I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI and more to do with the revenue outlook or the growth outlook. Basically, they are "narrative shopping" to save face with the stock market... and IMO it might work.
Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
sahaj · 5h ago
It has more to do with the workforce wage demands and their output. Imagine if we all think that AI will get rid of our job at some point. We will work harder and demand less money do that work. All large corps did huge coordinated cuts in workforce in 2022-2023, and now there's this narrative. They are simply trying to get us to do more work for less money.
True, however the pitch itself is telling. They're not saying "we're expecting AI to boost the productivity of our employees by 20% with no increase in labor costs." They're saying "we're going to spend less on humans" because investors are more ok with spending money on machines than people. That's the problem, they're not looking at how AI enhances people, they're looking at how it can eliminate people.
thunky · 2h ago
Why would you expect different?
Companies don't exist to benefit their employees (or their customers).
crop_rotation · 4h ago
> Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
If that was true then the companies should never have been doing layoffs, as all these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
> The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
This is assuming that companies have the capacity to keep increasing revenue by adding more workforce, which is just not true. At some point you hit diminishing returns with more workers. The same goes for Agent workers. To chase more revenue you need a lot more than just more SWEs and a lot of that is not currently similarly scalable.
CharlesW · 4h ago
> I think the fair way to read any CEO's comments about AI reducing their workforce at this point has nothing to do with the capabilities of AI…
You can legitimately argue "far less to do with", but it's definitely not nothing. There are countless projects underway where AI will allow for 10% reductions with zero business impact in the short term, and 25-40% reductions (sometimes more) by 2030.
jppope · 4h ago
ok. so you can reduce your head count without impact great! Why would you get rid of people? Why would you not reassign those people into other productive or revenue generating activities?
The only logical explanation is that they don't have enough opportunities to utilize those people OR as I previously mentioned... their financials might look bad, and they are trying to make them look better so they don't take a hit in the markets.
TheOtherHobbes · 4h ago
Fire people. Stonks go up. Bonus!
Stonks go down - fast - when all those fired people stop buying, but that's a problem for the next CEO.
As you say, they could also expand. Or just fix the problems with the site.
But they don't have the imagination to do that.
diamond559 · 4h ago
Countless projects huh, CMU found the best of them has only a 30%ish success rate on basic business tasks. Many are below 90% still, but yeah let's just pull magic numbers out of thin air. How much Nvda you own bud?
CharlesW · 4h ago
Zero Nvidia. The CMU benchmark is fun, but tasks <> jobs. They found that agents can autonomously finish about a third of their simulated office tasks, but that can't be mapped to a labor-market forecast.
another_twist · 4h ago
I am curious, where are these numbers from ?
CharlesW · 4h ago
These are realistic (IMHO, of course) projections based on studies I've helped with and conversations I've had with my network. Naturally, the impact will vary enormously based on roles, and the timelines won't be evenly distributed.
But these kinds of projections aren't unusual at all — if you use the Deep Research capabilities of modern models to build a list of public projections for your own research, you'll see similar estimates. These reports will generally use the framing of "efficiency gains", where AI will "free-up employees from drudgery to focus on higher-value work", but my intuition is that a future where all individual contributors are elevated to Director of Agentic Workflows is probably not the most likely outcome.
another_twist · 2h ago
I see and are these studies public ? Could we see the data and the methodology here ? Thing is there are benchmarks to judge software engineering capability of AI. I am more interested in how the jobless predictions made ?
I understand all the theory but it can largely be condensed into - AI makes workforce more efficient so you need less people. But there are no good studies afaik that measure AI powered efficiency and surely nothing about how to model workforce reduction due to AI. I am curious what the science is behind these opinions.
diamond559 · 4h ago
What studies? MIT estimates only 5% of the workforce can be replaced long term. What tasks are you employees using AI on, CMU shows the best llm only has a ~30% success rate for basic business tasks. Are you a vibe coding start up or something?
CharlesW · 3h ago
> MIT estimates only 5% of the workforce can be replaced long term.
The model by MIT's Daron Acemoglu estimates that ~5% of U.S. tasks can be completely and profitably automated by AI within ten years.
It was expressly not a head-count forecast, and didn't attempt to quantify the headcount reduction that AI augmentation could enable.
Is this the MIT paper ? In this one the TFP is 0.55%
whatever1 · 4h ago
In my case AI has boosted my productivity towards directions that are not on the critical path for a project, but nevertheless very nice to have.
For example now I have a ton of graphs and interactive UI pages that interact with my code. Made everyone’s lives easier, but at least in my case it was not a dealbreaker not having these, and frankly nobody was willing to pay for them.
jchw · 5h ago
Even though I can fathom a world where AI tools could somehow lead to reduced head count, I think this is the only reasonable interpretation right now. After all, tech companies have been beating the "downsizing due to AI" drum for a really long time now, and for almost the entire time it has been very blatantly obvious bullshit.
another_twist · 4h ago
What amazes me is the vile shit directed towards software engineers. Remember that letter from the dickhead investor to Google demanding to know why engineers were paid 450k. Or just PMs beating the drum about how you don't need engineers ? My reaction to that was hey all the tools you love to throw into engineers faces were devtools. You know the dev part is important. Remember Bubble, their whole schtick was you dont need a technical cofounder and I have yet to see a unicorn Bubble app. Instead of talking about how we all can collaborate, people really are hating on engineers for nothing.
conartist6 · 3h ago
Yes, your point about revenue is very astute
cyanydeez · 2h ago
Reduce it further: they have a cudgel to manipulate lower salaries with.
So it really doesnt matter whats realistic. They want cheaper workers to live in fear.
JCM9 · 5h ago
This headline is getting old and the story isn’t sticking with folks. They will do layoffs but because core business units are struggling and AWS has turned into a mess of disconnected services that are falling behind peers and they’re trying to clean up that bloated mess… not beside of “AI.”
Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.
crop_rotation · 4h ago
> Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.
What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to execute.
jdgoesmarching · 2h ago
“Behind on AI” isn’t exclusive to models. Azure is raking in money on OpenAI compute and has an entire product line built out in Copilot. I’m not going to argue for the quality of those offerings, but it’s clearly positioned much better for the street than Amazon is.
Google you’ve already covered, and Apple despite its faults has been designing and producing AI-targeted hardware for a decade and has a much clearer story for integrating AI into its lineup.
AWS has a scattered mess of Q-branded services and a consistent track record of shipping garbage enterprise apps like Workmail, Chime, Workdocs, Cognito, and arguably Quicksight. Bedrock APIs are frequently behind in features from their parent vendors, and Bedrock as a whole isn’t better than thousands of LLM management platforms that have already sprung up.
I’ll never fully bet against Amazon as the far and away cloud market leader, but their existing AI position is flimsy and their increasingly hostile position towards their workforce reeks of desperation.
mips_avatar · 1h ago
I think the bear case for Azure is they're now just a GPU service provider for OpenAI. This is a business, but it's not a great business. None of their AI products are industry leaders, and nobody would pick copilot if given a choice. Microsoft can't reuse their Teams bundling strategy because the unit costs of copilot are so high. Like for real where is the actually functional powerpoint or excel agent? It's not coming because these products are so sclerotic that there's no interface inside of these codebases for a current gen AI agent to use and provide customer value. Microsoft made it's bed by chasing the next shiny object and having a culture of crushing individual employee agency years ago. Executives might think that layoffs can instill innovation through fear and grind, but that is so misguided.
zdragnar · 5h ago
It definitely has the "thought leader" vibe that most fluff pieces from C level types have.
supertrope · 3h ago
The AI craze has shown that most businesses leaders blindly follow buzzwords.
NitpickLawyer · 4h ago
> and the story isn’t sticking with folks.
This take is getting old, and the story won't stick with folks till their desk is in a cardboard box...
Out of all the faangs, amz is the best positioned to remove staff and agentify the work they were doing. First, amz constantly churns the lower x%. They've been doing this for years now. They know what to count and who to fire. Second, amz has had everyone write a story about everything they do, day in, day out for years now. Change a lightbulb? Not without a story. Guess what you need for training LLMs? Yup, stories.
There are plenty of people writing stories and coordinating the writing of other stories. Those people will be the first out. It's never the top nor the bottom.
readthenotes1 · 5h ago
Anthropic is way behind? That might surprise a few people.
Amazon is just one of many investors in Anthropic.
paulddraper · 4h ago
Comment was about $AMZN
Fraction of that is Anthropic investment.
daxfohl · 5h ago
I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit?
There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But we're in tech. There's always something new to do. If you're not doing new things as a company, you're getting replaced by those who are.
So it seems like a losing strategy to make your workforce cost reduction your primary concern when we could see the greatest workforce productivity gain in modern times.
nerevarthelame · 4h ago
Good news, everyone! I invented a new lubrication that increases wind turbine energy production by 10%. So we obviously want to decommission 10% of our wind turbines.
takklz · 4h ago
Same thought I had. Almost everything piece of technology that I use is broken in some way. UI bugs, connection issues, missing obvious features, missing non obvious features that might be specific to me, terrible UI, etc etc.
If AI is so useful that it can fully replace engineers or other humans, why aren’t products next level amazing?
If the barrier to entry for these high margin tech companies becomes so low that they no longer even need employees, isn’t the next step to compete on quality?
crop_rotation · 4h ago
Because products never become next level amazing. Hardware got so fast and yet most software keeps getting bloated. Given a choice between writing near perfect software and cramming more features, almost all companies cater to more features (except in some rare domains or cases). Both because the latter is easier and because that's what people demand (not by their words but by their expressed preferences).
drewbeck · 3h ago
1. Software issues are not merely technical, they’re human. Someone has to care about the issue and prioritize it and get it fixed.
2. Many products don’t compete on software because there are more substantive market forces at play.
AI won’t fundamentally alter either of these facts.
supertrope · 3h ago
The market has reached an equilibrium of the minimum quality a business can get away with before customers switch away. Customers usually prioritize time to market or price before quality. There’s still a niche for excellent quality tech but you will pay much more for it.
mips_avatar · 1h ago
It's not a strategy it's a corporate PR spin. They're betting this will keep public markets happy for now.
People are out there building useful stuff with AI but they don't work at Amazon
hiddencost · 5h ago
Coordination costs in software are brutal.
More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.
another-dave · 4h ago
AI as a coordination multiplier would be interesting in large orgs — the AI assistant that trains on internal newsletters & minutes of all-hands says "I think you should loop John Doe from team X into this discussion because 1 year ago he ran point on something similar"
evil-olive · 3h ago
> I think you should loop John Doe from team X into this discussion
yeah, that's a useful thing that a chatbot could do...in theory.
in practice, from the recent CMU study [0] of how actual LLMs perform on real-world tasks like this:
> For example, during the execution of one task, the agent cannot find the right person to ask questions on RocketChat. As a result, it then decides to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.
True, but the large companies are incentivised to not see or accept that. I really don't think Jassy is thinking that he wants Amazon to be smaller so it has lower coordination costs. It will also have a smaller market cap, you know?
alephnerd · 4h ago
I'm on the board or a board observer for a couple companies (some public, some startups), and it is a bit of column A and a bit of column B.
The headcount growth during COVID along with the return of offshoring with GCCs was driven by the intention to speed up delivery of products and initiatives.
There are some IR games being played, but the productivity gains are real - where you may have recruited a new grad or non-trad candidates, now you can reduce hiring significantly and overindex on hiring and better compensating more experienced new hires.
Roles, expectations, and responsibilities are also increasingly getting merged - PMs are expected to have the capabilities of junior PMMs, SEs, UX Designers, and Program Managers; and EMs and Principal Engineers are increasingly expected to have the capabilities of junior UX Designers, Program Managers, and PMs. This was already happening before ChatGPT (eg. The Amazon PM paradigm) but it's getting turbocharged now that just about every company has licenses for Cursor, Copilot, Glean Enterprise, and other similar tools.
swader999 · 4h ago
Yes! I'd imagine a lot of employees will just replace the SAAS that laid them off using AI to leap ahead or just jump ship to a competitor to do the same thing.
LightBug1 · 4h ago
Thanks for reminding me to cancel my Prime. Logical comment!
This article/comment isn't really the prompt, just a reminder of that it seems like a shtty place to put my funds and I'll soon be using AI to replace it anyway!
crop_rotation · 4h ago
HN is so weirdly optimistic that SWE jobs will not decline terribly in the age of LLMs. Yes claude code can not write a new web browser from scratch or even some innovative project, but almost nobody is doing that. Most of non big tech is writing the same CRUD apps with trivial differences. Even 90% of big tech (outside the core infra) is just writing CRUD apps. I have worked at two big tech companies in fairly senior levels and almost everyone is doing CRUD work, not that there is anything wrong with it.
But the comments saying Claude can't replace some genius are irrelevant. The amount of SWEs at big tech itself is so high that law of averages dictate most people are not rockstars (and this is validated in my observations). Most SWEs just write internal RPC to internal RPC wrappers. I am seeing that everyone is relying a lot on these tools, and the new SWEs seem to utterly depend on them. HN users will always have some edge case pointed out but most of software is crud apps low scale (even big tech most internal tool is low scale) and these tools are definitely doing better than the median SWE I have encountered.
nullorempty · 5h ago
> We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.
What he hopes for is to just reduce the number of people they employ. So the "more people doing other types of jobs" just makes the message more palatable.
Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?
gruez · 5h ago
>Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?
There's no way that paying for a bunch of employees that you don't need, just so you can have some customers, is going to make sense. Even if you're operating a company town, only a fraction of their income is going to be spent on your company's goods/services, so you'll never be able to recoup the wage that way.
arnonejoe · 5h ago
I think what he is trying to say is if there is mass unemployment as a result of "all companies following suit", no one will be able to buy their products.
satyrun · 4h ago
Blue collar workers won't have this problem for a very long time.
It seems obvious that many white collar workers today will have to do something involving physical labor at some point in the future.
I expect I will be facing this in my mid 50s. Really not ideal timing.
drewbeck · 3h ago
Maybe not with AI, but blue collar workers suffered in the same way bc of job flight and automation in decades past.
ITB · 5h ago
Capitalism is the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It will work out.
nullorempty · 5h ago
More a pursuit of short term profit I'd think.
drewbeck · 3h ago
You’ve mistaken a sometimes-emergent property of the system with the fundamental rules of the system itself.
vajrabum · 4h ago
American capitalism in the 2020s is no such thing. It's goosing this quarters numbers so the management can get their incentive bonuses and stock and buying buying business advantage from the legislature.
It's all in Adam Smith and economic history.
lucianbr · 4h ago
That's why there's no such thing as regulatory capture or monopolies or rent-seeking, right? They just don't happen in capitalism, because they are inefficient.
slater · 4h ago
Efficiency so high, they've convinced us to help them pull up the ladder!
Mawr · 4h ago
The best way to increase efficiency is to externalize costs. E.g. by polluting the environment with your coal plant. The taxpayer takes on the burden of the cleanup and the company gets pure profit. So efficient. Capitalism is beautiful.
> Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems. Agents let you tell them what you want (often in natural language), and do things like scour the web (and various data sources) and summarize results, engage in deep research, write code, find anomalies, highlight interesting insights, translate language and code into other variants, and automate a lot of tasks that consume our time. There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field. There will also be agents that routinely do things for you outside of work, from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks. Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.
imiric · 5h ago
> Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.
This is the same wishful thinking that AI companies are heavily marketing.
Nobody will want to use an "agent" that makes mistakes 60% of the time. Until the industry figures out a way to fix the problems that have plagued this technology since the beginning―which won't be solved by more compute, better data, or engineering hacks―this agentic future they've been promising is a pipe dream.
sublinear · 4h ago
I take more issue with the media spin than the actual story. Why does the discussion even mention software jobs when that's less than 4% of Amazon's workforce?
It makes more sense that Amazon would continue to push AI where it's already being used successfully. Devs may benefit from finding solutions quicker with AI, but it's never made sense to me why that would affect productivity per head or change hiring/firing rates.
Put another way: there are never enough devs and they write a lot of shitty code. AI writes even shittier code, but in subtly different ways and can write it even faster helping the dev iterate to better code.
The result is basically no change anywhere except a modest increase in quality. This is equivalent to, but cheaper than going on an epic quest to find the good devs and overpay them. Why is this a bad thing for like 99% of people who write code? There's basically no impact on their pay or ease of finding a job.
linotype · 5h ago
Is there a way we can filter these kinds of articles out? It's becoming tiring. Maybe I should start using the API and an LLM to filter.
CharlesW · 4h ago
Definitely do a "Show HN" once you've done that.
exabrial · 4h ago
No they won’t lol. What’s actually happening is ceos are realizing that they don’t need to employ 100,000 JavaScript developers, there’s probably easier and better ways to solve the same problems… but yeah blaming ai sounds makes firing people a lot softer
crop_rotation · 3h ago
You are totally correct. Most of big tech has way too many SWEs (which if good for society definitely), but I don't see that number surviving LLMs.
owebmaster · 26m ago
Can AI build Google? 100,000 developers can.
owebmaster · 26m ago
They don't need it anymore because the tech and the customer base is built already. New companies will employ 100,00 javascript developers if that is what it takes to become trillion dollar companies.
markus_zhang · 4h ago
> As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.
I believe the business leaders are seriously considering about this -- i.e. not necessarily just as an excuse to RIF, but they probably believe in this. Whether it is going to be successful is irrelevant.
I'm eagerly waiting for someone to talk about AI integration experiments within FAANG. I'm surprised no one has talked about it yet -- maybe there is some kind of NDA or the experiments are still in early stages. Once the experiments are proved to be marginally successful, I bet the leaders are going to start some mass layoffs -- or maybe worse, if they are pressured by stock prices, to do that and see what happens before anything conclusive.
To any team who is integrating AI into your company's data or doc -- please STOP and don't do that. I'm not talking about USING AI, but INTEGRATING AI.
lbrito · 5h ago
Jassy is the prototypical Amhole. Always with a good zeitgesity excuse for screwing the workforce.
Klarna I feel also used the 700 fired due to AI and "oops now we're rehiring some" as a nice distraction from the ~2,100 total reduction that occurred from 2022 to 2024.
fsndz · 3h ago
exactly !
faizshah · 4h ago
Anything you can do with 1 person these large companies will figure out how to do with 10+ people + a PM + a Director/VP sponsor + 3-6 months of red tape and review and a late game “re-alignment” (rewrite) of the features right before the launch date.
More money is spent at most of these companies coordinating work than actually doing work.
fracus · 5h ago
It would make sense for the government to tax these companies using AI so they can put the money towards social programs.
super_linear · 5h ago
The Jassy "Thoughts on Gen AI" memo was released a month ago and this article doesn't seem to reveal any new information on this beyond just suggesting "amazon might soon reduce cost to serve" without providing any real information https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...
shmerl · 5h ago
Waiting for AI to reduce CEOs.
Finnucane · 4h ago
Are you sure all these C-suite guys aren't actually AI already? I doubt some of them would pass a Voigt-Kampff test.
shmerl · 6m ago
Yeah, may be they already were replaced by AI?
jihadjihad · 5h ago
Wasn’t there a report from Salesforce a month ago where they found that agents were far less reliable and capable as hoped? May be different at Amazon, but who knows.
But would they ever admit such a failure in-front of shareholders who are still under the spell of "AI agents", "AGI", "ASI" bullshit?
I don't think so.
e40 · 5h ago
Who does the Amazon CEO think will purchase their products, as income inequality increases and people are replaced with agents or robots?
rwmj · 4h ago
As long as he has his New Zealand bunker ready to go he doesn't care. Who can he trust amongst his security team is the greater concern for him.
gedy · 5h ago
I'm noticing a pattern that any one or company that talks about AI "agents" is full of snake oil they are trying to sell you.
gedy · 4h ago
Replying to myself, but maybe this is to tap into power-trip marketing to manager or business types e.g. "fleets of agents", "at your fingertips", etc.
rvz · 5h ago
This is their real definition of "AGI" without them admitting it directly.
p0w3n3d · 5h ago
I'm suspecting that AI might reduce the force of the workforce as well. Eventually.
throwawayoldie · 5h ago
"We're doing layoffs, and here's this years pretext."
xenihn · 5h ago
I'm going to pick an arbitrary number here that's loosely based on top 100 tech companies by market cap.
If you are working for a company that employs at least 1000 full-time engineers, I think you should consider joining a team where every project involves AI in some way, if you aren't already on one. Whether its owning AI tooling, or developing client features that use AI directly, or even just prototyping AI concepts that never launch. The safest roles like research and directly working on the models are out of reach for most people due to competition and position scarcity, but that's ok. There are so many positions downstream from those. The key thing to look for is to be in a position where your AI features can actually turn a profit, which might be rare, but not as difficult to get as an upstream role. But its still fine to be in a role that isn't profitable.
I think AI-adjacent roles will either be the first or last fulltime SWE jobs to go during the next tech downturn, which I don't think we are in yet. I am betting on the latter, because I think corporations will continue to reroute more and more funding towards AI all the way down. Even if the current AI cycle ends up as a failure, we are already in the sunk cost stages of commitment. There is no turning back without anything short of a total collapse.
supertrope · 3h ago
Sounds like the long term trend of companies hollowing themselves out by prioritizing sales and cutting “cost center” activities like engineering the product, manufacturing, support, R&D, and the overhead in running a company.
earth2mars · 5h ago
My gut feeling is, he is saying it to show dominance in AI (to show customers look, we are reducing our workforce, you can do it too! but to be frank, they have too many people doing nothing. so they can lay off as many people as they want). there isn't much out there. Systems are so fragile, management have no clue as they are far behind in understanding it.
sandspar · 5h ago
One thing I learned from COVID is that warnings never stick + once the wave hits it's MUCH larger than even the most dire warnings predicted.
CEOs can warn about AI replacing jobs until they're blue in the face, but people won't listen.
And when mass job losses finally arrive, people (including the CEOs) will be shocked and overwhelmed.
pmg102 · 5h ago
That was true for COVID but be careful not to overgeneralise. People also have historically warned about many things, with many of them never coming true.
In fact, that is probably the reason that people unfortunately have learned not to listen. There's even a fable about it.
sandspar · 1h ago
Thanks for the caution! That's good advice.
Although I do think that AI fits the pattern of "real big thing".
In general, cultural diffusion progresses in three stages: from insiders to money people to the public.
For example, great artists are recognized first by fellow artists and critics, then by art auctions, then by the broader public.
AI seems to be following a similar trajectory. AGI is felt first by insiders (AI researchers), then by money people (politicians and business leaders - we are here) then by the public (I'm guessing soon).
achierius · 5h ago
"Warn" lol. They're just telegraphing ahead of the layoffs they intend to do to capture more $$$, to whatever extent AI makes that possible. What are people supposed to do?
Your economic system is a joke
oblio · 4h ago
The thing is, there's no solution.
If AI truly comes in the current capitalistic system, there is no endgame. Ourobouros.
conartist6 · 3h ago
"We won't need people with agency, but we will need slaves for agents"
leptons · 5h ago
They will scrap it as soon as "AI" "hallucinates" Amazon into an embarrassing loss or problem somewhere that didn't have to happen.
rwmj · 5h ago
Have you bought anything from Amazon? They have no issues with flushing their reputation down the toilet, as long as it makes or saves money.
leptons · 3h ago
Ever hear the phrase "buyer beware"? It's been around for thousands of years.
p0w3n3d · 5h ago
I don't know what tools will be used at Amazon but I know who will be asked to fix it in the next three years after a major failure
Just a basic sniff test though - If AI enables developer productivity that would translate to more revenue, reduced costs, reduced risk, etc. The bottom line numbers would get better. With more resources available your next move is to decrease spending on more productivity enhancements or revenue opportunities? They don't want more revenue? Doesn't add up.
The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
Companies don't exist to benefit their employees (or their customers).
If that was true then the companies should never have been doing layoffs, as all these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars in revenue.
> The better headline would be: "Amazon CEO Andy Jazzy faced with poor financial outlook tries to convince the public that downsizing is due to improvements in AI"
This is assuming that companies have the capacity to keep increasing revenue by adding more workforce, which is just not true. At some point you hit diminishing returns with more workers. The same goes for Agent workers. To chase more revenue you need a lot more than just more SWEs and a lot of that is not currently similarly scalable.
You can legitimately argue "far less to do with", but it's definitely not nothing. There are countless projects underway where AI will allow for 10% reductions with zero business impact in the short term, and 25-40% reductions (sometimes more) by 2030.
The only logical explanation is that they don't have enough opportunities to utilize those people OR as I previously mentioned... their financials might look bad, and they are trying to make them look better so they don't take a hit in the markets.
Stonks go down - fast - when all those fired people stop buying, but that's a problem for the next CEO.
As you say, they could also expand. Or just fix the problems with the site.
But they don't have the imagination to do that.
But these kinds of projections aren't unusual at all — if you use the Deep Research capabilities of modern models to build a list of public projections for your own research, you'll see similar estimates. These reports will generally use the framing of "efficiency gains", where AI will "free-up employees from drudgery to focus on higher-value work", but my intuition is that a future where all individual contributors are elevated to Director of Agentic Workflows is probably not the most likely outcome.
I understand all the theory but it can largely be condensed into - AI makes workforce more efficient so you need less people. But there are no good studies afaik that measure AI powered efficiency and surely nothing about how to model workforce reduction due to AI. I am curious what the science is behind these opinions.
The model by MIT's Daron Acemoglu estimates that ~5% of U.S. tasks can be completely and profitably automated by AI within ten years.
It was expressly not a head-count forecast, and didn't attempt to quantify the headcount reduction that AI augmentation could enable.
Is this the MIT paper ? In this one the TFP is 0.55%
For example now I have a ton of graphs and interactive UI pages that interact with my code. Made everyone’s lives easier, but at least in my case it was not a dealbreaker not having these, and frankly nobody was willing to pay for them.
So it really doesnt matter whats realistic. They want cheaper workers to live in fear.
Amazon is also way behind tech peers on AI. These sorts of puff PR pieces don’t do much to shake that reality.
What tech peers is Amazon way behind on AI? Neither MSFT nor AAPL have their own models. FB has no path to model monetization. GOOG is unique but that's it, and AWS might be able to better capitalize on AWS enterprise customers. Amazon was way behind yes but at this point they are positioned well enough to execute.
Google you’ve already covered, and Apple despite its faults has been designing and producing AI-targeted hardware for a decade and has a much clearer story for integrating AI into its lineup.
AWS has a scattered mess of Q-branded services and a consistent track record of shipping garbage enterprise apps like Workmail, Chime, Workdocs, Cognito, and arguably Quicksight. Bedrock APIs are frequently behind in features from their parent vendors, and Bedrock as a whole isn’t better than thousands of LLM management platforms that have already sprung up.
I’ll never fully bet against Amazon as the far and away cloud market leader, but their existing AI position is flimsy and their increasingly hostile position towards their workforce reeks of desperation.
This take is getting old, and the story won't stick with folks till their desk is in a cardboard box...
Out of all the faangs, amz is the best positioned to remove staff and agentify the work they were doing. First, amz constantly churns the lower x%. They've been doing this for years now. They know what to count and who to fire. Second, amz has had everyone write a story about everything they do, day in, day out for years now. Change a lightbulb? Not without a story. Guess what you need for training LLMs? Yup, stories.
There are plenty of people writing stories and coordinating the writing of other stories. Those people will be the first out. It's never the top nor the bottom.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazon-cons...
Fraction of that is Anthropic investment.
There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But we're in tech. There's always something new to do. If you're not doing new things as a company, you're getting replaced by those who are.
So it seems like a losing strategy to make your workforce cost reduction your primary concern when we could see the greatest workforce productivity gain in modern times.
If AI is so useful that it can fully replace engineers or other humans, why aren’t products next level amazing?
If the barrier to entry for these high margin tech companies becomes so low that they no longer even need employees, isn’t the next step to compete on quality?
AI won’t fundamentally alter either of these facts.
People are out there building useful stuff with AI but they don't work at Amazon
More companies with smaller workforces would be better than fewer companies with larger workforces.
yeah, that's a useful thing that a chatbot could do...in theory.
in practice, from the recent CMU study [0] of how actual LLMs perform on real-world tasks like this:
> For example, during the execution of one task, the agent cannot find the right person to ask questions on RocketChat. As a result, it then decides to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.
0: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.14161 (pdf)
The headcount growth during COVID along with the return of offshoring with GCCs was driven by the intention to speed up delivery of products and initiatives.
There are some IR games being played, but the productivity gains are real - where you may have recruited a new grad or non-trad candidates, now you can reduce hiring significantly and overindex on hiring and better compensating more experienced new hires.
Roles, expectations, and responsibilities are also increasingly getting merged - PMs are expected to have the capabilities of junior PMMs, SEs, UX Designers, and Program Managers; and EMs and Principal Engineers are increasingly expected to have the capabilities of junior UX Designers, Program Managers, and PMs. This was already happening before ChatGPT (eg. The Amazon PM paradigm) but it's getting turbocharged now that just about every company has licenses for Cursor, Copilot, Glean Enterprise, and other similar tools.
This article/comment isn't really the prompt, just a reminder of that it seems like a shtty place to put my funds and I'll soon be using AI to replace it anyway!
But the comments saying Claude can't replace some genius are irrelevant. The amount of SWEs at big tech itself is so high that law of averages dictate most people are not rockstars (and this is validated in my observations). Most SWEs just write internal RPC to internal RPC wrappers. I am seeing that everyone is relying a lot on these tools, and the new SWEs seem to utterly depend on them. HN users will always have some edge case pointed out but most of software is crud apps low scale (even big tech most internal tool is low scale) and these tools are definitely doing better than the median SWE I have encountered.
What he hopes for is to just reduce the number of people they employ. So the "more people doing other types of jobs" just makes the message more palatable.
Suppose all companies follow the suite who is going to buy their crap?
There's no way that paying for a bunch of employees that you don't need, just so you can have some customers, is going to make sense. Even if you're operating a company town, only a fraction of their income is going to be spent on your company's goods/services, so you'll never be able to recoup the wage that way.
It seems obvious that many white collar workers today will have to do something involving physical labor at some point in the future.
I expect I will be facing this in my mid 50s. Really not ideal timing.
It's all in Adam Smith and economic history.
> Think of agents as software systems that use AI to perform tasks on behalf of users or other systems. Agents let you tell them what you want (often in natural language), and do things like scour the web (and various data sources) and summarize results, engage in deep research, write code, find anomalies, highlight interesting insights, translate language and code into other variants, and automate a lot of tasks that consume our time. There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field. There will also be agents that routinely do things for you outside of work, from shopping to travel to daily chores and tasks. Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.
This is the same wishful thinking that AI companies are heavily marketing.
Nobody will want to use an "agent" that makes mistakes 60% of the time. Until the industry figures out a way to fix the problems that have plagued this technology since the beginning―which won't be solved by more compute, better data, or engineering hacks―this agentic future they've been promising is a pipe dream.
It makes more sense that Amazon would continue to push AI where it's already being used successfully. Devs may benefit from finding solutions quicker with AI, but it's never made sense to me why that would affect productivity per head or change hiring/firing rates.
Put another way: there are never enough devs and they write a lot of shitty code. AI writes even shittier code, but in subtly different ways and can write it even faster helping the dev iterate to better code.
The result is basically no change anywhere except a modest increase in quality. This is equivalent to, but cheaper than going on an epic quest to find the good devs and overpay them. Why is this a bad thing for like 99% of people who write code? There's basically no impact on their pay or ease of finding a job.
I believe the business leaders are seriously considering about this -- i.e. not necessarily just as an excuse to RIF, but they probably believe in this. Whether it is going to be successful is irrelevant.
I'm eagerly waiting for someone to talk about AI integration experiments within FAANG. I'm surprised no one has talked about it yet -- maybe there is some kind of NDA or the experiments are still in early stages. Once the experiments are proved to be marginally successful, I bet the leaders are going to start some mass layoffs -- or maybe worse, if they are pressured by stock prices, to do that and see what happens before anything conclusive.
To any team who is integrating AI into your company's data or doc -- please STOP and don't do that. I'm not talking about USING AI, but INTEGRATING AI.
So glad I left that place.
More money is spent at most of these companies coordinating work than actually doing work.
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44289554
But would they ever admit such a failure in-front of shareholders who are still under the spell of "AI agents", "AGI", "ASI" bullshit?
I don't think so.
If you are working for a company that employs at least 1000 full-time engineers, I think you should consider joining a team where every project involves AI in some way, if you aren't already on one. Whether its owning AI tooling, or developing client features that use AI directly, or even just prototyping AI concepts that never launch. The safest roles like research and directly working on the models are out of reach for most people due to competition and position scarcity, but that's ok. There are so many positions downstream from those. The key thing to look for is to be in a position where your AI features can actually turn a profit, which might be rare, but not as difficult to get as an upstream role. But its still fine to be in a role that isn't profitable.
I think AI-adjacent roles will either be the first or last fulltime SWE jobs to go during the next tech downturn, which I don't think we are in yet. I am betting on the latter, because I think corporations will continue to reroute more and more funding towards AI all the way down. Even if the current AI cycle ends up as a failure, we are already in the sunk cost stages of commitment. There is no turning back without anything short of a total collapse.
CEOs can warn about AI replacing jobs until they're blue in the face, but people won't listen.
And when mass job losses finally arrive, people (including the CEOs) will be shocked and overwhelmed.
In fact, that is probably the reason that people unfortunately have learned not to listen. There's even a fable about it.
Although I do think that AI fits the pattern of "real big thing".
In general, cultural diffusion progresses in three stages: from insiders to money people to the public.
For example, great artists are recognized first by fellow artists and critics, then by art auctions, then by the broader public.
AI seems to be following a similar trajectory. AGI is felt first by insiders (AI researchers), then by money people (politicians and business leaders - we are here) then by the public (I'm guessing soon).
Your economic system is a joke
If AI truly comes in the current capitalistic system, there is no endgame. Ourobouros.