[colesantiago]

Bluntly, Yes.

There will be less jobs out there for software engineers since AI can pretty much do them for cheap and very fast, OpenAI talked about driving down the cost of intelligence, and now this is what is happening for all models that are being released.

Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer.

The company I was in was so fascinated by this that they closed job openings for junior employees, laid them off, and are thinking about laying off some senior engineers after carrying out a trial of AI tools like cursor, copilot and others.

I can only imagine the same thing is happening across other companies and especially startups that cannot afford many senior engineers, they will just use AI and only one senior engineer.

Expect more layoffs and less job openings unfortunately.

[philipswood]

Counterintuitively decreasing the cost of development might actually drive up the demand.

A lot of potential software currently can't be cost effectively developed - so it isn't.

More startups with a single senior engineer (augmented by AI) becomes possible at a lower price point.

We might actually end up with more work. And an altered kind of work

[cinntaile]

> Right now LLM’s like GPT-4o and Claude have gotten to the intelligence of a mid-level level engineer.

LLMs have no intelligence at all, they don't reason.

[colesantiago]

> LLMs have no intelligence at all, they don't reason.

So the benchmarks (1) of LLM's like Claude 3.5 are categorically flawed at reasoning and they will never get better?

Yet their outputs are heuristically good enough to reduce jobs from engineers by driving the cost of code generation down to almost 0.

If we take the idea that you believe that it cannot reason at all in any capacity, as whole it would be regretful for you to bet against these systems not getting better or that another breakthrough would change the perspective of a new generation of LLMs.

(1) https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet

[cinntaile]

Anthropic is an AI company, it's evident that they want their system to seem intelligent. That's what they're selling after all.

> it would be regretful for you to bet against these systems not getting better or that another breakthrough would change the perspective of a new generation of LLMs.

Now you're putting words in my mouth. The results are impressive for sure, although I don't think we have seen any major breakthroughs since their original release. Just small, incremental steps. I'm not convinced that'll get us to reasoning capabilities but I don't mind being proven wrong. Predicting the future is hard.