[GoatInGrey]

Many of these announcements are bluffs as many users here have pointed out. But real LLM-driven layoffs do happen, and from what I have anecdotally seen, they follow a pattern: leadership assumes the new LLM service will make human workers redundant. They then make cuts before the evidence is in. What this means is that today, there are many LLM service deployments that replaced humans while their actual impact remains a mystery. Though it won't be a mystery to leadership forever.

One example client that shouldn't dox me: Odom Corporation, a beverage distributor. They purchased an LLM-driven purchasing solution and immediately laid off their entire purchasing team, save for a few members who exist on the periphery. A follow-up with them showed that the system was ordering summer beverages coming into the winter (among many other bad purchasing decisions) and causing a dramatic increase in unsold inventory. Since they believe that LLMs will exponentially improve, they're dismissing it as a one-off because this year's models "will be so much better". We attempted to advise differently, but stakeholders got extremely emotional at even small suggestions that there was a fundamental problem. Good luck to them.

[caconym_]

Yeah. I keep running into LLMs in customer service functions where I would previously have been talking to a human, and in literally every case they're beyond worthless and I end up talking to a human anyway.

[dntrkv]

I think the execs are either using it as an excuse to reduce opex to boost share prices or they're actually buying into this delusion that the productivity improvements are right around the corner. Though I don't really buy into that second option since any reasonably intelligent person would wait to see concrete evidence of said improvements before crippling your company based on some hope.

I also think some of the companies that operate in the AI space are using the layoffs as a form of marketing to prove the capabilities of their tech (while also using it as an excuse to cut costs).

Anyways, I work at one of the major players in the space and the amount of AI code slop I see on a daily basis is absurd. My prediction is that within two years most younger SWEs will only have a high-level understanding of their code. I already see it happening.