The tech sector is pouring billions of dollars into AI. But it keeps laying off humans::The tech sector has kicked off the new year with a spate of fresh job cuts that are coming at the same time as the industry is doubling down on investments into artificial intelligence.
I work in tech. I’m really impressed with AI, particularly outside of LLMs, but I was a yuge chatGPT fan for most of last year. I don’t think the technology is ready. I worked with a senior dev who worked on LLMs and he didn’t think it was there. I think we’ve got c-suite overshooting and investor hype on a technology that isn’t quite there yet. There’s going to be a reckoning soon where all these dumbasses are going to have to eat crow and re-hire a lot of these positions.
I promise you they will not rehire those they fire to replace with LLMs. I cannot post which company I work for but it one of the largest employers in my country with tens of thousands of employees. We have laid off entire branches of our organization in favour of enterprise GPT-4 licenses.
Several sectors of HR have been replaced, our program analytics and accounting branches have all gone through 3 levels of cuts (we now have a chatbot that handles data viz and HR mediations/parts of various HR processes. Our graphics and design teams are now Stable Diffusion.
These changes were implemented in August of last year. Thousands of employees have been replaced by a handful of different generative AI licenses and we had to take on an additional cost of hiring an offshore consulting firm to feed these models our business data so they would be more customized for our org.
I’m looking for my exit because despite the increased costs and automation, things aren’t working well at all. The HR bot sometimes tells you rules that don’t exist (had to look deep into my contract because HR bot told me I wouldn’t be eligible for severance pay which was false). All of our workloads have quadrupled with losing a good chunk of our staff and trying to fix things that are now broken. I went from 40h/week to 60+ and I’m definitely on the lower spectrum of this.
That sounds about right. Incredible that they dove into it so completely, and having a bot handle their HR sounds like they’re spoiling to get fucking wrecked in court, at least at this stage. So, what makes you say they won’t reverse course? The cost savings are worth the lost performance, or they just haven’t/won’t see(n) the writing on the wall?
Sunk cost. They’ve already spent tens of millions on this.
With all the biases the bots carry, it’ll be law time for many of these corporations. Money gained by firing developers will be lost on retaining DIck, Schlong & Partners.
Sounds like the same performance as before, when it was a human!
“If we lie*, hopefully they won’t check. And if they call us out, it was an honest mistake!”
(Imagine a “you are here” arrow pointing at the peak.)
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Gartner hype cycle is a graphical presentation developed, used and branded by the American research, advisory and information technology firm Gartner to represent the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. The hype cycle claims to provide a graphical and conceptual presentation of the maturity of emerging technologies through five phases.to opt out, pm me ‘optout’. article | about
I think that arrow is currently still a bit to the left ot the peak.
I use gpt-4 daily for my work, I love it. I get more done and save time.
The thing i don’t trust the simulation for one bit. If you analyze it properly you will always find errors.
Its way easier to fix those errors or to adapt the solution into my needs. But the most essential component of the entire workflow is that i a human with real life expertise green light the good parts from its response. A bit like i became a teacher and chatgpt is the student. Its works extend mine but I remain at all times responsible.
Maybe in a few years it could be ready, lets just hope it doesn’t go the same way as nfts, which could have had a brilliant use to track the authenticity of journalism in a fake news world, but no, monkey craves golden bananas even if it cant digest them. And now the aftertaste is so bad people get sick at the mention.