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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet.

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> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months

No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested.

Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.

And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.

"Basically" is doing a lot of work there. What are the profit margins at FooCorp, and how much time and money is spent on messy human drama? If you could replace every human employee with AI, then you could fire the entire HR department and replace it with one AI "HR" that just spins up new AI employees like we do EC2 instances today. Since there are no more messy human resources to manage, anyway. Shutting down the entire department should boost profits by quite a bit!

Are you perhaps confounding inference purchased by clients with R&D and capex invested by frontier providers?

Agreed but the converse is also true. Predicting that everything will be sunshine and rainbows merely because the sky hasn't fallen yet doesn't pass the sniff test.

> we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months.

Oddly I seem to interpret that in the opposite manner that you do. The output became noticeably more cohesive sometime around the new year although it certainly still has plenty of shortcomings.

> Predicting that everything will be sunshine and rainbows merely because the sky hasn't fallen yet doesn't pass the sniff test

I’m not predicting it will be fine. I’m saying we have enough evidence to cast the opposite prediction, made on specific timescales in the past, as BS.

I'm not following your logic here. Are you basing your predictions on the predictions of CEOs?

If I understand you correctly you are saying, CEOs predicted X and they were wrong. Now CEOs are predicting Y, and since they were wrong about X you predict they are also wrong about Y.

But Y's success seems independent of other people's ability to predict X?

most ai use and spend is still by humans. laying off humans would (ironically) reduce ai spend and use.

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months

Which means that they were lying.

Or they were wrong. But best to assume malice given their incentives. (No, that certain saying is just stupid.)

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