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Comment by LPisGood | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think AI is meaningfully taking any jobs. Just like return to office mandates, it is just more cover to do layoffs in less than prosperous economic conditions.

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It's not the same as "AI replacing humans", but seems clear that the launch of ChatGPT led to dramatic cuts of NLP researchers. [1][2]

For instance, at HuggingFace:

> A few days after that, Thom Wolf, who was my manager at Hugging Face and also one of the co-founders, messages me, “Hey, can you get on a call with me ASAP?” He told me that they had fired people from the research team and that the rest would either be doing pre-training or post-training — which means that you are either building a foundation model or you’re taking a foundation model and making it an instruction-following model, similar to ChatGPT.

[1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11rizyb/d_...

It’s only natural that a breakthrough new way of doing $thing would lead to dramatic cuts in people who are experts in the old way of doing $thing, right? Doesn’t matter what $thing is. (Tons of examples, automated phone switches replacing telephone operators, online booking sites replacing travel agents, etc etc.)

That giant shock to the NLP research community is more than two years old now. It would be interesting to hear from people affected by that today, I'd like to know what they ended up doing in response.

That's true. From the quanta article it looks like many affected researchers went on to work on LLMs successfully.

I do wonder how people are adjusting to similar, ongoing shocks across other industries. For instance, the ArtStation protest against AI art a couple years ago showed widespread hostility towards the technology. In the time since, AI art has only gotten better and been adopted more, but from articles like [1] it doesn't seem like concept artists have much benefitted.

[1]: https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-co...

That’s very odd. You’d think a breakthrough and surge of funding would massive boost NLP research - unless those researchers who not focused on LLMs and the company just wanted to move all resources to that.

There are other ways that AI can hurt the job market in major ways. One, already happening, is AI-generated resumes based on the listing itself, causing HR departments to waste a ton of time, potentially preventing real experienced candidates from even getting a callback.

AI may prevent lost jobs from coming back, even if it didn't cause the loss. Companies will be able to do more with less.

> Companies will be able to do more with less.

I guess everyone on Hacker News should stop developing software then, since almost every piece of software I've ever worked on has allowed companies (and individuals) to do more with less.

In other words, if you can do more with less, you can do EVEN MORE with more!

Yep I agree. It does make senior developers more efficient at building new features but it's maybe like 20% more efficient in the grand scheme of things... But this efficiency saving is a joke considering that companies spend most of their development money creating and maintaining unnecessary complexity. People will just produce unnecessary code at a faster rate. I think the net benefit for a typical corporation will be negative and they will need to hire more people to maintain the increasingly large body of code, not fewer.

It's an intractable problem because even if some really astute senior engineer joins a company and notices the unnecessary complexity and knows how to fix it, there is no way they will do anything about it. Do you think thousands of existing engineers will support a plan to refactor and simplify the complexity? The same complexity which guarantees their job security? It's so easy to discredit the 'new dev' who is advocating for change. Existing devs will destroy the new dev with complicated-but-deeply-flawed arguments which management will not fully comprehend. At the end of the day, management will do what the majority of existing devs tell them. Devs will nod in unison for the argument which sounds more complex and benefits them the most.

Nobody ever listens to the new hire, even the new hire knows they are powerless to change the existing structure. The best they can do is add more complexity to integrate themselves into the scheme.

Ironically, the new hire can provide more value doing nothing but that will not provide them with job security. The winning strategy is to trade-off deep long-term value for superficial short-term value by implementing lots of small features loaded with technical debt.

It's like gears in a big machine, you could always add 3 gears to do the exact same job as 1 gear but once those 3 gears are in place, remove any of them, the machine stops working... So each one seems demonstrably essential to anyone who doesn't understand the tech. That's the principle. When pressed, a merchant of complexity can always remove a gear and say "Look, the machine doesn't work without it, just like I told you."

> Existing devs will destroy the new dev with complicated-but-deeply-flawed arguments which management will not fully comprehend. At the end of the day, management will do

I sympathize with this position, but I think it’s worth admitting that it’s also often the case that the complexity increases all made sense at the time of implementation, and the big rewrite in the sky is often more expensive, more risky, and likely to still end up with new complexity than is anticipated at the beginning.

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