Comment by taormina | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taormina | Hacker News Reader

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> LLMs are eliminating the need to have a vast array of positions on payrolls. From copywriters to customer support, and even creative activities such as illustration and even authoring books, today's LLMs are already more than good enough to justify replacing people with the output of any commercial chatbot service.

I'd love a source to these claims. Many companies are claiming that they are able to layoff folks because of AI, but in fact, AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to free money in the market over the last 5-10 years and investors are demanding to see a real business plan and ROI. "We can eliminate this headcount due to the efficiency of our AI" is just a fancy way to make the stock price go up while cleaning up the useless folks.

People have ideas. There are substantially more ideas than people who can implement ideas. As with most technology, the reasonable expectation is to assume that people are just going to want more done by the now tool powered humans, not less things.

> I'd love a source to these claims.

Have you been living under a rock?

You can start getting up to speed by how Amazon's CEO already laid out the company's plan.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/amazon-generative...

> (...) AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to (...)

That is your personal moralist scapegoat, and one that you made up to feel better about how jobs are being eliminated because someone somewhere screwed up.

In the meantime, you fool yourself and pretend that sudden astronomic productivity gains have no impact on demand.

These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product, i.e. the ones who stand to benefit from adoption. There is no standard way to measure productivity since it's subjective. It's far more likely that companies will use whatever scapegoat they can to fire people with as little blowback as possible, especially as the other commenter noted, people were getting hired like crazy.

Each one of the roles you listed above is only passable with AI at a superficial glance. For example, anyone who actually reads literature other than self-help and pop culture books from airport kiosks knows that AI is terrible at longer prose. The output is inconsistent because current AI does not understand context, at all. And this is not getting into the service costs, the environmental costs, and the outright intellectual theft in order to make things like illustrations even passable.

> These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product (...)

I literally pasted an announcement from the CEO of a major corporation warning they are going to decimate their workforce due to the adoption of AI.

The CEO literally made the following announcement:

> "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy wrote. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs."

This is not about selling a product. This is about how they are adopting AI to reduce headcount.

The CEO is marketing to the company’s shareholders. This is marketing. A CEO will say anything to sell the idea of their company to other people. Believe it or not, there is money to be made from increased share prices.

Congratulations for believing the marketing. He has about 2.46 trillion reasons to make this claim. In other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.

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