[jrecyclebin]

Something of a logical leap here: if LLMs aren't capable of replacing workers and it's all lies, then what company is going to engage in mass layoffs without seeing results first? Sounds like companies that deserve to go away.

[miltonlost]

> If LLMs aren't capable of replacing workers and it's all lies, then what company is going to engage in mass layoffs without seeing results first?

We see companies layoff workers for all sorts of short-sighted reasons. They'll mass layoff to reduce labor costs for short term profits and stock price increases, so the execs and shareholders can cash out. AI is just the current reason the executive class has decided to use for the layoffs they were going to do regardless.

[dredmorbius]

Further: business and management are exceptionally fad-driven, for numerous information-theoretic reasons.

Performance is difficult to measure and slow to materialise. At the same time, everyone, especially senior leadership and managers, is desperately competitive, even where that competition is on the perception rather than reality of performance. There's a very strong follow-the-herd / follow-the-leader(s) mentality, often itself driven by core investors and creditors.

A consequence is a tremendous amount of cargo-culting, in the sense of aping the manifest symbols of successful (or at least investor-favoured) firms and organisations, even where those policies and strategies end up incurring long-term harms.

Then there's the apparent winner-take-all aspect of AI, which if true would result in tremendous economic power, if not necessarily financial gains, to a very small number of incumbents. Look at the earlier fallout of the railroad, oil, automobile, and electronics industries for similar cases.

(I've found over the years various lists of companies which were either acquired or went belly-up in earlier booms, they're instructive.)

NB: you'll find fad-prone fields anywhere a similar information-theoretic environment exists: fashion, arts, academics, government, fine food, wine collecting, off the top of my head. Oh, and for some reason: software development.

[jrecyclebin]

Yep, those are the companies that would go away.

[neuronic]

LLMs are just a stock price preserving excuse to do layoffs from previous overhiring.

[pessimizer]

Yes. A lot of these people should have been laid off anyway. The Musk Twitter massacre taught everybody a lesson, and layoffs were hot before AI was even the main concern.

Also, the DEI massacre is probably going to develop (or has developed) into a full scale HR/Social PR massacre. Instead of getting yelled at for doing the wrong thing, better to do nothing but make more money. And a side-benefit is that firing all of those people makes it even easier to fire more people. (Is that the singularity?)

I don't doubt that some industries are going to be nearly wiped out by AI, but they're going to be the ones that make sense. LLMs are basically super-google translate, and translators and maybe even language teachers are in deep trouble. In-betweeners and special effects people might be in even more trouble than they already were. Probably a lot more stuff that we can't even foresee yet. But for people doing actual thinking work, they're just a tool that feeds back to you what you already know in different words. Super useful to help you think but it isn't thinking for you, it's a moron.

[sph]

> for people doing actual thinking work, they're just a tool that feeds back to you what you already know in different words. Super useful to help you think but it isn't thinking for you, it's a moron.

Beautiful description of AI. It’s the tech equivalent of the placebo effect. It does truly work for some, until you look closely and it’s actually a bunch of hot air.

Is a placebo worth a trillion dollars?

[rhetocj23]

Yeah exactly. The question should always be - are these layoffs incremental because of AI? If not, then they should not count in this kind of analysis.

[riffraff]

> The Musk Twitter massacre taught everybody a lesson

Well, depends on which lesson. "The company can still run" or "we actually won't build anything new for years".

Twitter released a couple things that were being worked on before the acquisition, and then nothing else (grok comes from a different company which later was merged into it, but obviously had different employees).

[surgical_fire]

> The Musk Twitter massacre taught everybody a lesson

That companies can be kept on KTLO mode with only a skeleton crew?

I think everybody knew that already. The hot takes that Twitter was going to disappear were always silly, probably from people butthurt that a service they liked was being fundamentally changed.

[pier25]

Or maybe companies are letting people go for other reasons and blaming it on AI?