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Comment by tsss | Hacker News Reader

Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs? Do that many people even work on AI development? And why does OpenAI burn so much money? Maybe they'll have to stop offering their compute time at a discount, but generative AI is doing useful work and will never go away. There are many companies using it to productive ends and there will be demand for programmers to integrate generative AI in business processes.

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> Do that many people even work on AI development?

That's not the relevant figure. It's more about how much capital has been wagered by large tech cos and the major startups & VCs on a near-complete takeover of white-collar work by AI (as that's the only level of payoff that could possibly justify the mind-boggling level of investment).

> Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs? Do that many people even work on AI development?

The implication is if AI is a bust, Google, Microsoft and Meta alone would have to run leaner organisations to make sense. Each of them is massively betting on LLMs are their core growth engine.

None of those orgs is going to run leaner if AI is a bust. They'll invest as much, if not more, into trying to find other ways to grow - exactly the same reason they all invested in AI in the first place.

> They'll invest as much, if not more, into trying to find other ways to grow

Management will try to hold on to the capital for as long as shareholders let them. But if the growth prospects from AI significantly diminish, 20,000 jobs in tech is a pretty conservative estimate for lay-offs.

I’m 100% sure the rush to add AI bots of various sorts (often just natural-language document search—which often replaces such complete neglect of making things easier to find that I wonder how much good it’ll actually do vs any traditional approach applied well if they’d ever bothered to do that, or even vs nothing since that’s apparently been fine so far) across basically all of every industry as far as I can tell, is helping prop up developer employment rates until rates drop and stupid money inflates the AI thing into a real bubble on the investor side.

It's the opposite in my experience. These sort of things are actually resulting in lower developer rates. Even if you went with an out-of-the-box solution for customer support (as an example) you still needed engineers and designers on hand to customize and maintain the solution. But that's almost entirely gone away.

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