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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet?

In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at Google/Microsoft.

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I work at a big tech company and there is a complete ban on coding using LLMs. The fear is sending our code for the model to learn in the future. This is also why then hype around GTP4-powered Office is overhyped. Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets

Until an on-prem solution is offered, many of these companies won't get anything out of the technology

The layoffs at big tech are caused by un-even profit generating, Where 5% or 20% of the company generate 99.9% of income. The rest are essentially startups being funded by rich VCs. Eventually if you don't find PMF the VC cuts the funding

> Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets

Aren't they already doing this, if your documents are in Sharepoint or Google Drive? I have assumed so, but with no basis

For big companies, that on-prem solution is coming sooner rather than later. For small companies, plenty of them (likely the large majority) will be very willing to take the "risk" for the save in labour costs.

> Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets.

Which is why Microsoft will be able to charge outrageous fees for enterprise plans that keep employees' queries to GPT private and out of future training sets. I do not think on prem will be successful, though, the hardware requirements are fairly substantial and specialized.

How do you reconcile what you just said with the massive popularity of cloud services? The source code is already sitting in the same data center the LLM GPUs are sitting in.

Of course there are some businesses too paranoid to use the cloud, but even intelligence agencies are on board these days.

Probably because people view the cloud as their data in someone else's hands, but AI companies view data as fair game for ingestion, since "they just learn like humans, and you allow humans to view your data, right?".

With cloud services, there's some expectation that your stuff is private. Copilot is like doing all your cloud development with an anonymous FTP server.

In general demand for programmers has been growing over the long term. So if the baseline is an upward trend, these tools can have a demand-reducing effect and the overall demand can still be going up just at a lesser rate.

Or it could be flat or go down - my point is that one thing reducing demand doesn't necessarily mean that demand is going down.

If your job is nothing but writing the kind of boilerplate code that Copilot gets somewhat right, you probably should lose your job.

Everyone I know is understaffed. I think the outcome is roadmaps deliver more reliably not reduce headcount.

Seems strange with all the layoffs

That’s companies preparing for the artificial recession the fed is launching us into to ensure Twinkie’s don’t cost $0.05 more.

Sometimes thinking that you are understaffed is actually caused by being overstaffed. The reason is that having a lot of people introduces tons of overheads and coordination costs, that reduce your time for your main work.

Lol the cope here is unbelievable. Let me guess, the people that are “just overhead” and “reduces time for main work” are everyone else, not you, right?

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