CEO Brags That He Gets "Extremely Excited" Firing People and Replacing Them With AI
CEO Brags That He Gets "Extremely Excited" Firing People and Replacing Them With AI
His company will probably fail in the near future.
They rehire in a few months
That's great that they were able to replace people with equipment that they own and control. Oh what's that? The price and capabilities of this AI can change at any time?
Very safe and cool investment.
They have a lot of wiggle room in pricing software when it's eliminating whole ass people. The software is competing with a floor of 30-40k/yr
Only if it actually can do their job, which is... Doubtful
You need to double employee pay to focus on this. If a person takes home $30K gross, the employer's likely paying double that.
Your pay is not what the employer pays for your labor. At the low end of the pay scale, it's closer to double. Worker's comp insurance, unemployment taxes, HR costs, shitloads of things add up. With AI, they're gambling on deleting all that overhead.
Yes, and as we've seen time and time again, companies are totally cool when operating costs suddenly revert back to what they were years ago.
Yeah. And AWS was supposed to replace on-prem hosting. Except, now, they represent a higher opex cost than even payroll.
I see no reason why OpenAI isn't just charging peanuts for service to build a gigantic user base who can't think without it, then jacking the price up to whatever they want — and I can assure you, if Sam Altman has the option to become an immortal trillionaire, he will take it.
Can't see why the upcoming price hikes aren't obvious. Think these AI companies are going to eat shit forever?
CEOs think on a quarterly basis, exclusively. Any problems that result are next quarter's problem!
If you are thinking, "gee whiz, that seems like an insane and deeply unsustainable idea," you would be right.
Keep in mind by killing AI User company, you extract money of other shareholders that did NOT pivot.
player 2, insert coin
I'm unironically glad, I hope they replace the entire staff. When the company inevitably implodes, it will serve as a warning.
You could probably make good money by just shorting the stock of any company that does this.
it's already happening. A lot of places are now realizing that advocating "vibe coding" and what have you is generating a lot of broken shit and tech debt. I'm a front end/back end dev consultant. been doing it for a couple decades now. and lately most of my contacts have been for fixing or refactoring or straight up rebuilding stuff built by a vibe coder.
Nothing produced by AI scales. None of it is encrypted, everything is exploitable, and eventually it all breaks. Example call I got last week: a startup had decided to set up their own mastodon instance for marketing reasons or whatever. they left the setup and configuration of it to their vibe coder who essentially had Claude Code set it up for them. basically build it out locally then throw it in some dockers for the server. real backwards ass way to do it. The problem is on weekly basis it was completely maxing out the storage on the server, thus it would crash and also crash whatever other instances for whatever they had on their (namely their own Gitea instance). Ends up the vibe coder in charge of setting this thing up either used Claude Code (doubtful) or straight up when to Claude.ai to walk them through the setup process. What was happening was all the images, videos, cached stuff was going into some extra .config dir and that's it. wasn't getting cleaned out, just all being thrown into some random directory and sitting there gradually growing. The fix was painfully easy just clean it out and make sure the cached stuff goes into the proper dirs and as a safety just run a cron job like once a week to clean it.
Digging around same company pretty much set up all their instances for various things the same way. a couple of their apps had major security holes cause AI really doesn't care or know what to do with that stuff. It was a mess.
And it's not just that company. like I said most of my calls now for work are just being a sort of digital janitor for AI and Vibe Coders. And I've dropped these companies some hints saying "look, hiring this dude who touts being a vibe coder is going to cost you way more money and tech debt in the long run then saving a few bucks right now. get rid of them and hire devs that actually know what they're doing." But most of these CEO's and CTO's only think in the short term. A year from now they'll all be collectively fucked. Expect a LOT more stories like the recent Tea App to come out. Everyone's data is at risk currently. I wouldn't sign up for shit using my ID or anything right now.
If this company you worked with was an AWS deployment then it's likely they used Q for the deployment, it's pretty integrated into AWS and they hype it constantly.
That's consistent with our experience using AI "assistants." If it's a common problem, the training set will be large enough that there's a chance the AI will return a correct answer, though without contextual knowledge that might be important. But in a case like that, you could also just go and look it up on Stack Overflow. And if it's not a common problem, the AI-proposed solution is likely to be crap, and one unlikely to take into account nonfunctional requirements, architectural guidelines, maintainability or best practice.
My own principle is that if AI was involved at any step in the coding process, that means we need to test that code even more than usual, because programmers who remain in the business learn not to do stupid things over time, and AI doesn't. When an AI makes some stupid coding suggestion, there's no feedback loop telling it that it fucked up.
I wouldn’t sign up for shit using my ID or anything right now.
That's some sound advice there.
If you put a giant button in front of these people and said if you push the button you'll get 1 million dollars but someone will die, they'll have not only slammed the button before you are done with the sentence, but will seemingly have sped up pushing it after you've finished. Literal antisocial behaviour that would be pathologized if they weren't affluent.
TBF, I could sacrifice one person and use that million dollars to save hundreds of lives. Trolly problem, I have to pull that lever.
As long as I can choose the person, I'd do it. Win/win.
Esp if you can pick the person. Remote plumbing with a cash reward sounds good to me.
Wait until the shareholders discover that with $0.01 in API tokens a LLM can do the same "job" of a CEO, if not even better. And if the decision is unpopular just blame the algorithm! "Sorry we will switch to ceomind_v2_2065_06_04"
Honestly I think AI would do a ton better at replacing humans the higher up the food chain you start.
Replace a CEO with AI and then the lower levels. Keep all the foot soldiers and give them a bump or higher more to scale out and lower workload.
If they think middle and upper managers can’t be replaced with AI…
I assumed they have been for 40 years. And I'm 41.
If I was a shareholder I would automatically call for the firing of any CEO who even starts talking about AI.
No matter how many examples we get of companies doing this and everything falling apart there's always another CEO planning on doing it. Apparently the main requirement of being the CEO is you don't learn, and arrogantly announce nonsense to the media. If you can manage simultaneous walking and spitting, you're probably overqualified.
The thing is, its not going to fall apart forever (unfortunately). Billions are invested by all big tech companies into enormous server farms just for AI and their entire future stock value is now based on them coming up with a way to make a profit from this.
Replacing humans can lead to a lot of profit since salaries are one of the most expensive things in a company.
So I dont know. I think the future will suck. But what else is new.
It's like watching a slow motion train wreck.
Either this turns out to be a giant boondoggle (which personally I think is the most likely case) in which case there's going to be an enormous crash
Or we actually get AGI out of all of this and then it promptly kills us all.
Let's assume the demand for AI is only 20% of.what is being built. Doesn't that mean that the other 80% can now be used for something useful (protein folding etc.)?
AI has its places. It's a tool and will/should never replace a skilled worker
These fuckers are so thirsty for more profits they're trying to cut out thier biggest line item against profits. Humans.
Its like he just wants to be next!
It’s odd because AI could easily replace my boss and his boss, but it can’t replace me, the one doing the work. If anything AI should replace managers and bosses
Maybe he should try Viagra rather than firing people in order to get hard? Seems healthier.
Says CEO of company providing other companies with AI services to replace staff. So, no surprises?
Yeah... fuck that guy
This is same energy as firing domestic engineers and send them overseas. Then they hire the old engineers as very expensive consultants. Just watch.
To be fair we've seen dozens of CEOs and boards of directors get prematurely thrilled about the idea of replacing high-paid jobs with AI (or at least with AI and some lower paying jobs to curate the good slop from the eldritch horrors and hallucinations).
This guy is being semi-self-aware at least, and they all need to be reminded the economy despairs for good jobs
Also, I bet a nickel if we looked at his clerical staff we can find bullshit jobs there to keep clerks running around so he feels important while he walks through the office. Take those guys and let them work at home as part of the LLM team. I bet they'd appreciate doing real work (and skipping the commute).
Right now it takes specialists with a solid LORA game to make generative AI produce functional results. If we acknowledged this, then we'd either integrate AI as a new tool for doing stuff or we'd ditch it and keep our artists and experts. (And, with newfound appreciation for them, give them a raise?)
Also I still stand by the notion that well-treated, well-paid workers are productive workers. It was recently affirmed by a farm expert noting that prison inmates are outperformed by low-paid undocumented laborers who are outperformed (in turn) by well paid workers (documented or otherwise.)
We could make capitalism work if our bourgeoisie wasn't so busy trying to be aristocrats and hyper-bigots.
Or we could nationalize AI development like China in a step towards post scarcity, but that would likely require violent revolution.
wont be laughing once the board fires him in place of AI
Lets test if I have this format right.
Tech bro are very excited to grifft CEIs with AI
CEO of what, exactly? Fucking nothing.
He should be excited, he will live in interesting times!
Oh, fuck. I really went onion-free with this one.
I wonder how excited he will be when bis company tanks.
He'll just fail upward. CEOs are protected from the consequences of failure except in exceptional cases.
im a but a lowly worker and this gets me excited too, replacing my job with ai :D <3 letsss gooo
Rick, could you stop by my office when you get a sec?
/wrings hands, mutters "bwaa-ha-haaa"
ITT kink-shaming
What? How is that applicable?
Luigi gets extremely excited firing bullets at CEOs tracked by AI
Why are you bringing an innocent person into this