The First Casualty of AI
Are those who helped create the damn thing
When the LLM wave broke over the last year, there were murmurs that many jobs would be eliminated. Content jobs were going to disappear before you knew it.
At the same time, news began to emerge about the “hallucinations” that LLM was often engaged in. LLMs are autocomplete on steroids. They are not fact-checking machines. A lawyer in the US got fined because he used ChatGPT to come up with case precedents. The software gave him precedents without checking if they existed or not. They did not!
The one thing that ChatGPT is very good at which has been much overlooked is - Writing Code. There is a lot of content on the internet of people trying to fix their code and find solutions to bugs. This excellent training data has provided the LLM with comprehensive code data.
Hence, rather than content writers, it is code writers or software programmers who are becoming redundant. 90% of the people who write code essentially go into Stackoverflow looking for code snippets that can be copied. I have had engineers tell me during interviews - that anybody can go to Stack Overflow and look at code, but an engineer knows what to copy and paste.
In this copy-paste world, the coders are the ones that are the easiest to lay off.
The numbers: Fourteen days into the New Year, 46 tech companies have laid off ~7,500 employees, per layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Some notable announcements:
Google confirmed it was axing about 1,000 employees last Wednesday across its Google Assistant, core engineering, and hardware teams that work on Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit.
Amazon cut hundreds of people working in its Audible, Twitch, MGM Studios, and Prime Video units.
Discord, the messaging app with IPO ambitions, slashed 17% of its staff.
Apple, which avoided the mass-scale layoffs of its rivals in 2023, is shutting down a 121-person team working on AI in San Diego, Bloomberg reported.
Source: Morning Brew
All of them have fired people in core engineering teams. I am certain these jobs have been eliminated because code can code. LLMs can write code and making it copy-paste should not be that hard.
Duolingo laid off 10 per cent of its contractors because of AI.
*Bloomberg* reports that a spokesperson for the language learning app said Duolingo doesn’t as many people anymore to perform the contractors’ work, adding that “part of that could be attributed to AI.”
The spokesperson also said AI isn’t a “straight replacement” because workers are already using AI to help them work. Duolingo has long used AI, having incorporated chatbots in 2016 and OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4 early last year.
Source: Verge
In 1500 it would take about a man-years worth of work to weave the sail of a ship. Weaving was lucrative and workers craftspeople used to be handsomely paid.
Then technology came in and…
Took the skill out of the production
Made it easier to weave in quantity
Destroyed the value of the individual involved in the trade
Beyond Yoga was worth $400 million in 2021, when it was purchased by Levi Strauss. Its leggings retail for about $100. Like many brands, the company relies on garment-sewing contractors to stitch together its products. In the US, such contractors pay workers as little as $1.58 an hour in the most egregious cases.
Source: Quartz
Is history going to repeat itself? Are computer engineers going to go the way of garment workers?
250 years ago, Ned Ludd could lead garment makers to revolt and break the machines that were robbing them of their jobs. They were called Luddites. Today, the rich strangled power in such a way that it would not even be possible for such a movement to take root. The Police state serving the rich would finish them.