[JumpCrisscross]

> If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper

This is, in my opinion, tripe. SWEs are being laid off because of post-Covid over-hiring. The only evidence for labour destruction is in junior hires. But not because anyone is being fired, but because entry-level jobs are being cannibalised.

[Ekaros]

In general economy that is not the stock market is looking less and less great. Answer to this is to tighten the belt and that means losing employees. Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

[visarga]

> Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

Nobody can make a profit with AI. Any clever idea can be cloned with AI, competition makes it unprofitable. No moat, no arbitrage opportunity. "During the gold rush, the only people making money were the men selling shovels."

We can definitely do amazing things with AI, and it makes us have superpowers, but so does everyone else. My competition also uses AI. I have to keep up with an AI powered competition now.

[JumpCrisscross]

The shovels are the datacenters. China and America are building them. Even after the valuations puff out, that infrastructure will remain as a massive competitive advantage to those economies.

[ben_w]

I am not convinced this will be true. The big piles of GPUs make sense when the models will change multiple times before the hardware fails; but when there's no more money for rapidly training models, the best can be encoded as circuits in much more energy efficient hardware, rendering even the new power supply infrastructure for the data centres useless.