Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."
It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer, in the past they just wanted to know the develop was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do.
I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.
Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.
It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price.
Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.
I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.
I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.
We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.
This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded
Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)
I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog.
The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc.
At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen".
Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at...
..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc)
So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions.
This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that.
In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI.
And then there is the jevons paradox consideration...
It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.
> "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them."
I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention.
There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own.
Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline.
There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.
(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.
(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.
They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs by the end of the year" for another 20 years.
If you think there is even a 2% chance you're going to need a government bailout over the next decade, you simply cant be calling your product the grim reaper.
A significant job loss will trigger a deep recession which will eventually hit most AI customers so they will have too few customers to be profitable. The best (for AI business) scenario is when productivity is increased without mass unemployment.
I don't think its as big of a deal as its made out to be. They are human after all and have overestimated the capabilities of LLMs. What's more important is that this signals product market fit.
Millions of Nvidia GPUs are stranded in warehouses right now with nowhere to be installed and some will be deprecated in less than a year. Good thing Micron and everyone in the supply chain is scaling up to make millions more... I am sure this will work out fine when they write down all of the inventory which is too old to install
It's amazing how any rightful and just criticism of a Jewish person is automatically anti-Semitic. The only group of people with a special label for those that criticize them and the only group of people with a special label for those that ask questions about a certain historical event that involved them. Wild stuff.
There are many humans without any skin in the game that accurately estimated the capabilities of LLMs.
It has nothing to do with "being human". This wasn't about finding "product market fit" either. It was about griftin' while the gettin' was good. That certainly is "human".
To recap: 1) they developed and heavily pushed a technology they thought would result in mass unemployment, 2) they now believe they are wrong, so the market/government should definitely support their company going public. Which means that they were both intending to tank the economy and take your job away, and they were also wrong in their predictions, and now want to be rewarded for both with more money.
I have to admit LLMs are actually quite useful at generating code for me, but I am experienced enough to know what I want. I use it as a next-generation autocomplete.
This is the "whole thing" in a nutshell for me too. It's useful, speeds some things up, but I've been doing this a long time.
The state-of-the-art or medium-term future of the tooling doesn't feel apocalyptic in itself, but the macro forces, implications of scaling, and general reactions to it on all sides are a different story.
Because that was the truth. Now they have learned they are going to have to lie to the people so the masses can be sleepwalked to the same eventuality.
They both hired some good publicists who is advising that change your tone and messaging to get the public to like and trust the companies.
Initially the goal was to convince investors which is pretty much done and now its the retail/public that will value these companies once they IPO. Either way the job market is definitely impacted and is changing rapidly.
Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?
In every AI prediction there is an obvious underestimating of the actual difficulties faced by workers and planners so the tool to automate those intelligent tasks always way underperform what a person is capable of with the notable exception of merging the automation with human tasks as an augment. And that is a totally ‘nother topic. But thanks for the investment money.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.
That's a better link, thanks. Not much substance there about this though!
> One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”
I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.
But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:
> Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”
So in the span of 2 years we've gone from "AI will be our new God and solve all of our problems" to "AI will replace all your jobs and make SaaS companies obsolete", to now "AI will have some impact on the job market - might be positive, might be negative - who can say?"
I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".
" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise "
Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.
How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.
I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look strong enough to me support the "walking back AI jobs apocalypse" framing. See also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157
Public sentiment has turned strongly against them. They can try to take it back, but I don't think they will be successful. Nobody is buying the fiction anymore. Everyone knows that any proceeds from the technology will not be shared. The ownership class will take everything and leave the ecological impact to be dealt with by the same people they laid off.
Saying people are going to lose jobs at least sounded like we were at the cusp of something special. Now it just seems like we are going to get Opus 4.8.1 that supposedly helps somehow according to benchmarks.
Guess they have found their market and this is it.
The scam was that the US needed private industry to bootstrap technology that's mostly going to be used for surveillance analysis and building kill matrices.
Of course, the fact that the statements they made confidently for years are now hastily getting undone in the face of public backlash only further cements their reputation as snakes who can't be trusted farther than one can throw a bowling ball. For a while there I actually respected Amodei for sticking to his guns on the job loss thing, it seemed like it was his genuinely-held belief and he was going to keep saying the truth even if it was unpopular, but never mind.
As a general rule the least charitable interpretation of a CEO's words are probably the most accurate. Considering the increasing backlash against AI this sounds more like a PR move than a change in actual belief.
CEOs aren't a big enough target market. They need their slop machines to appeal to the masses as well. I wouldn't be surprised if we started seeing more advertising with that in mind, something like the ads Apple has but marketing their AI.
It's also amazing how hidden some of these realities before. Like, you assign a ticket to a developer, in the past they just wanted to know the develop was working on it and didn't care so much which work was what. They'd probably be so surprised to find out that a large percentage of implementation was deriving exactly what was meant by the jira ticket or the specification or the product person's intent. Which is all the stuff you have to work on before you can type in a prompt to an LLM. But now there's this pressure to believe that the developers only do the implementation part that the LLMs do, so they can pretend there will be major efficiency improvements. And it's really hard to explain to them what it is that developers even do.
I know I'm not saying anything new here, but at least where I'm working all of these matters feel much more present than they did months ago.
Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.
I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.
I hav set up a system where customer success and sales can drop in artifacts of customers talking about what they value (emails, transcripts, etc) and skills analyS them and then use them to add context to issues in the backlog.
The idea is that everything in the backlog is tied to an explanation of who it benefits and how it benefits them. We're using AI to merge multiple sources and automate the writing of it. The hope is it streamlines that communication. Our backlog issues now are 3-4 pages that explain very clearly why the issue matters, what it's higher level goal is, etc.
At first engineering was like "woa that's a lot of text" but after reading it was then "that's the best written issue I've ever seen".
Okay, so cool we are streamlining product management and setting ourselves up to automate customer feedback to development pipeline, dramatically cutting down on that issue discernment bottleneck you're pointing at...
..except today I found an issue with critical hallucinations in it. It mixed up what the customer said and what the cs rep said, to the extent that the issue was just straight up incorrect. This was with Opus 3.7 extended thinking. (Mind you it was a big transcript and pushing the limits of context window, loading multiple skills, etc)
So there's some serious potential, but it's just not there yet. Even if all this works flawlessly, the context these models can hold at once is like 0.1% of what a human can (if not less). So we will still need the humans for quite a while to make the harder decisions.
This is in a very leading edge startup pushing the limits of what LLMs can do... And even in this context optimized for LLM success it's still no where close to replacing people. We get a ton of value out of LLMs, but let me clarify that the hold up isn't just fact checking, it goes way beyond that.
In some ways I keep thinking it comes down to context management. Humans can hold so many orders of magnitude more context. Context is the bottleneck. The tech is a long way off being capable enough, and even when it is, there will be lots of operational and cultural obstacles to getting the right context into the AI.
And then there is the jevons paradox consideration...
It feels like we are a long way off. It seems plausible a generation from now employment will look very different, and I can kind of grasp how we get there, but I'm extremely skeptical of any unemployment apocalypse on a 5 year time horizon being triggered by AI. Maybe an unrelated economic shock, but not AI.
I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human intervention.
There are, of course, many cases where this is not true, but they're certainly more capable than I had previously thought and can solve an increasingly large range of problems on their own.
Reading the comments here is like glimpsing in to either the past or an alternate timeline.
There's tons of inertia in the system so don't expect change to happen over night, but reading "AI won't replace jobs" today feels a lot like when I used to hear "nobody will purchase things online!" back in the mid 1990s.
Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.
if you really believe this, quit the yapping and concentrate your portfolio for direct and indirect exposure to all frontier AI projects.
Paul Graham has mandatory essay on this - https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
(1) More than 50% of Americans at this point are more concerned about AI than excited for it - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
(2) Popular media is feeding into this zeitgeist with headlines like - "Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse" eg - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-...
(3) There is a bright line between these articles and growing concern / pushback on the development of new data centers with both moratoriums and significant municipal cancellations.
(4) Perhaps more materially the architects of AI are being challenged directly - in April Sam Altman's home was (a) bombed and then (b) shot at and weeks later the entire industry was just taken to task by The Pope! himself calling for acknowledgement of human limitation, grace, and dignity.
(5) Meanwhile Sam and others are reframing including launching a new foundation to "increase quality of life and individual freedoms for people around the world" and pivoting messaging to AI "accelerating everyone in achieving their goals" https://x.com/sama/status/2059677202917331431 & https://x.com/sama/status/2057218997503086888
Is this because the architects don't believe AI will be as disruptive as planned or . . . ?
I’d type that in alternating caps but I’m on mobile.
I see what your dialect did there. Can i quote you verbatim?
They self-servingly overinflated the capabilities and now its coming to roost.
Hahaha! Good one!
It has nothing to do with "being human". This wasn't about finding "product market fit" either. It was about griftin' while the gettin' was good. That certainly is "human".
The state-of-the-art or medium-term future of the tooling doesn't feel apocalyptic in itself, but the macro forces, implications of scaling, and general reactions to it on all sides are a different story.
Initially the goal was to convince investors which is pretty much done and now its the retail/public that will value these companies once they IPO. Either way the job market is definitely impacted and is changing rapidly.
Will one of these companies be the first to hit 10 trillion valuation?
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk.
But the link to the interview goes to this 2m11s YouTube video, and he doesn't use say anything of the sort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhbsKZ-_bg
Here's a full MacWhisper transcript (easier to search than the YouTube one): https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba0fe174cb7306b74ddf08589a027...
UPDATE: It turns out the article was linking to a short highlights video, but the interview itself was 45 minutes long.
I don't think the full video is available anywhere, so it's hard to confirm that "pretty wrong" quote.
This Reuters story carries the same quotes and, unlike the linked Fortune article, doesn't sit behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...
> One of the areas where he personally had been wide of the mark was on AI’s short-term impact on entry-level white-collar jobs, which had not been nearly as bad as he had once predicted, he said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about that.”
I'm not sure that justifies a whole "Sam Altman ... walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions" headline, personally. It's pretty thin.
But... we still haven't seen the full interview, so there might be more to it. The Fortune article also includes:
> Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”
I'm filing this right next to "blockchain for everything" and "we will all live in the metaverse" as evidence that most of these people are full of shit and don't understand much outside of their area of expertise (if they even understand that). I can't believe the level of credulous hype around this stuff. At least AI is a useful technology compared to what we saw with "The Metaverse".
Its interesting isnt it? That many humans dont seem to understand that unless you know a thing well, perhaps you should shut up and not comment.
How can Dario and Sam credibly say we are going to automate X, Y, Z job when they've never done it in their lives? Its like the idiots on here talking down on accountants - unless you've done the job and prove you understand the mechanics: shush. Dont talk about stuff you have zero clue about. I see this time and time again in posts related to finance - just shut up and stop creating noise.
This Reuters story carries a similar idea: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/openais-altman-sa...
I'd warn that this all looks pretty thin - there are a couple of partially supporting quotes from a 45 minute virtual conversation Sam had with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference on Tuesday, but they don't look strong enough to me support the "walking back AI jobs apocalypse" framing. See also this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315157
Guess they have found their market and this is it.
I haven't looked at how long he's been predicting job destruction, so I don't know if that explanation fits the facts.
Its gonna be funny seeing the eventual ego melt down when the labour market continues going on.