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I am convinced that the mass layoffs are occurring because forward-thinking executives can see that AI agents are coming to replace employees faster than most people expect. By doing layoffs early they can cut staff before public opinion shifts to questioning AI as the motive, as opposed to "the economy".

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Why are you convinced of this?

From what I can see, GPT-4 is incredibly useful but you have to be very careful to lead it in the correct direction otherwise it produces bad outputs. I say this as somebody that probably uses it every 10 minutes. Do you think that it will stop making errors of judgment and be able to behave as an agent soon?

I've not encountered anything yet that gives me faith in that, other than hype about it increasing in ability exponentially which seems unlikely.

> I say this as somebody that probably uses it every 10 minutes

Do you feel like your ability to produce correct output with GPT improved with practice? If so, then eventually you might reach a point where you get 99.99% accuracy with it, and this can easily 10x your productivity.

No, that's not really what has happened. If you ask a question, it tends to mean you lack knowledge about something, and therefore you don't have enough context to produce a question that perfectly teases out the correct answer from GPT. Instead what happens is that you have to carefully engage in conversation and iterate towards improving GPTs context and your understanding of what it is saying well enough to ask it more incisive questions or to correct obvious inconsistencies in what it has communicated.

I was thinking more of a situation where you have a good understanding of the subject, just using GPT to generate a solution for you.

That’s a level of confidence, preparation and forward thinking that would be uncharacteristic. The reality is that everyone else is cutting staff so it’s become expected. And because it’s expected and happening throughout the industry it’s a lot easier to do a layoff or two now than it was a year ago

It’s not because it’s “expected” in the abstract. It’s because everyone is competing for money with the US Treasury, and the rates on those Treasury bills are looking better than they have in a long long while.

Did you have a growth business that’s going to be 50% bigger in 10 years? A few years ago that would sound not-amazing but reasonable. Today that’s nothing. You can get that kind of returns from bonds with like zero risk.

Firms therefore prioritize savings like they haven’t done in years.

> because forward-thinking executives can see

If that is what they are "seeing" then based on their collective track record it is almost certain to not happen.

AI agents might be replacing jobs in the future, so executives are cutting profit generating employees in the present?

> profit generating employees

Good professionals are being hit by these layoffs, but I suspect the vast majority create little to no value for their employers.

The point is that if they are not letting go of employees for economic reasons i.e. they are no longer economically viable because of the environment, then they must be getting rid of them while the employees are actively valuable? otherwise the AI agent argument holds no water, because the employees aren't creating value anyway, so their dismissal is orthogonal to the AI agent question.

No, mass layoffs are happening because companies overhired like crazy. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...)

Meta / Google employees 2019: 44k / 118k

Meta / Google employees 2022: 86k / 190k

Even after these layoffs virtually all companies retain way more employees than they had three years ago.

Let's see what remains of ChatGPT after I finish my demo of a chatbot that aims to replace politicians and NYT writes an article about it.

Wouldn’t the “public opinion” be more understanding if it was clear AI was able to replace humans?

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