[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.