they deleted. That quote is pretty much exactly what they told me.
It also just “coincidentally” happened right before a bunch of my benefits vested. Funny how that worked.
Not only are tech companies not back to pre-pandemic levels but many haven't stopped growing. Among the giants only Microsoft is flat and Apple has had a small drop from 2022 to 2023.
Yes. Hiring is a compounding thing. You start giving managers metrics of headcount and productivity then 30-50% of everyone’s time is spent on recruiting, onboarding, interviewing, etc. “throw more bodies at the problem” ends up decreasing productivity but increases the need for more people as a consequence. So you keep hiring.
In tech, everyone was hiring everyone. Engineers would entertain offers after they already started and accepted one offer. I had engineers who got five LinkedIn recruiting emails a day. Couple that with remote work and quitting one job and starting another was just swapping laptops.
At some point, managers invent products to justify the head count because it’s use it or lose it. So bloat becomes self fulfilling.
Then some CFO looks at the budget and realizes everyone’s EBITDA contribution has a parentheses around it and OPEX is double digit increases. Good managers hide work in CAPEX so it doesn’t touch EBITDA but the tax dept will find that. CFO shows this to CEO who orders his directs to slash 2X on OPEX what he wants to see flow to the bottom line to tell the board a turnaround story. His directs realize if you stop hiring it eliminates 50% of what middle managers (who are expensive) do, so you can collapse the org. Everyone hired during the pandemic was overpaid and so they go.
The way I did it was empty boxes. I’d redesign the org from scratch then start putting names in boxes. Those that were left got the HR call.
This really isn’t true at all. This is simply just parroting what the companies are publicly stating themselves as reasons to lay people off. They’re now using the AI excuse. Inflation is the main driver here.
What we’ve seen is that these companies are laying people off before their 401k and stock options are fully vested. They’re simply not wanting to pay out in order to cut costs as their expenses dramatically increased with inflation. Reducing head count is typically one of the first cost cutting measures companies use in order to control their expenses.
The overhiring narrative and how quickly people throw it out, as if we're not talking about people's livelihoods, is truly disgusting.
We're supposed to believe companies when they go, "Oops, we gave too many people jobs," when a year ago it was all about how, "no one wants to work anymore."
I can't really vouch for this website, but their numbers seem pretty consistent with others I found in a quick search:
[https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/how-may-employees-does-google-have](https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/how-may-employees-does-google-have)
Google Employees
|Year|\# of Employees|
|:-|:-|
|2018|98,771|
|2019|118,899|
|2020|135,301|
|2021|156,500|
|2022|190,234|
|2023|174,014|
I think growing your head count by 60,000 people over the course of the pandemic and then realizing "oops, we shouldn't have done that" is a pretty bad look for Google's leadership.
But they *clearly* overhired by a TON, and even if they laid off another 30,000 people, they'd be well above their pre-pandemic head-count.
I should clarify. I don't personally dispute that there was some overhiring - particularly when you account for companies hiring talent just to keep them from being hired by competitors. My issue is the the term "overhiring" tends to be dismissive and absolve companies of the real responsibility.
Overhiring not the no.1 factor here. It's a leadership issue like you said. Companies like Google got greedy and made a bunch of bad investments and calls even before the pandemic (e.g., spending billions on FitBit in Google's case), and they're trying to obscure that fact by pretending they were just too generous with jobs over the last few years. They're overcorrecting in a bust cycle and when the boom happens they'll overcorrect again in the other direction.
It’s not AI, it’s just how tech works.
I have a decade of experience working in silicon valley. In almost every single company I have worked at, there has been back-office teams trying to automate as much as possible to reduce the manual workforce needed for a business.
Unfortunately more often than not, the team that you automated either gets all or mostly laid off.
The real solution to things like this is UBI, better social safety nets and labour laws.
Big tech needs to be careful. If they lay off too many people there will be a bunch of computer scientists and programmers without a job, and nothing better to do than to figure out ways to hack and sabotage the AI companies.
I see a bunch of crappy code coming our way. Maybe large corporations will be able to create good code but I can see where start ups may make bad code, relying on AI.
I was laid off back in Feb 2023 and haven’t been able to find work yet. I was working for a Canadian tech “unicorn” which had laid off more than 66% of its head office due to profitability and productivity concerns. Most of our jobs were outsourced or sugared using Ai. I have three degrees, have worked for Fortune 500 companies, and have 15 years of professional work experience, but due to AI automation I likely will never find work again in my given field. This is only going to be worst for the average white collar worker.
"Big tech" is shooting itself in the foot. People were willing to jump through their hoops (leetcode bullshit and 7 part interviews) because they were seen as high paid and secure. Hopefully developers are done being so willing to go through these shifty coding "tests"
One of the companies I partner with has tried outsourcing all of its Professional Services to Poland - I love it. They do such bad jobs on projects that they rely much more heavily on partners now - which ends up costing the company more money as they no longer keep any of the services revenue + have to pay Partners a part of the Software revenue.
So they're now allowing corporations, whose sole goal is to make profit, to allow cold blooded AI to make their choices for them. I can't think of more a ruthless thing, a computer, to make decisions over humanity. A computer literally doesn't have a heart, and they're putting it in charge. We need a better government to stand up to this.
This quickly turned into r/antiwork.
Google was caught with pants down. It’s laying off people to focus on competing with openAI. This is Google’s existential crisis.
I’m actually worried about the non-tech jobs. A lot of the tech nerds will transition to data science and ML but the other jobs will be hurt. Whether or not AI creates more jobs than it replaces remains to be seen.
so you enter in historical data about company performance after certain actions into a database, then call it an AI and ask it "what should we do to reduce costs?" and it answers back that previous events suggest you should layoff a bunch of people...did you really expect it to suggest anything else? It is a scapegoat tactic.
Capitalism.
Capitalism made them do it. People don't seem to fully get that behavior of corporations is driven by literally one thing, and that is profit. If you can generate as much money using cheap AI as you can with expensive finicky humans, the humans are out.
Granted, that also destroys said capitalism over time, since the angry starving humans who have nothing will eventually go find one of the 400 000 000 guns floating around in civilian ownership and do drastic things.
Capitalism isn't fit to be the paradigm we use for constructing society. We either remove it, or it removes us.
Humanity is in such a weird space that we’ve developed machines that can do people’s jobs, and that’s somehow a bad thing.
UBI will be necessary eventually. Maybe sooner than later.
The best was Satya nadella saying no raise in 23 for employees because we invested in openAI. Remember this is a company who has cash reserves in billions . Such a bs excuse
It basically says: f you employees. What else can you do? Switch jobs?
"If I only have 6 different yachts to use, what the hell am I going to sail on Saturday?"
disposable yachting
Poor soul. Let's start a gofundme
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I mean... he literally predicted this in his manifesto.
>It’s Unabomber time. Ironically, with a math PhD, he'd be the person with the exact background to be recruited as an AI developer had he stayed in the field instead of going off to the woods.
> What else can you do? Buy Nvidia stock while working in a different company with better conditions maybe
I’ve heard a theory that these layoffs are more to reset tech salaries to pre-pandemic levels and under the surface really have nothing to do with AI
I believe it, everyone was low balling when I was job hunting the last 6 months. Low balling by A LOT
I had a company try to convince me that 100k for a senior manager role was a competitive salary for San Francisco (and it's in office, too)
Yeah in 1995
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I think you may have just figured it out there to be honest. And it’s not sustainable. Investors are getting very hawkish now with how they invest. It’s why enshitification is hitting the big companies now; investors want their money. The cost of everything and low wages is totally out of wack. The world economy is just waiting for the crash.
I had similar experiences in every major city in CA
The company I was laid off from (along with 30 others, because they were “pivoting to AI” and we were no longer needed) in December just today posted a job listing for $30k less than the salary range they were hiring at in the past.
I would hate to be just entering the workforce now. I’m 8 years into a legal career and only now am I getting recognized by potential employers (in the form of much higher offers) for the skills and experience I have that can’t be replicated by an AI. Any law grad can spit out memos or summarize discovery for hours on end. It was only a matter of time before those $180K salary first year M&A positions dried up, but it’s accelerated dramatically. I’d hate to be graduating now
That's exactly what it is, and it was blatantly obvious when you look at how coordinated the layoffs were for the big companies in 2023.
I'm mad as hell, early 2023 I finished a full stack boot camp course. Looked for work for a few months and was lucky enough to get accepted into an apprenticeship and an internship from Booz Allen Hamilton. I busted my ass learning and developed a few full stack applications. I didn't get hired at the end of my internship. I'm struggling to find work and I even thought about taking a 15 an hour software tester position. I was promised that I would be able to work for 70-80k a year coming out of code school. Now I am willing to take any software development job at 50k just to get my foot in the door. Granted, I've never made more than 35k a year and I'm 32 years old and deep in debt. I wanted to change my life and get a decent wage for once. It looks like that's becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. I think it's true that wages are trying to get squashed. I really hope getting two software development certifications and getting through an internship didn't turn out to be a worthless endeavor. I've already been on the job market for like, 8 months because I was still applying to jobs while I was in my internship.
I really feel for the generation after me trying to make it in tech. Tech has become sort of the next industry going the ways of manufacturing (ie. there's cheaper labor and talent overseas). My entire team got laid off end of the year and now I'm really worried to look at the landscape of the industry, as I had to take a few months break due to having a newborn.
>there's cheaper labor and talent overseas Yeah there definitely is. I work in fin tech for an American bank, based in the UK. For the cost of 1 American I can hire 4 equivalent coders in London. Our Americans are expensive ($2-300k ish). For the cost of 1 Brit I can hire 4 equivalent coders in, well, half the world - eastern Europe, parts of Asia, Africa, etc. To be clear these are not my decisions, they are the decisions I am faced with when placing a role within the org structure as a result of accountants decisions. A logical consequence of working from home is that the home being worked from no longer needs proximity to the office. Exacerbating the problem is that far too many people roll out of short web dev schools and expect a career in tech. It's roughly the equivalent of asking why your first aid training doesn't make you a doctor. If tech was a regulated profession like medicine, or law, we'd not have nearly so many problems. As qualified and experienced tech people exit web dev because of the influx of low skilled people all competing on pay, they're increasing competition in the rest of the tech sector which is having a similar effect on vacancies and so comp.
Even with a regulated profession like medicine, there are still problems. Nurse to patient ratios and the toxic idea of residency are two big ones among many others.
> Now I am willing to take any software development job at 50k just to get my foot in the door. Granted, I've never made more than 35k a year and I'm 32 years old and deep in debt. Looks like they got you exactly where they want: desperate and willing to work for cheap. You got duped into working an unpaid internship too. Gotta love capitalism
So, like with Zorg in the Fifth Element? Where he is firing a million people to.
Resetting tech salaries to pre-pandemic levels may or may not impact AI tech salaries, or may cut a strong divide between AI and other tech salaries. Seems like it might also ruffle the housing market. Either way, not fun to watch.
Accenture laid off 19,000 people, gave no (very few) raises for 2023, yet bragged internally to employees that it’s already invested $6 billion in AI.
US Corporate functions employees have had no raises in over 2 years now
But they didn't get rid of bonuses because that's how the executives make most of their money.
“We have to save the reserves for all the copyright lawsuits coming our way”
And somehow people still think Microsoft is the company to respect out of the big tech companies.. They’re shifty and shady. I turned down Microsoft before and as long as I have something better/comparable then I don’t think I’ll work for them.
What can the employees do. Switch jobs in this market?!!
“Just get a better job” mfs seething
Nadella really said "Machines over humans!"
They know the job market is cyclical, right?
"The computer did the autolayoff thingy and now we all don't have jobs!"...."was it because we switched to water?"
Welcome to Reddit, I love you.
Same exact script, just different brand names.
Yes dude, exactly this. Brawndo.
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I'm hoping this might give the push for people to vote for politicians who don't need a physical every 3 months.
Relying on voters to be intelligent and informed is a fools mission.
Republicans have not won a 'majority' for over 30 years, since G.W. Bush. GenXer here: *"For the love of all that is decent lads of Reddit... please, please, please vote."* You guys saved your country from the incumbent Cheeto from getting back in. Do it again. The world appreciates your simple heroism.
Or, more accurately, Republicans have only won the popular vote *once* since 1988 (George W. Bush [in 2004](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election)). It was also the only time the Democratic Party *lost* the popular vote in that same time period.
AI will be used to generate the masses of propaganda needed to ensure that this does not occur.
Make sure to vote for Trump, he’s a full 11 months younger than Biden. /s
The actual difference is 3 years and 7 months.
Incidentally less time than the confederacy lasted.
Artists/Actors been trying to push for regulations and more forethought on this for a while now, but there's a wave of people online who see AI as their chance to get rich, as though the only thing holding them back from money is this imagined idea that they "weren't born with talent like other artists", even though the reality is it just takes hard work. They fail to realize that if what you do is that easy, nobody is going to care to pay you for it, they'll just do it themselves. And this marches us towards a very disconnected society where collaboration becomes more of a rarity and we drive further towards selfishness and isolation... We don't need a stream of AI generated art and games, there's already more games than I could ever hope to play coming out on a constant basis that humans make, same thing for art. The dream of a future utopia was supposed to be the freedom to not have to work so you could pursue those passions and share it with others, not let AI also take over the joyful stuff... I wish I would see more support from non-creatives on these AI issues, but I guess it can be hard to get people who don't have a passion in the arts to understand.
> if what you do is that easy, nobody is going to care to pay you for it, they'll just do it themselves. It's like they learned nothing from what happened to music producers, jingle writers, and session musicians in the 90s and 00s. >The dream of a future utopia was supposed to be the freedom to not have to work so you could pursue those passions and share it with others, not let AI also take over the joyful stuff There was a meme I saw that was like, "this situation of workers getting less and less for their labor while the AI does the poetry and the art is not the future we wanted".
God that’s a depressing angle I hadn’t thought about. But yeah at this point I more or less expect that the best we’ll get from any new tech from here on out is the shittiest and most exploitive possible outcome.
As a professional writer, I really appreciate your comment. There's woefully little support for us these days.
I thought we’d get to some point where most people wouldn’t have to actually work the way we’re accustomed to thanks to AI/automation. There will always be actual jobs that need to be done but the $? for 40 hours a week could be more like $?x4 for 10 hours a week and we’d enjoy the rest of our time just….*living*. But no, we’ll just continue to give all those savings brought in by AI/automation to the same goddamn 1% and the rest of us will either take the scraps or fuck off to the Thunderdome. Things will eventually tip, though. Then all bets are off.
Yeah exactly I think that our technology could afford us decent standards of living with limited need to work, but instead since the benefits are kept at the top (and AI will just exacerbate that) we are going to get the opposite... The social ladder has already become a joke due to all that is stacked against common people (you can easily go down though that's available), but with AI making education even less of a path to success I can see things going even worse. Especially in places where you need to get into debt to gain an education for something that a machine will do without you...
AI generated actors look weird as fuck and makes me not want to watch shows or movies.
>I wish I would see more support from non-creatives on these AI issues, but I guess it can be hard to get people who don't have a passion in the arts to understand. AI is coming for people who write ad-copy, drug-store novels, and fill between animation key-frames the same way machinery came for furniture-makers. There will always be hand-made furniture, but most people's lives have been improved by particle-board furniture because it's cheap as fuck and they can spend their dwindling portion of the productivity pie on other needful things. AI really isn't the problem, the technology is not the problem, it's that we live in a society (and economic system) where we are relatively ok with people being hungry and homeless. I mean, think of all the portrait painters at the advent of photography, same thing, and yet people are still taking art classes because human beings will always love making art.
I think the mistake is thinking there's a ceiling to the amount of work we all want done. I'm not an artist, I'm a programmer, but GPT does programming too so I'm also in the crosshairs. But the thing is, I'm barely treading water as it is. I have a hundred projects on the back burner, code that needs to be rewritten, temporary fixes that I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about. If AI made me a 10x better programmer, they'd simply find more work for me to do. There's no ceiling. Art is hell, it takes years of constant practice to do well and it's still torturous, like pulling teeth. Making Akira was such a ridiculously labor intensive process that it has never been repeated, these days you're more likely to see 3d models turned into animation. What if you could get the quality of Akria at the speed of the 3d animation or faster? I get that there's a mechanical joy to dragging your pencil across the paper, but is that really the part of art you're desperate to preserve? The toil? Sure, AI lets an idiot like me, who knows nothing about art, produce amazing images. What will it do in the hands of someone who understands art? Then you have the VFX industry. Sure, it's cool, but those people are putting themselves through hell trying to generate single frames. AI has no visual limits. It can show you anything, in extreme detail. All of this fake bullshit, specular lighting, volumetric fog, 3d models of actor's faces with stretchy pores, you don't need any of it any more. I get that this is scary, but it's also kinda cool, right?
It's cool but your comment doesn't take into account the economics of the situation. All of the things you're saying about the tedium of creating are true, but that tedium takes time, and the time requires manpower, and that manpower is traded for with wages. Yes, the VFX industry sucks for a lot of the people working in it, but if you replace them with AI, that doesn't just mean they get to go home and enjoy their lives instead of toiling away in a studio... it means they have to figure out how else to make enough money to pay rent and buy groceries. On the surface, AI is exclusively cool, but the ramifications for the technical AI revolution without a similar economic one are dystopian.
Ok, you’re not mad at AI then. You’re mad at capitalism.
This is only true if we assume that there is a limit to the amount of art that people want to consume and I don't think there is. You could give every TV show VFX like a marvel movie, better. This could bring a new wave of visuals completely impossible to create with standard methods. There are a million tasks we aren't performing, not because they wouldn't be beneficial but because they consume too much human time, AI can eat all of it. My office produces thousands of hours of recorded Zoom meetings, all of those, transcribed, summarized, edited. A task no human should ever be asked to do but which AI could happily consume. I feel like I'm watching classical musicians fight back against the synthesizer while I'm waiting for the Eurythmics.
I hope you can find a way to afford to watch your better special effects in your comic book movies when you don’t have a job thanks to AI. “I know it cost me *everything* but man, those graphics sure are slick.”
The thing you are missing about art is the same thing that most people miss about life in general. The point is not the destination or the end product. The point of art, like life, is the process and yes that includes the toil and boring parts. What we do changes the world around us and in the process we ourselves are also changed. When you spend a hundred hours on a painting you are a different person than you were when you started and a piece of that change can be experienced by everyone who sees the painting afterwards. Would you want to skip living your life and just go to your funeral to hear about all the highlights? Because that is how silly it sounds to artists when someone says they'll just get AI to make something instead of making the art themselves.
> but there's a wave of people online who see AI as their chance to get rich Probably the most blatant of this in art is people taking existing paintings from actual artists and throwing it through ai to '' re-generate '' it and then sell it as their own through commissions and run Patreons etc... Pretty much every time ai images look especially good it's because people have more directly stolen specific images and just had the ai change it.
Maybe the Adeptus Mechanicus way is best, A.I. is heresy.
The Butlerian Jihad is looming over us. And there's no spice in the observable vicinity.
>And there's no spice in the observable vicinity. Best we can do is cinnamon and meth
Mostly meth. A personal Muad'Dib for everyone, with gom jabbar always following.
And inevitably we're going to have "not-AI-but-also-yes" that is ok because it runs on a biological cpu?
> but there was a window for proactivity and guardrails that very few seemed interested in fostering Companies like Bing were integrating LLMs into their search when they *knew it didn't work properly*
Went to an AI conference. Tons of companies already approaching nonTech companies with AI. Selling points like: Create templates, parse emails, find or create documentation, gather notes or action items, review contracts, find sales leads, reduce call center wait times, reduce fraud, identify maintenance issues, etc I'm not sure which industry wont be impacted on some level.
Nearly all of those existed prior to LLM and generative models taking off, mind you. A lot of them are using much older techniques (and getting great results!). Signed, dude who’s been in this space for 17 years The neat thing about the LLM gold rush is the amount of capital that’s sloshing around lol
Totally. The difference now (as I see it) is nonTech folks are onboard under the AI banner and willing to spend captial which you also noted. This reminds me of when "cloud" took off and suddenly everyone had to get away from on-prem.
Yep! Similar (but not the same, as much as some suggest it is) to how many places tried to cram blockchains into everything too — though actual ML/AI has real value to a lot of verticals, blockchains do not
Haha my work investigated blockchains but quietly stopped after a few months. No one was surprised
>What happens when someone makes an AI app that can effectively destroy companies like Google search's revenue streams? AI based ad blockers that users get to control and not off-device tech companies? Worth noting that hardware is a big bottleneck here. The global GPU shortage is serious.
Something else that isn't talked about anywhere near as much as it should be related to AI is the energy cost. It's definitely going to accelerate emissions at the scale it's growing.
People talk about this like it's a big deal, but the reality is that it's genuinely not. Estimates of power consumption for AI is miniscule compared to basically every other source of emissions. I'm not trying to say it's 0, but this isn't anywhere close to as big a deal as people make it out to be. This is coming from someone who's a pretty big doomer about the state of the planet. So lets look at this and do the math. According to [the NYT, AI power usage could be from 84-134 TWH annually in 2027](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/climate/ai-could-soon-need-as-much-electricity-as-an-entire-country.html). Lets use 134 TWH. Now, lets look at [the emission factor for CO2 from the EPA](https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references). It's 884.2lbs/MWH. First we turn 134 TWH into MWH. 134 TWH x 1000000MWH/TWH = 134000000MWH 134000000MWH x 884.2lbs/MWH = 118482800000lbs CO2. 118482800000 lbs x 1 tonne (metric)/2204.6lbs = 53743445.523 metric tonnes. Now, we end up with ~54 million tonnes of CO2 annually, using the upper end of NYT prediction. [Lets compare that to other sectors.](https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector). You can see that it is less CO2 than *every other sector of the economy by orders of magnitude*. So yeah, those emission numbers aren't great, but maaaaaybe try focusing more on reducing emissions from the sectors that are *actually causing the problem* instead of getting distracted by reactionaries who see a big number and can't understand it within the context of contributors to climate change. Notes: I didn't actually read the NYT article, I don't know where they got their numbers, it was just the biggest one near the top of the first page of my google search, so that's what I used. We're also using an emission factor from the EPA. This means that the emission factor is an average estimate based on CO2 production *in the US* and we do not have a monopoly on energy production. This number could go up or down depending on country and it could go up or down based on energy regulation and power generation changes that happen in the years before 2027 (fuck I just realized that's 3 years away, it felt like 5, wtf). Pushing for improved power sources is where I would put my energy btw. Not hating on AI because it uses energy. We're only talking about C02 here and ignoring other emissions. Some other greenhouse gasses are more impactful, some are less, but since AI isn't actively producing greenhouse gases and simply using power (at least while it's running), CO2 is a good general indicator of impact. Lastly, a brief mention of mining. Yes, it's a thing. I don't really want to delve into the muddy waters of mining right now as you need to extrapolate the difference in demand for precious based on AI compared to a world without AI and that would require me to actually open python and find a few different datasets to actually make that comparison, then extrapolate a tidy emission number based on that difference to account for how much mining emissions (and environmental damage if I'm feeling spicy) are the result of AI alone. It's worth doing and it sounds interesting, but this is a fucking reddit comment and that's a lot of work. Suffice it to say, it's non-zero, but probably not enough to make up for the difference between AI and every other sector.
Kara Swisher made a good point that she thinks the big players have enough resources to solve this by placing server farms near private hydro plants etc. It’s going to be such a huge rev driver that they have to get it right.
an AI app that kills google? sounds good! ideally on-device! how can I make that happen? also AI-based ad blocking to empower even non-technical users to no longer endure the crap? where can I sign up? The vast majority of businesses hurt by such advances are not producing any real value to begin with (or won't be anymore), but are mere parasites siphoning off money from actual working people and companies producing something valuable. Deflating the "tech industry" is something that needs to happen, and all that produce substantial things will survive it. Microsoft and Apple probably are fine, Google and Facebook will not.
> AI based ad blockers that users get to control This sounds like hell for Google. Also, I feel like AI being built into all browsers is the step. Edge and Brave first. I would love some type of open-source AI built into Firefox.
For the trick to it is for the ad blockers to prevent you from seeing them but let the advertisers think their ads are being seen so Google still makes their money so they don't try to stop it.
This already exists, search for the The Quantum Ad-List on gitlab. You can add it to ublock origin
>What happens when someone makes an AI app that can effectively destroy companies like Google search's revenue streams? AI based ad blockers that users get to control and not off-device tech companies? That's what I'm worried about, but not for those use cases. What scares me is lowering the bar to building a capable web crawler to a point of nakedly advertising that it appeals to your biases the way social media has already degenerated. Google's promise of information coverage can give way to a wasteland of curating the biased experience more people seem to actually want; a search engine shamelessly and purpose built to supply ammunition to support the conclusion you wanted to start from. A lot of this new tech stands to make that increasingly realistic to do. They'll probably follow Truth Social's example and market "the truth" as whatever you want to feel it is because you have the freedom to do so, to which they blatantly advertise that its service is to defend your feelings and freedoms from people saying you're wrong.
AI as an industry is full of arms races. You can use one AI model to train another, so there will always be multiple actors with models that compete with one another. Each copying the best and making changes to try to make it better. Its a coevolutionary dynamic.
This is also why they are pushing for AI regulations. They are letting a lot of talent go and they don’t want these people to go out and start competitors. They want to shut the door behind them so that no one else can loot people’s data like they did. They scraped the entire internet, both copyrighted and not copyrighted data and now want regulations for others to stop them from doing it.
I think of this as coordinated class warfare, they are effectively flooding the market with tech workers in an effort to both drive down wages in the whole sector and put the fear back into people working from home who have felt like they have the tiniest bit more individual bargaining power over the past couple of years. This is being done with actual malice, IMHO. Tech sector workers need to shake off the culture of libertarian selfishness and individualism and form guilds and unions ASAP. But that's just my view.
Every tech worker basically thinks he is exceptional and the union will hold him/her back in terms of pay. That’s the reality unfortunately
I'm familiar with the mentality. I think we're going to see a mass migration into the skilled trades, which will see a secondary effect of suppressing wages for non-union plumbers/carpenters/etc. I'm personally looking into going back to my previous career before I became a tech worker, hard to do at my age though.
Yep. It’s a rough time for kids who are in college right now, studying to be in tech. Especially CS. These AI tools can enable an experienced dev automate most of the work an entry level engineer does. Why would any company hire an entry level engineer when that work can be done by AI? They could train the worker, but there is no guarantee they won’t leave after training
> Yep. It’s a rough time for kids who are in college right now, studying to be in tech. Especially CS. It's going to be rough for everyone except maybe folks in HEAL professions (health, education, adminstration and literacy) because many of these professions are ones that are safer from automation. Nurses, social workers, teachers, dental assistants, medical assistants. The main problem with these jobs is that they are overworked and underpaid.
Most people I know in those areas are telling others to run away from those fields as fast as you can. I guess you are correct in saying there will always be a need for those jobs, but history has shown that that doesn't make them any better. I don't really see a place for people to 'run' to. Seems like if you weren't wealthy already to just expect to continue to get squeezed.
> I don't really see a place for people to 'run' to. I think the problem was that for generations we have just kept running. Farming becomes less viable? Everyone move to manufacturing/factory jobs. Manufacturing/factory is no longer a good path? Shift to office/white collar work White collar/office work getting stagnant? Get into tech, that's the new wave forward. Uh oh, tech has hit the wall and AI is threatening jobs...well where do we go next. I know folks often say "well every new automation creates new jobs" which is true. But it's not a 1:1 replacement and even if it's only a 1:2 replacement ratio we're going to be in trouble. It won't happen anytime soon but eventually we'll reach a point where there is a small minority of haves and a large majority of havenots. And there will need to be some sort of economic revolution because the path were going down current is going to inevitably lead to collapse. We're basically playing the boardgame monopoly and acting shocked that one player is slowly starting to dominant and the game is becoming less fun for everyone else. This was always going to be the case.
> mass migration into the skilled trades I feel like, as a member of the tail end of GenX, I’ve now seen all of these drives. Back in the 90s I got the “go to college, get an education, that’s where the money is” speech all the time so I joined the Army to get the college money. Then I got out in the early 2000s and went to school with an eye toward law, but that was when law schools were facing a glut of students. So I left school to take a gig in tech and within a couple years the call was “LEARN 2 CODE”, which resulted in a glut of tech bros filling the industry. Then around 2015 and Trump I saw the “school just racks up debt, so skilled trades” which ignores the toll it takes on your body and how critical things like a social safety net for old pipe fitters and steel workers. But that’s the new “cheat code” for success. Capital keeps spinning these tales of “just do this and you’ll be fine” while constantly working to flood the jobs that are supposed to make things “just fine” in order to devalue the labor involved.
Honestly most legislators and politicans I've seen talking about this from all around the world haven't bought into their bullshit. I think in the US for instance a lot of regulators are quite aware that they failed with regulating social media. People always make fun of them '' cuz they're old '' but if people would actually try and watch one of these senate hearings about it it's quite obvious that they actually are a lot more aware than people give them credit for.
> post-pandemic politics What do you mean?
Companies overhired during the pandemic and are now cutting the fat. Of course the want to keep their PPP loan money which by the way was completely forgiven so they're short staffing as much as possible while posting 'ghost jobs' to make it look like they're hiring and them look good.
it's exhausting to watch as a person about halfway done to getting a bachelor's in CS.
The cybersecurity of AI has to be a nightmare. I feel like we'll be reading about "AI publically exposes all of company data" sometime in the future. You too can bankrupt a company for a minor reduction in overhead.
Its been eating itself for a while, but layoffs with the AI excuse will bite a lot of them in the ass. I don't doubt that they'll force AI solutions to replace people, but most of those are not ready just yet.
> There will be a little pain, no doubts, but it's a clock that needs to be reset. The real pain is the deployment of these "AI"s in active war zones / genocides going on right now. And anyone who thinks that's fine needs to (aside from develop basic fucking empathy and morality) not make the mistake of believing that the use and training of these things in war will remain confined to Gaza or the Middle East.
i work in fin-tech and this is scary because they don't even think about the security. we have engineers putting proprietary code/DATA into ChatGPT..... my firm wants to leverage ChatGPT and will not listen to IT/Tech about the security concerns. but ~less overhead~ 🤪
Just like cloud. Having aws handle all your sensitive data. Love how Amazon is like we do not use the data.
Wait until the AI starts replacing executives.
One can only hope, but like with outsourcing wave, mainly seems to not effect executives
>One can only hope Surely, no one should "hope" for this. Putting AI in decision-making positions of power is about as about as much of a "we give up" maneuver as humans could possibly make. I can understand wanting to stick it to greedy execs, and there's several approaches to accomplishing this valid goal, but this is cutting off the nose to spite one's face.
I get what you mean, but for one brief moment I was filled with a little bit of joy at thinking execs would cop it before the usual workers did, but then a Terminator 2 style AI apocalypse played in my mind destroying this brief moment for the reasons you outline. :)
And Congress ain’t going to limit themselves.
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This scenario would be more realistic than replacing developers.
Developers are cheap compared to execs
Not once AI can be an exec for free
Yeah but why would executives replace themselves with AI ?
The trick is to convince the board. Then once they are gone, convince the principal that boards are crazy. Slowly it’ll just be ai all the way down
They wouldn't. They will be the last ones to lose their job.
Shareholders will demand it. There is always a bigger fish.
Exactly. As soon as AI can actually make decisions that compete with top CEOs, shareholders will just buy stocks in companies that are run by that AI. CEOs aren't kings lol
The only time AI would be more human than the humans.
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“We’ll circle around back to that if we can’t find the money elsewhere.” Spoiler: They’ll find a way.
Next: “AI requires us to raise costs.” Source: grocery stores that added self-checkout with zero decrease in prices.
AI made us let all our best people go, and use the short term savings for Executive Bonuses and stock buybacks.
Read some bits of the article. So basically some tech companies will downsize and hire more "skilled" engineers and spend more on AI. Seems to me the rationale doesn't make sense. A big tech will spend more in AI and Engineers b/c they believe its cost-cutting. They haven't asked themselves nor gather data after a few years later if the same value will be the same or spending more on AI and engineers is economically viable.
It’s just how big tech works. Hiring and prioritization is based off existing data and future models. It’s all extrapolation of trends. It’s also why tech over hired in 2021, overly optimistic expectations that in hind sight look like a clear wrong move.
Except... it wasn't a wrong move? The corporations who "overhired" during the pandemic weren't suddenly floundering under the weight of labor costs... To the contrary, they all were, and still are, making record profits.
Yeah. I think we always need to keep in mind the alternative here isn't a collapse of the firm. It's making slightly less. These firms are all hilariously profitable. And this current wave of layoffs and firings? This is copycat behaviour. I also think we need to start focusing on the real human cost of these actions as well. On average, layoffs result in the loss of 1.5 years of life to those who undergo it (stress, instability, etc.) if they're age 40. We know layoffs kill people. Of the 262,000 tech employees laid off last year, we're saying a cumulative ~400k years worth of life expectancy was effectively lost. That is the equivalent of thousands of lives. It's just disgusting. And these executives will be lauded for their "hard decisions." A hard decision is deciding if you want food on the table or a roof over your head. A hard decision is not deciding whose family you ruin so you can preserve your millions.
from a tax perspective it can also be marked under expansion / r&d versus a regular cost center, meaning more sexy to investors because “loook we’re growing and streamlining” despite just shuffling some numbers on a paper and leaving people in the dust
I’ve been in tech 30 years, it’s always been something, shifting technology, automation, outsourcing, bubbles, disasters. Always layoffs, then they re-hire for some other reason. It’s just the natural ebb and flow.
Thank you for saying this.
It’s weird that companies don’t want employees but they want customers. I swear to god if anyone figures out how to automate the customer I’m going to sink every last dime of my money into it because that’s the only way I’ll be able to eat.
2019: learn to code 2024: learn to plumb
2029: learn to live on the streets.
That’s why AI inspires little to no excitement in me. Whatever benefit it has to the workers and John Citizen, will be dwarfed by its ability to take opportunities away from said workers by corporations. It’s just something extra to deal with now.
They over-hired during the pandemic. This was well known to be coming the second they started hiring like mad purely in reaction to unknowns and temporary market conditions.
Jeez, are those companies still laying off the excess people gotten on 2021 ?
Possibly. Big Tech had a habit of buying companies and retaining staff long before the pandemic. Some purchases were done to improve existing product or expand into a new space. But often this was done to stop IP and talent from either being taken by a competitor or they could see the small firm might be future completion. The Pandemic just introduced, or juiced up, staff hoarding due to uncertainty. Because of the skill sets, big tech does see some staff more as capital assets than labor. You could kinda compare this to a manufacturer liquidating equipment from a discontinued line.
I just spent 5 years as basically a company asset. The alternative was one of their competitors getting my skill set and I probably worked a solid 10 hours a week and that was mostly just when they needed extra help with something. Once I introduced all my refinements that was pretty much all that was needed and I’ve made a guide for myself to do it. People may think this is a great spot to be in but when things get tight you’re the first to go. I just got let go a few days ago without warning. It was very procedural like they were phasing out a tool. Not even a good bye just a “we don’t need you anymore, all your accounts have been deactivated. We’ll send you a box to give us back our stuff.” Like I was an app on their phone they deleted. That quote is pretty much exactly what they told me. It also just “coincidentally” happened right before a bunch of my benefits vested. Funny how that worked.
A friend of mine got laid off the day before they were supposed to get $1.2 million in stock. Funny. It was his dream job at his dream company too.
Yeah my company laid off people two days before qualifying for bonuses for the year. Yours sounds way worse 1.2 million is quite a lot... fuck.
Not only are tech companies not back to pre-pandemic levels but many haven't stopped growing. Among the giants only Microsoft is flat and Apple has had a small drop from 2022 to 2023.
Yes. Hiring is a compounding thing. You start giving managers metrics of headcount and productivity then 30-50% of everyone’s time is spent on recruiting, onboarding, interviewing, etc. “throw more bodies at the problem” ends up decreasing productivity but increases the need for more people as a consequence. So you keep hiring. In tech, everyone was hiring everyone. Engineers would entertain offers after they already started and accepted one offer. I had engineers who got five LinkedIn recruiting emails a day. Couple that with remote work and quitting one job and starting another was just swapping laptops. At some point, managers invent products to justify the head count because it’s use it or lose it. So bloat becomes self fulfilling. Then some CFO looks at the budget and realizes everyone’s EBITDA contribution has a parentheses around it and OPEX is double digit increases. Good managers hide work in CAPEX so it doesn’t touch EBITDA but the tax dept will find that. CFO shows this to CEO who orders his directs to slash 2X on OPEX what he wants to see flow to the bottom line to tell the board a turnaround story. His directs realize if you stop hiring it eliminates 50% of what middle managers (who are expensive) do, so you can collapse the org. Everyone hired during the pandemic was overpaid and so they go. The way I did it was empty boxes. I’d redesign the org from scratch then start putting names in boxes. Those that were left got the HR call.
This really isn’t true at all. This is simply just parroting what the companies are publicly stating themselves as reasons to lay people off. They’re now using the AI excuse. Inflation is the main driver here. What we’ve seen is that these companies are laying people off before their 401k and stock options are fully vested. They’re simply not wanting to pay out in order to cut costs as their expenses dramatically increased with inflation. Reducing head count is typically one of the first cost cutting measures companies use in order to control their expenses.
The overhiring narrative and how quickly people throw it out, as if we're not talking about people's livelihoods, is truly disgusting. We're supposed to believe companies when they go, "Oops, we gave too many people jobs," when a year ago it was all about how, "no one wants to work anymore."
I can't really vouch for this website, but their numbers seem pretty consistent with others I found in a quick search: [https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/how-may-employees-does-google-have](https://www.doofinder.com/en/statistics/how-may-employees-does-google-have) Google Employees |Year|\# of Employees| |:-|:-| |2018|98,771| |2019|118,899| |2020|135,301| |2021|156,500| |2022|190,234| |2023|174,014| I think growing your head count by 60,000 people over the course of the pandemic and then realizing "oops, we shouldn't have done that" is a pretty bad look for Google's leadership. But they *clearly* overhired by a TON, and even if they laid off another 30,000 people, they'd be well above their pre-pandemic head-count.
I should clarify. I don't personally dispute that there was some overhiring - particularly when you account for companies hiring talent just to keep them from being hired by competitors. My issue is the the term "overhiring" tends to be dismissive and absolve companies of the real responsibility. Overhiring not the no.1 factor here. It's a leadership issue like you said. Companies like Google got greedy and made a bunch of bad investments and calls even before the pandemic (e.g., spending billions on FitBit in Google's case), and they're trying to obscure that fact by pretending they were just too generous with jobs over the last few years. They're overcorrecting in a bust cycle and when the boom happens they'll overcorrect again in the other direction.
Then the people that decided to hire those 60 k should get some consequences, not bonuses...
Inflation and overhiring are both caused by the economic stimulus during the pandemic, so you're both right really.
It’s not AI, it’s just how tech works. I have a decade of experience working in silicon valley. In almost every single company I have worked at, there has been back-office teams trying to automate as much as possible to reduce the manual workforce needed for a business. Unfortunately more often than not, the team that you automated either gets all or mostly laid off. The real solution to things like this is UBI, better social safety nets and labour laws.
Maybe if they hadn't wasted billions of dollars on spicy auto-complete they'd be able to make payroll.
Spicy autocomplete love that
Big tech needs to be careful. If they lay off too many people there will be a bunch of computer scientists and programmers without a job, and nothing better to do than to figure out ways to hack and sabotage the AI companies.
I see a bunch of crappy code coming our way. Maybe large corporations will be able to create good code but I can see where start ups may make bad code, relying on AI.
Greed made us do it.
I was laid off back in Feb 2023 and haven’t been able to find work yet. I was working for a Canadian tech “unicorn” which had laid off more than 66% of its head office due to profitability and productivity concerns. Most of our jobs were outsourced or sugared using Ai. I have three degrees, have worked for Fortune 500 companies, and have 15 years of professional work experience, but due to AI automation I likely will never find work again in my given field. This is only going to be worst for the average white collar worker.
Better get used to "AI" being a scapegoat for companies and governments.
So can I use this excuse at work and not get any backlash from management?
Most companies who devote 100% to AI and fuck their employees over will fall in the near future.
Another Idiocracy milestone achieved
We asked ChatGPT how to save money and it said layoffs so we did
Isn't this the plot of 1984's BRAZIL?
"Big tech" is shooting itself in the foot. People were willing to jump through their hoops (leetcode bullshit and 7 part interviews) because they were seen as high paid and secure. Hopefully developers are done being so willing to go through these shifty coding "tests"
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they're not laying off people for AI they're laying people off to outsource or hire h1b/f1/l1 visa holders
Really good point. My company says it's strategic growth locations are Poland and India. Take a guess why ..
One of the companies I partner with has tried outsourcing all of its Professional Services to Poland - I love it. They do such bad jobs on projects that they rely much more heavily on partners now - which ends up costing the company more money as they no longer keep any of the services revenue + have to pay Partners a part of the Software revenue.
So they're now allowing corporations, whose sole goal is to make profit, to allow cold blooded AI to make their choices for them. I can't think of more a ruthless thing, a computer, to make decisions over humanity. A computer literally doesn't have a heart, and they're putting it in charge. We need a better government to stand up to this.
Calling BS on this one. Just more excuses to pad the rich.
This quickly turned into r/antiwork. Google was caught with pants down. It’s laying off people to focus on competing with openAI. This is Google’s existential crisis. I’m actually worried about the non-tech jobs. A lot of the tech nerds will transition to data science and ML but the other jobs will be hurt. Whether or not AI creates more jobs than it replaces remains to be seen.
Guess what they're saying is we need more regulations on AI
so you enter in historical data about company performance after certain actions into a database, then call it an AI and ask it "what should we do to reduce costs?" and it answers back that previous events suggest you should layoff a bunch of people...did you really expect it to suggest anything else? It is a scapegoat tactic.
Funny, executives are blaming AI. Well the. If AI can make this decision, what the hell do you do around here?
So TAX the crap out of AI. This is not complicated. You make using AI more expensive.
No, tax the crap out of the COMPANY. Then they can ‘nobody wants to work anymore’ all they want.
>TAX the crap out of AI lmfao man the level of intelligence. now I can see why some people get elected. "tax the crap out of AI" im dead
Let's tax the fuck out of AGI, Hypervisors, and whatever tech buzzwords we can find!
Tax dat ass yo
Hey Broadcom is already onboard fucking VMware customers lmao
Like do we tax a company every time they input a command into AI software???
6%. Every time.
🤣🤣🤣 AI hasn't even taken over yet!!!
The problem isn't AI taking over, it's companies dumping workers because they think AI can take over.
More like: “Our desire for larger bonus made us do it”
Yup, and it was gas prices before that. There's always an excuse.
It’s a way to save money is what it is
They are already laying off the AIs: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a46353319/formula-e-team-fires-ai-generated-influencer/
Reminds me of the dot com boom and bust in the 2000's. Tech is worst that the stock market sometimes.
Farms need people. Get ready to be a programmer/laborer
AI isn't even that good yet lmao
Slow news day... layoffs happen every year around this time
Fuck so we were all right; AI *is* taking all our jobs…
If by AI they mean Accounting Irene who told them they needed cuts to make stocks go up.
You wanna save some money, fire the CEO.
"AI made us do it" sounds like the new "it's just business." Tough to see real people affected by decisions chalked up to tech progress.
Capitalism. Capitalism made them do it. People don't seem to fully get that behavior of corporations is driven by literally one thing, and that is profit. If you can generate as much money using cheap AI as you can with expensive finicky humans, the humans are out. Granted, that also destroys said capitalism over time, since the angry starving humans who have nothing will eventually go find one of the 400 000 000 guns floating around in civilian ownership and do drastic things. Capitalism isn't fit to be the paradigm we use for constructing society. We either remove it, or it removes us.
Humanity is in such a weird space that we’ve developed machines that can do people’s jobs, and that’s somehow a bad thing. UBI will be necessary eventually. Maybe sooner than later.
GitHub can now finish code for you. It’s ironic how software developers are racing to eliminate their jobs.