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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

I know for a fact that companies have fired people and replaced them with AI. I’ve met with business owners and they told me.

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> they told me

> I know for a fact

That's not what a fact is; if we took everything written on businesswire or what the business owners / salespeople told us at face value then we'd be in deep trouble.

One thing that is real is companies using LLMs to fill roles they couldn't afford to spend on before. Like the tourist who uses Google Translate on a trip to Japan: in principle they are saving 10k on the cost of a professional interpreter. On the other hand they never would have had the resources for a professional interpreter.

Good to know, but for me, the study is more convincing than your anecdote.

I think it's the fact that they say zero effect, which is obviously not true.

They didn’t say there’s literally zero effect, they said that there’s negligible disruption to job market from the introduction of AI.

Even a net zero effect would mean some people were replaced with AI and the same amount of people were hired to use AI

Be careful with "they". The "zero effect" in the headline was likely written by a Register editor, two steps removed from the authors of the study. I think the quote in the fourth paragraph is more telling:

> "Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," said Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee in a report summary.

What roles were these people working?

Developer, replaced with cursor.

Do you have more information? As a cursor user I don’t see how you can replace a developer with that product.

I imagine these businesses probably don't fire ALL their Devs, instead they reduce team sizes

I’m sure that’s the case. I’m just curious about the devs that lost their jobs. I feel like if cursor can replace you then you must have already been on the chopping block. Or maybe the company’s development needs had declined.

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