[ChatGTP]

This would imply there is an “end of work”. If these things are so good at augmenting your work, why would Google not keep their engineers, augment them with LLMs and just be more profitable and productive with the same number of people ? What does the lay off part get them ? Why be “just as productive” if you could be moar productive?

The fully replacing people thing would be if we had an AGI in which case I’ll be using one to augment myself and stay on top of the game.

[wonderwonder]

Because that's not how the real world works. Any product has a real world limit on the amount of money it can generate. Only so many companies are going to subscribe to product X. There are only so many customers in a particular niche.

Your assumption is that generating more work = more profit.

The idea that just adding more engineers leads to more money is an obvious fallacy. Cutting engineers though and continuing to receive the same income is an obvious way to increase net profit.

[ChatGTP]

Because that's not how the real world works. Any product has a real world limit on the amount of money it can generate.

Yes it is, I’ve never seen “the end of work”, have you ?

Google has an unlimited amount of issues to solve. I read about them here everyday. ChatGPT is even an existential threat to their search, if not directly, then through the internet becoming a huge piece of AI spam.

LLMs are not why Google is laying people off.

[wonderwonder]

No one is talking about or implying the end of work except you. What I am saying is that if a company can do more work with less people they will do it.

"Google has an unlimited amount of issues to solve" sure but that does not lead to profits otherwise they would just hire as many people as they could and make more money. Again that's not how it works.

"LLMs are not why Google is laying people off." Guess we will find out soon: https://dataconomy.com/2024/01/03/report-google-ai-layoffs-2...

[ChatGTP]

We don’t if that’s the real reason or the advertised reason that they’re laying people off. If was an investor I’d prefer the "AI is making us money for nothing story". But I know blog spam is also screwing their product up. It’s why I pay for an alternative search engine.

Ironically AI seems like a huge problem for Google's main business. Even if what you're saying is true, and all the layoffs are because of AI productivity gains. Well guess what? Other people can use AI to build cheap advertising businesses too? AI is cheap and it's getting cheaper, thanks to open source AI, it's accessible to everyone.

What I've come to realize is that, it's not Youtube that's valuable, or Google, or even Open AI, it's the information these things are providing access too. The information people are creating for them. The communities.

Now it seems like accessing that information is becoming democratized in a way that Google never really planned for. Soon I might be able to have something that can generate a youtube video for any topic I need, without youtube, just locally on my laptop or phone. That's going to be a problem for them. They know this.