Have any managers/team leads been asked to layoff staff b/c of AI?

For a long time IBM's AI strategy has been to do normal business, and claim it's AI-related in order to make themselves sound cooler.

This is the same thing. Any layoffs happening today don't really have anything to do with AI. The company just needs to do layoffs, and saying "we have layoffs because of AI" sounds better than "we have layoffs because revenues are worse than we expected".

The company I work for just jumped on the bandwagon and is actually searching for people with ML/AI experience. If you can use Spark, TensorFlow, Scikit and Keras, you actually have a better chance of getting the job than a Ph.D. who knows only one of the frameworks. (That's the way many corporations work, sadly.)

The only place where "intelligence" is in the AI is in its name. These are mathematical or logical models which resemble a behaviour of an intelligent being and if you throw ML into the mix, the AI models can actually learn on their own. But they are not creative. They can do amazing things but they have no comprehension of WHY they do these things or have (usually) no notion of truthfulness. They just repeat what they were learnt on or extrapolate from it (often wrongly because there is no critical thinking and fact-checking in contemporary models).

I see a lot of tell-tale signs of another bubble which is going to burst in a couple of years like it did in the 1980s.

Nothing to worry about. If someone's job security is endangered, they can either switch employer or do something else.

But if you can claim experience with these frameworks, enjoy the ride. Companies are going to pay you whatever you ask.

People buying into the hype too much? We've been early adopters of AI at my work, but we're still hiring. AI just improved our efficiency a bit.

I think if you can replace employees with ChatGPT you probably didn't need them to begin with. They weren't doing valuable work anyway.

Anecdotally, I know quite a few copywriters who've seen their clientele dry up, especially those deep in SEO and content marketing, thought leadership, that sort of thing.

I have no data to support this, but I have seen plenty of LinkedIn headlines switch to "Prompt engineer:

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=pro...

Wouldn't you have to first automate the job? Speculative layoffs because something is going to be automated "any day now" seems unwise to me, how will the task be completed tomorrow?

Or is the idea that businesses already automated stuff and the management is so incompetent that IBM has to send around a pamphlet to remind them to layoff the people now sitting on their hands?

I have a friend (really) who is no longer replacing front-end devs who quit at their mid-stage startup. Says that he’s getting enough lift from ChatGPT-4 to make up enough of the gap that so far it’s not worth replacing them as the team can pick up the slack.

Question for OP - How big is the company you work for?

I work for a company that has around 50 technical employees and I'd say use of LLMs is putting pressure on the company against hiring more employess rather than actually laying people off.

My armchair estimate is LLMs make the employees ~5% more efficient "on average" (not everyone is using it or using it effectively), which is 15-30 minutes more efficient per day. That would mean you'd start thinking about laying off 5 people if you're a company with 100 technical employees. If you're a smaller company, it would be premature to lay off employees based solely off of the impact of LLMs.

Great question, and one to be skeptical of. IBM doing layoffs and saying they will be an AI company, is well, the slumbering giant trying to keep itself relevant and squeeze costs to pump stock.

> The IBM layoffs articles have been passed around executive management recently.

That IBM interview was highly speculative, and was arguably as much a smoke screen for layoffs they wanted to do anyway as it was a prediction of their future AI plans. No one at IBM has been layed off due to AI yet either, they simply "expect" they can do it in years to come, which may well be true.

I don't think this is common yet anywhere serious, as realistically you aren't going to be replacing an IC with an LLM yet, despite the hype, with very few exceptions.

Arvind Krishna is as much trying to associate IBM with the current AI investor craze as he is making a sensible statement about the future of work in that interview, and it should be seen as the investor marketing it is. IBM have done this in the past too - remember the Watson AI ads with Bob Dylan? Now no one remembers the Watson brand.

Planning to reduce headcount by 7800 people because you have awesome AI technology coming down the pipeline sounds a lot better to some investors ears than firing 7800 people because company isn't performing well, and investors are often rewarding AI news handsomely in the stock market recently.

I can't even remember the last time I saw Arvind or senior IBM staff being interviewed in the mainstream media at all before he uttered the word AI.

I’m a front-line manager and the idea of replacing any of the IC’s on my team with “AI” is absolutely ludicrous.

I think you've have to be specific about what kind of staff. Developers? Users?

ChatGPT has only been out for about six months. Even if there are big layoffs coming, going from released technology, to implementation in a customer domain, to being comfortable laying off significant staff in that time-frame seems extremely aggressive. I would guess layoffs in that time frame would actually be fore other reasons, though "AI" could possibly been used to obscure the true reasons.

We need to hire more QA and requirements/analysis people because we are more productive. I think only half our devs are really using AI regularly too.

Skeptical of layoffs happening for non-"tech" companies due to AI, but lower HC for next year is happening in at least some orgs for sure, especially at entry levels. Cf. Bill Gates' comment of having a white-collar worker made available.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/05/10/a-message-from-prashan...

No, but we did create an open position for an engineer to build internal tooling around LLMs.

The tech has the potential to displace workers, or cause unemployment.

However, unemployment will never happen, if you know humans. There is going to be a lot of outrage, and regulators will regulate it like drugs!

AI won't directly lead to large-scale layoffs. It's more of a trend where companies begin to hire fewer people. They might not replace those who retire or leave.

Chegg certainly seems to be in a tight spot.

First should come the training to use AI then should come the layoffs of those who don’t use AI.

But it sounds like your company is not interested in training. And would rather hire from outside first. So fire now and Hire AI enhanced staff next.

I have an aversion to such companies. But the other kinds of companies are not firing staff because of AI. Instead They are increasing staff workload, a fallout of lots of staff finding better jobs.

kind of the opposite, i've been told from on high to not use it at all and tell everyone below the same.

Middle management is bad enough when it's done by trained competent people. I can't imagine working under the direction of one of these LLMs.

If GPT-4’s diminishing abilities are any indication, employees have nothing to fear.

The tool has somehow become less impressive over time.