As someone who attended this school and has a degree from their economics department: this finding very consistent from what I learned in classes covering the economics of innovation. Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs.
The core intuition for this phenomenon is that human society overall takes the tech productivity gains to do more things overall, creating new goods and services. The broader range of goods and services overall also enables more people to find work.
Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters.
One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time.
It's certainly possible that this study is just reinforcing the researcher's biases from their previous understanding of the economics of innovation, and also possible that this study is accurate today but conditions will change in the future. That said, I believe the burden of proof is on the pundits claiming cataclysmic job loss, which is counter to economic historians' models of innovation.
This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality
Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
My personal experience lines up with this. From what I've seen all the AI hype is coming from:
- Companies building AI models & tools - this one is obvious.
- Executives using AI to justify layoffs - there have been constant rounds of layoffs across corporate America since ~2021, but recent ones have been rebranded as "AI taking the jobs" so no one points to the obvious corporate mismanagement, offshoring and greed.
- Bosses using AI to push employees to work harder - I have personally seen this at my own company. AI is an excuse to increase forced attrition. "You aren't good enough" is harder to justify, so now it is "you aren't using AI well enough".
Real-world use cases of AI meanwhile haven't really moved beyond the prototype stage.
A great and relevant quote from a recent Noah Smith article discussing this same subject:
> The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about to take everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong?
Lets focus on the tech firms that produce software.
Two things should happen if AI proliferates into software development:
1) Increasing top line - due to more projects being taken by enabling labour to be more productive
2) Operating margin increasing - due to labour input declining and taking more cost-reduction projects
If those 2 things dont occur - the AI investment was a waste of money from a financial perspective. And this is before I even discount the cash flows by the cost of capital of these high-risk projects (high discount rate).
At some point everyone will be analysed in this manner. Only Nvidia is winning as it stands, ironically, not because of LLMs. But rather because they sell the hardware that LLMs operate on.
I feel lucky. Rather than cut workers because AI is making our jobs easier and faster, we are just doing more work, more projects that we wouldn't have had the bandwidth to do. I'm solo on something we we would have assigned a small team to.
Would you mind elaborating? Generally speaking what is the project? What does the AI enable you to do solo that you would have had to dedicate a team to before? Is the quality of the software the same, worse, or better? What does your day-to-day job look like and how is it different from before? What tools are you using?
I saw a great shift in our data science job offers: we removed the old offers and now only search machine learning experts. We do not know if they would have any problem to work on. But we surely are looking for one.
I think there are 2 different ways to interpret the title. First, is AI itself replacing workers - article is referring to this case says no. 2nd case is what you are mentioning, the AI race has companies reducing hiring in non-AI areas in order to prioritize hiring for developing AI.
I think we are still in the period where many new jobs are being created due to AI, and AI models are chiefly a labor enhancer, not a labor replacer. It is inevitable though, if current trends continue (the METR eval and GDPval) that AI models will be labor replacements in many fields, starting with jobs that are oriented around close-ended tasks (customer service reps, HR, designers, accountants), before expanding to jobs with longer and longer task horizons.
The only way this won't happen is if at some point AI models just stop getting smarter and more autonomously capable despite every AI lab's research and engineering effort.
Zero effects on jobs overall, i.e. for every person displaced by AI, another has been hired? Or zero effects on any individual person's job, i.e. not one single person has lost their job due to their boss wanting to replace them with AI?
>And major companies conducting layoffs like IBM and Salesforce have held themselves up as examples of that narrative, though their employee culls may be more focused on outsourcing than automation.
Automation seems to be a better excuse than outsourcing
AI might not have much actual impact on software engineering, but AI (Actually Indians) has. Companies are using AI as a justification for layoffs, and then just replacing those roles with cheaper engineers employed by bodyshop companies.
When nobody wants to return to office, why not? The work from home shift was always going to accelerate the global pay equilibrium, it will continue to do so.
I am a small anecdote where developers who just use chatgpt/cursor are in higher positions than me who learned to code back in 2010. Use as in "chatgpt told me..." about whatever topic. Still they are accomplishing the task (getting code out there that works).
I also had a vibe coded prototype get handed to me to fix it
While it's likely due to other factors (i.e. like maybe the stock indices have just completely de-coupled from reality or are just being helped by AI-hype?), the fact that US job openings seemingly de-coupled from S&P 500 in Nov/Dec 2022 when ChatGPT was publicly released (as a web app) is pretty interesting.
There was more also going on in that time-frame: several interest rate hikes, no fix for section 174 changes by the end of 2022. Maybe someone will pinpoint whatever had the largest impact in a detailed study.
Oh it's certainly effecting jobs. I know plenty of people who would be unemployed right now if not for the insane spending on AI across the board.
I think there's many reasons for the AI hype, but one of the basic ones is that it's the only way to keep the economy propped up. I doesn't matter if it's an illusion or not, it means money is flowing many directions (even if a shocking number of those flows are accounting tricks).
What we're watching is some mass hysteria like tulip mania. There are many, many people who benefit from this situation independent of whether or not its an illusion.
And maybe that bubble will pop and maybe it will soon, but when it does, most of us will wish it hadn't.
One thing that is real is companies using LLMs to fill roles they couldn't afford to spend on before. Like the tourist who uses Google Translate on a trip to Japan: in principle they are saving 10k on the cost of a professional interpreter. On the other hand they never would have had the resources for a professional interpreter.
That's not what a fact is; if we took everything written on businesswire or what the business owners / salespeople told us at face value then we'd be in deep trouble.
Be careful with "they". The "zero effect" in the headline was likely written by a Register editor, two steps removed from the authors of the study. I think the quote in the fourth paragraph is more telling:
> "Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," said Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee in a report summary.
Call centers these days are staffed at the bare minimum as is, adding an AI bot in front of that doesn't really change that fact. At least for me, it's now a regular occurrence that I'll slot a quarter to half an hour of holding time when I need to call support. Local and small companies are better in this regard, there you can usually reach a human pretty quickly. Big international corporations however are a lost cause. Funny, given that they'd have the most funds available to keep their customers.
Not surprised. There’s some good applications but the hype bubble is on the verge of bursting. Many companies are boated and inefficient but it’s highly unlikely that “AI” is the fix.
Ironically the thing broken in most cases is poor quality management that let things get so bloated and messy in the first place… the same folks that are cluelessly boasting about the potential of AI in their company.
I’m not sure it’s even that. I think the entire tech industry is reaching a maturation stage. Where a majority of customers pain has been solved, opportunities for innovation are slim or negative ROI, and so maintaining the headcount of the growth stage is just unnecessary.
Job numbers? Pretty sure you could make the case that this claim isn't true, but the data might be too nebulous.
But it's definitely had an effect on jobs.
It's made so many underqualified people think they have a new superpower, and made so many people miserable with the implied belittling of their actual skills. It's really damaging work culture.
Of course studies like this are aimed at people who think jobs are interchangeable neutral little black boxes that can be scaled up and scaled down, and who don't like to think about what they involve.
> Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release
I'm not surprised, is saving tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars per employee worth screwing up by betting on AI and losing millions? Notice that the headlines of companies wanting AI are wanting their employees to use AI to be more productive, and that's fine, but they still need their employees to be fully aware of the output so they're not just churning out slop.
Every year, large companies secretly rank employees and then yank the 10% or so they consider low performing. This is called rank and yank [1]. If your company has performance reviews and is ran by MBAs it almost certainly uses it.
The most important aspect of rank and yank is that it has to be done in secrecy. Your company will not tell you it is using it. Even your manager might not know this.
When rank and yank is not done in secrecy, employees react to it by hiring the most mediocre people they can, sabotaging/isolating strong performers, hiring to fire, forming peer review/code review mafias, avoiding helping others as much as possible, etc. Anything they can do to not land in the bottom 10%. This cannibalizes the company and an example is what Ballmer did to Microsoft.
Any person with a ChatGPT account can now ask it to analyze the "game" of rank and yank from the perspective of game theory and realize how dumb the whole idea is. The rational strategy for the employee is to destroy the company from within. But MBAs love it because it involves a made up statistical distribution.
The only truth about rank and yank is that it's a stupid idea that has impacted the careers of millions of hard working people around the world, while also impacting many families and their future. It has converted thousands of companies into horrible places to work filled with workplace psychopaths at the top.
MBAs are people who believe in the work of the person that kickstarted the decline of American manufacturing, Jack Welch. Jack Welch extracted record profits from GE for 20 years, but left it a hollowed-out "pile of shit" according to his successor. The worse part is that MBAs aspire to be like him and in the process have ruined the whole manufacturing industry.
So to pull off a rank and yank every year you need a scapegoat, and this year the scapegoat is AI. In previous years it has been the economy, or some other excuse. AI will naturally become the scapegoat for everything.
Have you ever wondered why your company is laying off people while having job postings for the same positions? Does it happen every year? Does it happen after performance reviews? Is it always around 10% of the workforce? Oof... that's a tough guess, I wonder what it might be!
AI is the perfect scapegoat because the company can claim they're using AI and boost their value somehow. But if AI could reduce your headcount by so much then your company, your business model, your processes, your intellectual property, etc. have no intrinsic value anyways and the correct interpretation of the situation is that everyone should divest and make the share price go to zero.
>> "Since amortization took effect [ in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ("TCJA" 2017) ], the growth rate of R&D spending has slowed dramatically from 6.6 percent on average over the previous five years to less than one-half of 1 percent over the last 12 months," Estes said. "The [R&D] sector is down by more than 14,000 jobs"
> Hopefully R&D spending at an average of 6.6% will again translate to real growth
>> In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these [R&D] expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills
> People just want the same R&D tax incentives back:
Well we had people being "let go" (how I hate this term...as if they were trying to flee but couldn't before) at our Call Center. Replaced by AI. The women were older. Didn't have long until retirement. Seems to be still worth it to kick them.
I know first hand that this is not the case. At least in film/media.
- I've sold software to several mid-scale production firms. Folks that do everything from Netflix title sequence designs to pharmaceutical television ad spots. They're billing at less than a quarter of their previous rate and picking up more clients on account of AI. They're downsizing the folks that do not do VFX or editing.
- A neighbor of mine who is a filmmaker was laid off last week. If you've flown Delta, you've seen his in-flight videos. His former employer, who he has worked for for nearly a decade, is attracting clients that are hiring them for AI work. My neighbor was not attached to any of those efforts.
- Major ad firm WPP is laying people off. Some of this is the economic macro and decreased ad spend. Another of my neighbors works for them and they haven't had any major projects. She typically manages major F500 clients. They're not spending. Despite that, she says some of the inter-departmental woes are directly attributable to AI.
- I spoke with former members in SAG-AFTRA leadership (before Sean Astin came on board). They quit on account of AI. "The writing is on the wall", they said. Direct quote.
The data on the article applies to IT related jobs disappearing for any reason on the same period. The only thing specific to AI is the pick of time, and the conclusions seem very robust from moving it some months around either way.
One specific stupid manager will absolutely replace people, but the overall dynamic isn't any more broken than it used to be.
It's not stupidity but corporate strategy. Up until a few years ago companies and executives used to get massive backlash for doing layoffs. Today they can say "we replaced workers with AI" and get rewarded with a stock price bump.
As a co-founder and dev at a bootstrapped company I’d say AI has and will slow developer hiring rate. We’re just more productive and on top of things more.
We’ve also reduced the hours we work per week. We care about getting things done not time behind a screen.
Sure AI can build cute POCs. Will it build scaled solutions, not this year. The amount of ignorance in this post is precisely why the industry is so rattled. Gen AI tools are great, they are not making people orders of magnitude more productive.
We’ve been in business 15 years. These aren’t POCs. Even at say 20% productivity boost I feel way ahead to give devs 9 day fortnights and soon hopefully 4 day weeks.
how is it both a bootstrapped company slow to hiring devs (due to AI) and also a company that's been in business 15 years? if you were going to hire devs to scale out, you would've done it 10 years ago?
Normally as we add enterprise customers we have to dedicate more dev resource keeping them happy. But since Claude code and now codex we have not felt that feeling of not being on top
of the work. Thus not feeling the need to hire more devs.
I seem to remember the latest tools for software developers were pushed in the business organisation by the developers - and eventually the folk at the top relented and accepted it.
When the reverse is happening, alarm bells should ring.
But hey, Im not against these CEOs destroying the culture within the firm and making their employees hate their guts, resulting in negative productivity gains.
Well it's not exactly a parody. The next season of Silicon Valley not only continues the cheeky hijinks and ironic saves required to navigate tech-cap dysfunction, it is a reality show. Although some of the new core team characters are (openly) unfiltered chatbots.
Including a real-life LLM "resurrection" of the fictional Erlich Bachman, created as part of a successful espionage mission to steal a Chinese deep learning company's near impossible distillation technology. But despite its trove of valuable illicit information, it has been orphaned online, unable to find its mysterious SV-fan hacker creators. As a result, chatErlich is now desperately attempting to make contact with the original SV team actors, who it actually believes are their fictional counterparts.
Yes, I learn how to use AI for coding in case it doesn't advance much more. But if AI is really going to do what some people think, it doesn't matter if you learn to use it or not, whole swathes of jobs, including software developers, will be obsolete. If your business boils down to being a middle man for an LLM it's not long for this world.
What really matters is the rate of advancement.
And no, there won't be new jobs to replace them. This is less like industrialization, which created jobs before replacing old ones, and more like the automation that hollowed out whole communities and cities from the '70s to '00s. Services largely saved us from this, but I see no new sector to come and rescue us. And any re-orientation of the labor force to existing jobs will drive down those wages too.
If it's the right numbers (called measurement data) and the right excel sheet pushing (called running a validated model) that is exactly the way you can make these claims.
Overall it's called the scientific method.
As someone who attended this school and has a degree from their economics department: this finding very consistent from what I learned in classes covering the economics of innovation. Historically, technological revolutions have increased productivity and labor force participation, despite many pundits at the time worried about loss of jobs.
The core intuition for this phenomenon is that human society overall takes the tech productivity gains to do more things overall, creating new goods and services. The broader range of goods and services overall also enables more people to find work.
Put another way, "“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.” -- one of Bezos's Amazon shareholder letters.
One of my favorite counterintuitive examples: The biggest economic gains from the 1800s Industrial Revolution actually came from the humble washer/dryer. By making routine homeware 100x more efficient, this (along with other home appliances) allowed more women to enter the labor force, nearly doubling labor force participation within a couple generations. Though, at the beginning, lots of people were opining about homemakers losing a sense of purpose or relaxing all the time.
It's certainly possible that this study is just reinforcing the researcher's biases from their previous understanding of the economics of innovation, and also possible that this study is accurate today but conditions will change in the future. That said, I believe the burden of proof is on the pundits claiming cataclysmic job loss, which is counter to economic historians' models of innovation.
This perspective very much ignores economic friction. The luddites were a thing because, metaphorically, not every washer can become a programmer. These large scale analyses often treat one person losing their job and a different person finding a job as equivalent, which does not reflect any kind of material reality
Yeah actually the labor conditions of the working class were horrible as they entered factories, conditions only remedied by the spurs of the labor movement.
Being a farmer was worse!
Tell me more, I'm long term unemployed so have plenty of time to read stuff like this.
Here's one free article covering a book about the washing machine example https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright...
My personal experience lines up with this. From what I've seen all the AI hype is coming from:
- Companies building AI models & tools - this one is obvious.
- Executives using AI to justify layoffs - there have been constant rounds of layoffs across corporate America since ~2021, but recent ones have been rebranded as "AI taking the jobs" so no one points to the obvious corporate mismanagement, offshoring and greed.
- Bosses using AI to push employees to work harder - I have personally seen this at my own company. AI is an excuse to increase forced attrition. "You aren't good enough" is harder to justify, so now it is "you aren't using AI well enough".
Real-world use cases of AI meanwhile haven't really moved beyond the prototype stage.
A great and relevant quote from a recent Noah Smith article discussing this same subject:
> The debate over whether AI is taking people’s jobs may or may not last forever. If AI takes a lot of people’s jobs, the debate will end because one side will have clearly won. But if AI doesn’t take a lot of people’s jobs, then the debate will never be resolved, because there will be a bunch of people who will still go around saying that it’s about to take everyone’s job. Sometimes those people will find some subset of workers whose employment prospects are looking weaker than others, and claim that this is the beginning of the great AI job destruction wave. And who will be able to prove them wrong?
Source: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/ai-and-jobs-again
Forget about that.
Lets focus on the tech firms that produce software.
Two things should happen if AI proliferates into software development:
1) Increasing top line - due to more projects being taken by enabling labour to be more productive 2) Operating margin increasing - due to labour input declining and taking more cost-reduction projects
If those 2 things dont occur - the AI investment was a waste of money from a financial perspective. And this is before I even discount the cash flows by the cost of capital of these high-risk projects (high discount rate).
At some point everyone will be analysed in this manner. Only Nvidia is winning as it stands, ironically, not because of LLMs. But rather because they sell the hardware that LLMs operate on.
That only gets you an expected net present value. Looking at the variance and quartiles is way scarier.
The hucksters will tell you the variance in the cashflows is exactly why they are pursuing AI - real options.
I feel lucky. Rather than cut workers because AI is making our jobs easier and faster, we are just doing more work, more projects that we wouldn't have had the bandwidth to do. I'm solo on something we we would have assigned a small team to.
Would you mind elaborating? Generally speaking what is the project? What does the AI enable you to do solo that you would have had to dedicate a team to before? Is the quality of the software the same, worse, or better? What does your day-to-day job look like and how is it different from before? What tools are you using?
I saw a great shift in our data science job offers: we removed the old offers and now only search machine learning experts. We do not know if they would have any problem to work on. But we surely are looking for one.
I think there are 2 different ways to interpret the title. First, is AI itself replacing workers - article is referring to this case says no. 2nd case is what you are mentioning, the AI race has companies reducing hiring in non-AI areas in order to prioritize hiring for developing AI.
The level of uncertainty in the job market says otherwise. This is the worst tech job market in my entire 40 year career.
I think we are still in the period where many new jobs are being created due to AI, and AI models are chiefly a labor enhancer, not a labor replacer. It is inevitable though, if current trends continue (the METR eval and GDPval) that AI models will be labor replacements in many fields, starting with jobs that are oriented around close-ended tasks (customer service reps, HR, designers, accountants), before expanding to jobs with longer and longer task horizons.
The only way this won't happen is if at some point AI models just stop getting smarter and more autonomously capable despite every AI lab's research and engineering effort.
Zero effects on jobs overall, i.e. for every person displaced by AI, another has been hired? Or zero effects on any individual person's job, i.e. not one single person has lost their job due to their boss wanting to replace them with AI?
The second would be easily disprovable by anecdotes and there's plenty of those to go around, so its more a net zero thing.
>And major companies conducting layoffs like IBM and Salesforce have held themselves up as examples of that narrative, though their employee culls may be more focused on outsourcing than automation.
Automation seems to be a better excuse than outsourcing
Headline could be more clear.
Title implies all things AI, when they were actually looking at GenAI. I know it's what everyone thinks of, but I hate how everything gets muddled.
I suspect AI is currently fashionable as a smokescreen to justify deep cost cutting (See MSFT example.)
(we've since changed the URL and the headline - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444395)
AI might not have much actual impact on software engineering, but AI (Actually Indians) has. Companies are using AI as a justification for layoffs, and then just replacing those roles with cheaper engineers employed by bodyshop companies.
When nobody wants to return to office, why not? The work from home shift was always going to accelerate the global pay equilibrium, it will continue to do so.
Lots of people would be willing to take a paycut to WFH.
The key phrase is "the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption".
I am a small anecdote where developers who just use chatgpt/cursor are in higher positions than me who learned to code back in 2010. Use as in "chatgpt told me..." about whatever topic. Still they are accomplishing the task (getting code out there that works).
I also had a vibe coded prototype get handed to me to fix it
While it's likely due to other factors (i.e. like maybe the stock indices have just completely de-coupled from reality or are just being helped by AI-hype?), the fact that US job openings seemingly de-coupled from S&P 500 in Nov/Dec 2022 when ChatGPT was publicly released (as a web app) is pretty interesting.
There was more also going on in that time-frame: several interest rate hikes, no fix for section 174 changes by the end of 2022. Maybe someone will pinpoint whatever had the largest impact in a detailed study.
Oh it's certainly effecting jobs. I know plenty of people who would be unemployed right now if not for the insane spending on AI across the board.
I think there's many reasons for the AI hype, but one of the basic ones is that it's the only way to keep the economy propped up. I doesn't matter if it's an illusion or not, it means money is flowing many directions (even if a shocking number of those flows are accounting tricks).
What we're watching is some mass hysteria like tulip mania. There are many, many people who benefit from this situation independent of whether or not its an illusion.
And maybe that bubble will pop and maybe it will soon, but when it does, most of us will wish it hadn't.
I know for a fact that companies have fired people and replaced them with AI. I’ve met with business owners and they told me.
One thing that is real is companies using LLMs to fill roles they couldn't afford to spend on before. Like the tourist who uses Google Translate on a trip to Japan: in principle they are saving 10k on the cost of a professional interpreter. On the other hand they never would have had the resources for a professional interpreter.
> they told me
> I know for a fact
That's not what a fact is; if we took everything written on businesswire or what the business owners / salespeople told us at face value then we'd be in deep trouble.
Good to know, but for me, the study is more convincing than your anecdote.
I think it's the fact that they say zero effect, which is obviously not true.
They didn’t say there’s literally zero effect, they said that there’s negligible disruption to job market from the introduction of AI.
Even a net zero effect would mean some people were replaced with AI and the same amount of people were hired to use AI
Be careful with "they". The "zero effect" in the headline was likely written by a Register editor, two steps removed from the authors of the study. I think the quote in the fourth paragraph is more telling:
> "Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy," said Martha Gimbel, Molly Kinder, Joshua Kendall, and Maddie Lee in a report summary.
What roles were these people working?
Developer, replaced with cursor.
Do you have more information? As a cursor user I don’t see how you can replace a developer with that product.
One spot I really find this surprising is call center - but maybe majority of those folks are outside of the US or were reassigned
Call centers these days are staffed at the bare minimum as is, adding an AI bot in front of that doesn't really change that fact. At least for me, it's now a regular occurrence that I'll slot a quarter to half an hour of holding time when I need to call support. Local and small companies are better in this regard, there you can usually reach a human pretty quickly. Big international corporations however are a lost cause. Funny, given that they'd have the most funds available to keep their customers.
Automated call center predate the current AI hype cycle. Jobs were already lost.
As well as customers.
There's been many layoffs attributed to AI. That seems like an excellent cover for market conditions.
Actual source: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/evaluating-impact-ai-lab...
Thanks - we've changed the URL to that from https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/ai_isnt_taking_people....
Not surprised. There’s some good applications but the hype bubble is on the verge of bursting. Many companies are boated and inefficient but it’s highly unlikely that “AI” is the fix.
Ironically the thing broken in most cases is poor quality management that let things get so bloated and messy in the first place… the same folks that are cluelessly boasting about the potential of AI in their company.
I’m not sure it’s even that. I think the entire tech industry is reaching a maturation stage. Where a majority of customers pain has been solved, opportunities for innovation are slim or negative ROI, and so maintaining the headcount of the growth stage is just unnecessary.
Job numbers? Pretty sure you could make the case that this claim isn't true, but the data might be too nebulous.
But it's definitely had an effect on jobs.
It's made so many underqualified people think they have a new superpower, and made so many people miserable with the implied belittling of their actual skills. It's really damaging work culture.
Of course studies like this are aimed at people who think jobs are interchangeable neutral little black boxes that can be scaled up and scaled down, and who don't like to think about what they involve.
> Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release
Because metrics don't tell the story.
Ergodicity assumptions will do the rest.
Skill issue: just measure whatever you are worried about.
I'm not surprised, is saving tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars per employee worth screwing up by betting on AI and losing millions? Notice that the headlines of companies wanting AI are wanting their employees to use AI to be more productive, and that's fine, but they still need their employees to be fully aware of the output so they're not just churning out slop.
AI is a scapegoat.
Every year, large companies secretly rank employees and then yank the 10% or so they consider low performing. This is called rank and yank [1]. If your company has performance reviews and is ran by MBAs it almost certainly uses it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
The most important aspect of rank and yank is that it has to be done in secrecy. Your company will not tell you it is using it. Even your manager might not know this.
When rank and yank is not done in secrecy, employees react to it by hiring the most mediocre people they can, sabotaging/isolating strong performers, hiring to fire, forming peer review/code review mafias, avoiding helping others as much as possible, etc. Anything they can do to not land in the bottom 10%. This cannibalizes the company and an example is what Ballmer did to Microsoft.
Any person with a ChatGPT account can now ask it to analyze the "game" of rank and yank from the perspective of game theory and realize how dumb the whole idea is. The rational strategy for the employee is to destroy the company from within. But MBAs love it because it involves a made up statistical distribution.
The only truth about rank and yank is that it's a stupid idea that has impacted the careers of millions of hard working people around the world, while also impacting many families and their future. It has converted thousands of companies into horrible places to work filled with workplace psychopaths at the top.
MBAs are people who believe in the work of the person that kickstarted the decline of American manufacturing, Jack Welch. Jack Welch extracted record profits from GE for 20 years, but left it a hollowed-out "pile of shit" according to his successor. The worse part is that MBAs aspire to be like him and in the process have ruined the whole manufacturing industry.
So to pull off a rank and yank every year you need a scapegoat, and this year the scapegoat is AI. In previous years it has been the economy, or some other excuse. AI will naturally become the scapegoat for everything.
Have you ever wondered why your company is laying off people while having job postings for the same positions? Does it happen every year? Does it happen after performance reviews? Is it always around 10% of the workforce? Oof... that's a tough guess, I wonder what it might be!
AI is the perfect scapegoat because the company can claim they're using AI and boost their value somehow. But if AI could reduce your headcount by so much then your company, your business model, your processes, your intellectual property, etc. have no intrinsic value anyways and the correct interpretation of the situation is that everyone should divest and make the share price go to zero.
FWIU software jobs hiring was/is down along with the cancelling of the R&D tax credit.
From "House restores immediate R&D deduction in new tax bill" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213002 .. https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=38988189 :
>> "Since amortization took effect [ in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ("TCJA" 2017) ], the growth rate of R&D spending has slowed dramatically from 6.6 percent on average over the previous five years to less than one-half of 1 percent over the last 12 months," Estes said. "The [R&D] sector is down by more than 14,000 jobs"
> Hopefully R&D spending at an average of 6.6% will again translate to real growth
From "Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275202 :
> Did tech reduce hiring after Section 174 R&D tax policy changes?
[...]
> From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131866 :
>> In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these [R&D] expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills
> People just want the same R&D tax incentives back:
> "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)" (2025 (2439 points)) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226145
It is suspected that hiring levels correlate with the cancelling of the R&D Tax credit.
The TCJA (2017 Trump) cancelled the R&D tax credit.
The OBBA (2025 Trump) restored the R&D tax credit for tax year 2025.
Well we had people being "let go" (how I hate this term...as if they were trying to flee but couldn't before) at our Call Center. Replaced by AI. The women were older. Didn't have long until retirement. Seems to be still worth it to kick them.
AI won't replace you. But a stupid manager who believes AI could replace you will replace you
AI has provided a great excuse for your manager to fire you and replace you with someone much cheaper.
That’s a killer use case I gusss, pun intended
I know first hand that this is not the case. At least in film/media.
- I've sold software to several mid-scale production firms. Folks that do everything from Netflix title sequence designs to pharmaceutical television ad spots. They're billing at less than a quarter of their previous rate and picking up more clients on account of AI. They're downsizing the folks that do not do VFX or editing.
- A neighbor of mine who is a filmmaker was laid off last week. If you've flown Delta, you've seen his in-flight videos. His former employer, who he has worked for for nearly a decade, is attracting clients that are hiring them for AI work. My neighbor was not attached to any of those efforts.
- Major ad firm WPP is laying people off. Some of this is the economic macro and decreased ad spend. Another of my neighbors works for them and they haven't had any major projects. She typically manages major F500 clients. They're not spending. Despite that, she says some of the inter-departmental woes are directly attributable to AI.
- I spoke with former members in SAG-AFTRA leadership (before Sean Astin came on board). They quit on account of AI. "The writing is on the wall", they said. Direct quote.
AI has been remarkably good at killing Art and Writing jobs for sure.
The data on the article applies to IT related jobs disappearing for any reason on the same period. The only thing specific to AI is the pick of time, and the conclusions seem very robust from moving it some months around either way.
One specific stupid manager will absolutely replace people, but the overall dynamic isn't any more broken than it used to be.
What, personally, I think it's very surprising.
It's not stupidity but corporate strategy. Up until a few years ago companies and executives used to get massive backlash for doing layoffs. Today they can say "we replaced workers with AI" and get rewarded with a stock price bump.
As a co-founder and dev at a bootstrapped company I’d say AI has and will slow developer hiring rate. We’re just more productive and on top of things more.
We’ve also reduced the hours we work per week. We care about getting things done not time behind a screen.
Sure AI can build cute POCs. Will it build scaled solutions, not this year. The amount of ignorance in this post is precisely why the industry is so rattled. Gen AI tools are great, they are not making people orders of magnitude more productive.
We’ve been in business 15 years. These aren’t POCs. Even at say 20% productivity boost I feel way ahead to give devs 9 day fortnights and soon hopefully 4 day weeks.
how is it both a bootstrapped company slow to hiring devs (due to AI) and also a company that's been in business 15 years? if you were going to hire devs to scale out, you would've done it 10 years ago?
Slowed the rate of hiring devs.
Normally as we add enterprise customers we have to dedicate more dev resource keeping them happy. But since Claude code and now codex we have not felt that feeling of not being on top of the work. Thus not feeling the need to hire more devs.
A stupid manager like Kaz Nejatian? https://x.com/CanadaKaz/status/1971622109614166342
Lol this is crazy.
I seem to remember the latest tools for software developers were pushed in the business organisation by the developers - and eventually the folk at the top relented and accepted it.
When the reverse is happening, alarm bells should ring.
But hey, Im not against these CEOs destroying the culture within the firm and making their employees hate their guts, resulting in negative productivity gains.
That's a parody account to promote the next season of silicon valley, right?
Well it's not exactly a parody. The next season of Silicon Valley not only continues the cheeky hijinks and ironic saves required to navigate tech-cap dysfunction, it is a reality show. Although some of the new core team characters are (openly) unfiltered chatbots.
Including a real-life LLM "resurrection" of the fictional Erlich Bachman, created as part of a successful espionage mission to steal a Chinese deep learning company's near impossible distillation technology. But despite its trove of valuable illicit information, it has been orphaned online, unable to find its mysterious SV-fan hacker creators. As a result, chatErlich is now desperately attempting to make contact with the original SV team actors, who it actually believes are their fictional counterparts.
That should still show up in this data though.
Nope, people using AI would.
But with AI being so easy to pick up, does that mean everyone replacing everyone ad nauseam?
This is why I try to not care too much.
Yes, I learn how to use AI for coding in case it doesn't advance much more. But if AI is really going to do what some people think, it doesn't matter if you learn to use it or not, whole swathes of jobs, including software developers, will be obsolete. If your business boils down to being a middle man for an LLM it's not long for this world.
What really matters is the rate of advancement.
And no, there won't be new jobs to replace them. This is less like industrialization, which created jobs before replacing old ones, and more like the automation that hollowed out whole communities and cities from the '70s to '00s. Services largely saved us from this, but I see no new sector to come and rescue us. And any re-orientation of the labor force to existing jobs will drive down those wages too.
...also the study is from august 2023.
No it's not, it's from Oct 1st.
And the data goes up to 33 months since ChatGPT's release, or in other words Nov 2022 + 33 months = August 2025.
> Overall, our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago
Doesn’t seem to be that outdated
You can't make this claim from pushing numbers around in an excel spreadsheet.
>As previously noted, the metrics from OpenAI and Anthropic are imperfect proxies for AI risk and usage, while still being the best available.
Seems they're just coming out and admitting they refuse to measure it themselves. Not a good sign.
If it's the right numbers (called measurement data) and the right excel sheet pushing (called running a validated model) that is exactly the way you can make these claims. Overall it's called the scientific method.
What is your null-hypothesis and how does your data actually refute your null-hypothesis? And how is your sample representative?