AI Job Loss Tracker | Hacker News Reader

AI Job Loss Tracker

jobloss.ai

30 pointsgnabgib24 comments

The “explicit” tag on some of these should really be “self reported”. It seems like most companies these days mismanage themselves into layoffs and spin it as AI gains to appease shareholders instead.

The table shows this better. All have just a single reported layoff "event" except Amazon which has three. Even a decade ago Amazon had many reports on Glassdoor and elsewhere of horrible middle management and employee churn.

All these layoffs seem to track better with longer-term decline than AI progress. One would otherwise expect the layoffs to reflect the multiple and much hyped "step change" improvements over the past few years. Instead the chart shows a sudden plateau starting a month ago. Probably when this last made the rounds somewhere else (maybe reddit? too lazy to search).

There's also a huge hole in media reporting regarding smaller businesses. That's where you'd expect AI to have the biggest impact. Instead we hear crickets.

> One would otherwise expect the layoffs to reflect the multiple and much hyped "step change" improvements over the past few years. Instead the chart shows a sudden plateau starting a month ago.

Can you clarify the theory here? So if there is a “step change” you expect companies to do layoffs all at once? How does this account for I.e. diffusion lag or companies deciding if it’s better to chase growth vs. capital efficiency?

Yes I would expect a lag, but we've been hearing hype with every model update about huge AI productivity improvements for years now.

Despite this, the layoffs are steady over that time with no such spikes. If the goal was ever to cut costs, payroll is never spared since it's too big to ignore. Chasing growth is unlikely when lending and investment is tight. Why invest in other tech companies when you can invest in AI?

I think your narratives are a bit mixed up. We went from science experiment ChatGpt 2022 to zero day finder that is too dangerous to release 4 years later. So whoever has been talking about progressive model updates has surely been correct?

Plenty of zero days have also been found with brute force and random fuzzing.

I'm not downplaying the LLMs we have now, but none of this got started in 2022 apart from the hype train.

Mismanage or can't pay healthcare premiums anymore (US)?

Health care premiums are expensive, but even the best insurance I've ever seen was a fraction of the compensation software employees were making.

For some fields that's a huge amount of your compensation, but for software engineers it's noticeable but not going to be worth doing layoffs over by themselves.

How much do you think healthcare premiums are? Employers are not paying your deductible or out of pocket expenses.

What an absurd question. You think employers, who are laying people off and claiming AI for shareholder value, are more pressed about their large group plans than the fucking salaries that absolutely dwarf those premiums?

Some of y’all desperately need to stop huffing social media farts.

I can read the news and see things are going up sideways across the globe. You guys are extremely good at flooding the zone with shit. I am asking a question. It is easy to say we layoff people due to AI when the real reason is different. Not every company has shareholders.

You are also thinking about companies having thousands of employees and everybody seem to make millions.

This is a brochure site from "The Alliance for Secure AI", which I am unfamiliar with, but whose site gives "AGI weirdo". Am I misreading?

https://secureainow.org/

I don't think so..nothing about these folks backgrounds screams "understands LLMs" https://secureainow.org/staff/. Which to be clear doesn't mean they can't effectively pull together publicly available layoff data in a website.

This is a website created by a professional lobbyist who still has an active role taking lobbying contracts through a firm they founded called Steinhauser Strategies.

How do they differentiate AI job loss from normal layoffs that companies are pretending are due to AI to get brownie points from shareholders?

Not sure, but Im assuming it's based on self reporting or when companies like Oracle say "we are doing layoffs to manage AI costs"...

  > How do they differentiate AI job loss from normal layoffs that companies are pretending are due to AI to get brownie points from shareholders?

why the same way we measure productivity gains from ai: mostly vibes (aka self-reporting)

Site doesn’t load for me, just hangs indefinitely.

AI is creating jobs, too, so this information isn’t really valuable if you want a clear image of its impact on employment.

Why are some companies listed multiple times?

It looks vibecoded as can be.

Ah, this decade's Fucked Company?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Actually, who owns that domain? It might be time for a revival.

It’s really hard to know if these reports are real or marketing. Usually the company is very nonspecific about the kind of positions replaced. I tried reading a few of these articles and it was just buisness speak drivel about strategic repositioning. I have no idea what those displaced employees were doing and if their function was even replaced.

There is of course some value in self reported claims but usually a careful researcher would look for other evidence that those claims are sensible.

Most of the numbers are BS. They're regular layoffs with AI used as a scapegoat.

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