I don't trust most CEOs perspectives on AI at all, they are far too removed from the actual work to know what AI can and can't do.
When I hear a CEO say this, what I hear is that they are going to use AI as an excuse to do massive layoffs to juice stock price and then cash out before the house of cards comes tumbling down. Every public company CEOs dream. The GE model in the age of AI.
Will AI drastically reshape industries and careers? Absolutely. Do currently CEOs understand or even care how (outside of making them richer in the next few quarters)? No.
CEOs are just marketing to investors with ridiculous claims because their products have stagnated. (See Benioffs recent claim that 50% of work at Salesforce is AI. Maybe that is why it sucks so much)
The argument, I think, is that if AI cannot actually replace these jobs, either other companies will pop up to fill the holes, or they will quickly reverse their position once negative results start coming in.
Sure, you can have all of SalesForce run entirely by AI, but people may just find a better solution that actually works. Claude ran a vending machine after all, but it was deemed a failure.
So yeah, maybe there's a rocky month or two, and I'm not trying to downplay the severity of that...but the demand for the roles these services fulfill will still exist, and become market opportunities
At some point the people who were laid off start competing against the company they used to work for at a fraction of the price. A company that only has a few real people and the rest AI that has cushy executive margins can be out priced by those who have access to the same AI features and just want a reasonable wage.
We could also see CEO wages fall as their job can be done by anyone because of AI.
And then the ~~outsourcing~~ AI replacement may slow down or reverse.
Its happened before, it'll happen again, and ~~Visual Basic~~ AI may or may not change the landscape. I'm not that impressed with the current guise, but after a few revisions it may be better.
I actually thought LLMs worked well (and I do a lot of LLM work) until a couple of days ago when I started trying to do some weird things and ended up in hallucination land, and it didn't matter what model I used.
Literally everything hallucinated even basic things, like what named parameters a function had etc.
It made me think that the core of the benefit of LLMs is that, even though they may not be smart, at least they've read what they need to answer the question you have, but if they haven't-- if there isn't much data on the software framework, not very many examples, etc., then nothing matters, and you can't really feed in the whole of vLLM. You actually need the companies running the AI to come up with training exercises for it, train on the code, train it on answering questions about the code, ask it to write up different simple variations of things in the code, etc.
So you really need to use LLMs to see the limits, and use them on 'weird' stuff, frameworks no one imagines that anyone will mess with. Even being a researcher and fiddling with improving LLMs every day may not be enough to see their limits, because they come very suddenly and then any accuracy or relevance goes away completely.
It's an easy thing to say without giving specific time frames. At least when Elon makes grand pronouncements he risks getting it horribly wrong.
"told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools."
Here's a time-frame a bit more specific then "in the coming years", but still vague:
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years"
Repeating a comment I've read on HN before: Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well. Minimising the number of people coming through Gate 1 will necessarily reduce the number of people going through Gate 2 (yes, you can hire in people to go straight through Gate 2, but they'll have had to go through Gate 1 somewhere).
I knew a great graphics design artist ... really talented. Besides logos, slogans, art she could run print lines. Then www came out and she became despondent. Any fool can do this now she said. She was in NYC at the time. I told her 82 million times yes, but the top 10% can now charge more for the discerning customer who didn't want the bottom 75% of junk. She didn't buy that. And gave up. It's a shame in a way.
There are always more entry level jobs, and some number of those entry level staff will inevitably exit the field or fail to progress to senior levels.
The only fields where this is not true are where the entry level pipeline has disappeared, but that’s a temporary effect because those more senior people will eventually move on also.
The first line is just some cope people use to tell themselves they are different.
Someone using AI won't "take" your job, they'll just get more done than you and when the company inevitably fires more people because AI can continue to do more work autonomously, the first people to go will be the people not producing as much (i.e, the people not using AI).
In the limit both groups are getting their jobs taken by AI. Knowing how to use AI is not some special skill.
It's the opposite.Every use case needs its own distinct workflow ("context engineering"). We need a massive amount of engineers in order to implement LLMs in real-world business environments.
But in most cases, LLMs will be prompted by practitioners, i.e. designers who mockup designs in Figma, engineers who generate code in their IDE - and then invariably need to correct it.
All in all, LLMs will cause an employment boom if widely adopted.
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When I hear a CEO say this, what I hear is that they are going to use AI as an excuse to do massive layoffs to juice stock price and then cash out before the house of cards comes tumbling down. Every public company CEOs dream. The GE model in the age of AI.
Will AI drastically reshape industries and careers? Absolutely. Do currently CEOs understand or even care how (outside of making them richer in the next few quarters)? No.
CEOs are just marketing to investors with ridiculous claims because their products have stagnated. (See Benioffs recent claim that 50% of work at Salesforce is AI. Maybe that is why it sucks so much)
Sure, you can have all of SalesForce run entirely by AI, but people may just find a better solution that actually works. Claude ran a vending machine after all, but it was deemed a failure.
So yeah, maybe there's a rocky month or two, and I'm not trying to downplay the severity of that...but the demand for the roles these services fulfill will still exist, and become market opportunities
We could also see CEO wages fall as their job can be done by anyone because of AI.
Its happened before, it'll happen again, and ~~Visual Basic~~ AI may or may not change the landscape. I'm not that impressed with the current guise, but after a few revisions it may be better.
Literally everything hallucinated even basic things, like what named parameters a function had etc.
It made me think that the core of the benefit of LLMs is that, even though they may not be smart, at least they've read what they need to answer the question you have, but if they haven't-- if there isn't much data on the software framework, not very many examples, etc., then nothing matters, and you can't really feed in the whole of vLLM. You actually need the companies running the AI to come up with training exercises for it, train on the code, train it on answering questions about the code, ask it to write up different simple variations of things in the code, etc.
So you really need to use LLMs to see the limits, and use them on 'weird' stuff, frameworks no one imagines that anyone will mess with. Even being a researcher and fiddling with improving LLMs every day may not be enough to see their limits, because they come very suddenly and then any accuracy or relevance goes away completely.
"told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools."
Here's a time-frame a bit more specific then "in the coming years", but still vague:
"Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years"
Repeating a comment I've read on HN before: Following on from cutting down entry-level jobs must imply cutting down on all those next levels up as well. Minimising the number of people coming through Gate 1 will necessarily reduce the number of people going through Gate 2 (yes, you can hire in people to go straight through Gate 2, but they'll have had to go through Gate 1 somewhere).
Followed by a huge boom in salaries once the workforce shrinks.
For example, go look at the hourly wage of a cobol programmer.
Only if the amount of employees in each level is uniform.
I.e. if there are more entry level jobs than senior that wouldn't necessary be true.
The only fields where this is not true are where the entry level pipeline has disappeared, but that’s a temporary effect because those more senior people will eventually move on also.
That someone is your co-worker and will soon be your co-worker's co-worker.
I don't see how the rate of job creation can come close to the rate job loss we'll see for a few years.
Other comments here say things like lower 80% will be laid off etc. but current LLMs are more like bottom 10% would be laid off, maybe.
Someone using AI won't "take" your job, they'll just get more done than you and when the company inevitably fires more people because AI can continue to do more work autonomously, the first people to go will be the people not producing as much (i.e, the people not using AI).
In the limit both groups are getting their jobs taken by AI. Knowing how to use AI is not some special skill.
Article via Mint.
Then we can hire more on-shore faces and use them to actually deliver what we have them sell. Think of the profits. Execute.
But in most cases, LLMs will be prompted by practitioners, i.e. designers who mockup designs in Figma, engineers who generate code in their IDE - and then invariably need to correct it.
All in all, LLMs will cause an employment boom if widely adopted.