Openai Eats Jobs, Then Offers to Help You Find a New One at Walmart

Let's reduce headcount and spin it as AI disruption! That way we dont have to acknowledge we overhired during covid AND our stock price will go to the moon as they say.

Companies like IBM & Klarna have made news for reducing positions like these & then re-hiring them.

AI, like most tech, will increase productivity & reduce headcount but it's not there yet. Remember, the days are long & the years are short.

This is to say that we know from looking at outcomes over the long term that the kinds of concrete gains you're describing are offset by subtler kinds of losses which most likely you would struggle to describe as decimal numbers but which are equally real in their impact on your business.

Gemini "analysis" looks superficially detailed but if you actually do any deep dive (or even a shallow dive) you're going to start finding all the things its wrong about because it's not actually analyzing anything; its just connecting most likely words together. Very crucial, because of the ways LLMs work, they can't generate any conclusion that isn't already in its data set. But it's exactly those sorts of non-obvious conclusions that are the reason you hire people to do Finance.

Will AI eventually take over these kinds of jobs? Sure, in 10 to 20 years when actual AI exists. But LLMs aren't AI. They're just brute-force black box machine learning algorithms.

AI is an entropy machine for everything it touches. Companies that runs off of AI is a zombie company. Without people to understand an industry, what does your company ad? Without people to see new revenue streams, new directions, and most importantly NEW RISKS to your business model, you are a dead zombie company living off what the previous living, growing company built. But does that matter to owners when they get $500,000 more a year in their pockets?

Except it seems like the opposite is happening. CS grads have high unemployment. Companies laying off staff.

The rhetoric doesn't seem to add up to the reality.

Do you use tech to grow your business or increase dividends?

Also reducing staff via attrition shows far better management skills than layoffs which imo says more about the CEO & upper management.

I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates.

There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.

When he retired a few years ago, most of that was gone. The attorneys and paralegals were still required, there was a single receptionist for the whole office (who also did accounting) instead of about one for each attorney, and they'd added an IT person... but between Outlook and Microsoft Word and LexisNexis and the fileserver, all of those jobs working with paper were basically gone. They managed their own schedules (in digital Outlook calendars, of course), answered their own (cellular) phones, searched for documents with the computers, digitally typeset their own documents, and so on.

I'm an engineer working in industrial automation, and see the same thing: the expensive part of the cell isn't the $250k CNC or the $50k 6-axis robots or the $1M custom integration, those can be amortized and depreciated over a couple years, it's the ongoing costs of salaries and benefits for the dozen humans who are working in that zone. If you can build a bowl screw feeder and torque driver so that instead of operating an impact driver to put each individual screw in each individual part, you simply dump a box of screws in the hopper once an hour, and do that for most of the tasks... you can turn a 12-person work area into a machine that a single person can start, tune, load, unload, and clean.

The same sort of thing is going to happen - in our lifetimes - to all kinds of jobs.

My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.

AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI.

Maybe AI exposes other inefficiencies.

you get HR's glossy `Exit Packet' with a cover of a pristine chartered white catamaran on the translucent aquamarine Carribbean in a palm treed cove, afloat with bikini babes lounging on deck, five minutes to fill your cardboard box, and manhandled by two security wide-shouldered bulls squeezing your arms to your sides gripped under your forearms, marching you down the aisle with rubber-knecking wide-eyed heads watching you repeatedly slip, fall forward, the experienced bulls lowering your arms to regain your shoes' purchase with the carpet, hurriedly packing you into the elevator with silent ignominious stares and hushed whispers of those packed in around you, then past hot Tanya at Reception in front of every Tom, Dick, Irene, and Harry, out the main revolving glass door entrance, into the overcast dishwater grey and miserable wind blown wet in truth is Seattle, to the sidewalk, left at the curb -furthest from proper and successful glitterati as possible.

All double-time haste, signalling to everyone get this despicable loser/criminal POS off the property, fast.

Its over, you're done. Sooner than you thought possible, you're freezing in a tent wasting days into months: tailing-downward foodbank boxes, the TIDE(tm) pee-bottle, those el-cheapo dirty gloves with the tips cut off, dirty layered thriftstore fleeces, its under filthy roaring I-5 for you pal, and your ilk of dangerous insane addict-crazed zombies screaming outside your hideous blue-tarped tent, and where's the knife.

The answer to the fundamental question of your entire existence and net worth has reduced to simply ask: "How do I best empty my bowels"?

ICEstapo hunter/killers gunning for you, to flush you offshore unseen and forgotten forever. You better run, you better run your ass off. Why didn't you study harder all those wasted years?!

Welcome to Sam Altman's Club.

Initially machine translation was way worse (by professional standards) than people assumed, essentially useless, you had to rewrite everything.

As time went on, and translation got better, the workflow shifted from doing it yourself to doing a machine pass, and rewriting it to be good enough. (Machine translation today is still just 'okay', not professional quality)

On the initially set rates 15 years ago you could eke out a decent-ish salary (good even if you worked lots of hours and were fast). Today if you tried to do the work by hand, you'd starve to death.

The question is no longer whether AI will put people out of work, but how many and how quickly.

And the sick thing is that the company that tries to be smart longer term won't be able to compete with the short term companies that cut as much as possible using AI to maximize short term benefits. Long term these 'cut everything' AI leaning zombie companies won't last, but they will last long enough to undercut and take out the longer term thinking companies with them.

AI is an entropy machine. It sucks all momentum from everything it touches.

There is so much else that people do. So many details that are just being ignored because of short term 'gains' that justify ignoring so many details.

The book, however, is excellent- definitely recommend.

They are pursuing profits. Their ethical focus is essentially a form of theater.

This time the purported capabilities of "AI" are a direct attack on thinking. Outsourcing thinking is creepy and turns humans into biorobots. It is different from robotic welding in an assembly line.

Even if new bullshit jobs are created, the work will just be that of a human photocopier.

[All this is written under the assumption that "AI" works, which it does not but which is the premise assumed by the persons quoted in the Register article.]

All the good devs that I know aren't worried about losing their jobs, they are happy there is a shortcut through boilerplate and documentation. They are also equally unhappy about having to talk management, who know very little about the world of dev, off the ledge as they are getting ready to jump off with their AI wings that will fail.

Finally, the original point was about censorship and controlling of information, not automating jobs.

What rational worker would want to take part in this?

It's more about a logical outcome. Automating scripts means existing employees can do other or more work.

AI doesn't feel like that at all. it wants to automate labor itself. And no country has the structure ready for that sort of "post work" world.