The hed here is a bit misleading … 40% of total staff is not 40% of an individual job.
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.
Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.
“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week,” he wrote. He also said that Block’s business remained strong and that these cuts weren’t an austerity measure.
Can AI operate 40% of a business? Perhaps, but other specters haunt Dorsey’s company.
I’d be surprised if LLMs can handle 40% of anyone’s job. You know what often can? Good, old-fashioned automation. It handles tedious tasks no one wanted to do in the first place and produces improved, predictable and testable results.
If a weak crypto market can tank your company, I’m not sure you should be trusted for business advice.
Still, maybe he’s exactly the right kind of businessman for these times. Genuine value and productivity don’t matter anymore. It’s a potemkin economy, so why not staff it with potemkin labor?
Yeah, that roughly tracks (maybe not that AI can do the jobs, but that the jobs do not need human employees)
37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless: https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/13005-british-jobs-meaningless
give UBI and i won’t care 🎉🫡
Oh look, a tech bro pivoting from crypto to genAI. He’s shifting grift a little late but whatever.
I am pretty sure AI can do 0% of my job.
I don’t see how text output is gonna clean the toilets.
You’re safe.
Remember boys and girls, AI doesn’t have to be as good as you to take your job. Just has to be good enough. Because AI doesn’t go home for the night, it doesn’t take vacation, it doesn’t take sick days, it doesn’t care about holidays, it doesn’t go to the bathroom, it won’t go get a cup of coffee, it doesn’t need pay and benefits, it doesn’t require payroll taxes be paid…
And now think about how the economy seems to have shifted to catering to the wealthy. Vegas only wants the high rollers, everyone else fuck off. Car companies have priced all their vehicles like luxury vehicles even if they didn’t do anything to make them luxury. Companies know only the wealthy will be able to buy anything in the near future.
The primary financial issue with LLMs taking people’s jobs is in the cost of operation, mainly for the LLM companies. They still have not made an ROI, not even close, and that’s with massive government contracts. I personally think that there’s one of three possibilities here. Most of the LLM companies could go under (but they may be “too big to fail” at this point), the LLM companies could start to charge far too much for the quality of the outputs causing some companies to back out, or the LLM companies will, by some miracle, get a ROI through a more efficient model.
The models are enshittified at the start, since they’re basically just hallucinating with guardrails. There’s not any way to make them truly deterministic. Even the “agents” that run through multiple iterations of code to find the “best” solution are lacking. This is because they cannot “think” logically.
My personal opinion, though, is that they’re simply using it as an excuse to fire workers and pump up company stock value. I don’t believe they actually think that LLMs can fully replace devs and engineers. So yes, while LLMs are taking jobs right now, it’s not because they’re good enough at what they do or anything like that. It’s just greed.
The price of these services is pretty heavily subsidized today. Unless their costs go down a lot over the next couple years , they will eventually have to raise prices which will destroy roi.
Agreed. I don’t see LLM services making an actual ROI any time soon unless something drastic changes.
It took longer than I expected, but Humans need not apply is becoming more and more relevant. Interesting that he thought it would be the transportation sector first that sees significant job losses. Instead that still hasn’t really taken off yet at scale and its the later predictions that we are now seeing.
What do we do when large sections of society are unemployable through no fault of their own?
To quote Oversimplified “Who wants to start a rebabablution, rebolalution… Dang it”
AI could replace CEOs. As soon as you throw that out there, all the CEOs are like “woah now, hold on, you’re taking it a bit too far…”
AI is a rich asshole’s wet dream. An employee that will work 24/7, doesn’t require benefits or PTO, and can complete a task faster? They’re all in.
I’m really not sure what kind of world they want but I see patterns:
- A government that pushes anti-vaccine rhetoric and suggests unhealthy foods in unhealthy quantities
- Zero worker protections
- Largest prison population in the world
- Ruining both food and education
- Poisoning minds and social circles with infighting bullshit
🤔 Seems like they want the poor class to either be enslaved or dead. They’re going to turn the US into Gaza. A captured audience that either works for peanuts and owns nothing, or dies off and is no longer a burden on the rich.
I mean… Yeah, woah. Imagine an AI CEO taking decisions while being even more immune to accountability than a human CEO.
Maybe because Jack fucken Dorsey is a twit that walks around, talks, and sends messages for “work”. Sattle up one of these agents with me for a day and watch it solve one of the myraid of bullshit I see on a daily basis as it support. It eon’t even do 0.8%.
Did Jack Dorsey hire an unsustainable number of employees?
Maybe, but Jack would rather you look somewhere else.
Jack trusts AI to be the future, and he is good at predicting things (Block is a reference to “Blockchain”), so you need to be frightened.
