Why? No really: why? Businesses are profit-seeking entities. Why not just fire nine people? You save money.
(Yes, this could be a really stupid decision for the company in question. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)
There is cutting costs and scaling. You need 9 other people for scaling. Imaging if you with GPT4 can replace 10 people with 1. What if you keep other 9 and train them to prompt on GPT? Now you have not 10 people working but 100 and a cost of 10.
I guess the follow-up question is: if you do value these 100 units of work (1 employee == 1 unit pre-GPT), why did you only have 10 workers at the beginning? Doesn't it mean that 10 units of work is what you thought was optimal? What are you going to do with 100?
Or maybe you're implying that reducing the costs changes this equation?
All small businesses are not pure profit maximizers. Anyway even if they were, there’s MORE money to be made by empowering employees to use powerful tools which can increase revenues and profits much more than just firing. Doing so generates goodwill which improves employee effectiveness and drive.
Small businesses get eaten. That's the entire point of modern venture capital, even! Find ways to out-operationalize small businesses in sub-optimally exploited markets while burning an ocean of cash, then seek profits when you no longer have to dump to be competitive.
It's okay to not think every technology under the sun is a good thing. You don't have to have heart-eyes emojis for the immiseration machine.
Most small businesses skimp by on very small margins - often run by "crafters" or "artistans" who generally couldn't tell you much about margins besides "cash in the bank"
I believe AGI can help small businesses have higher margins for the same service level - but lower cost.
No, we’re not. Small businesses embracing technology to get more done with the same number of people is not “immiseration.”
And I take it from your use of Marxist terminology that you’re coming from that the perspective. 20th Century Marxists embraced technological advancement, and used that to advance the cause of the proletariat. The REAL immiseration is to embrace paleoconservative ludditism.
Goodwill doesn’t pay the bills, most businesses don’t care, and most CEOs etc cannot acquire more customers and contracts fast enough to multiply the available work by ten in the time frame required.
Yeah, the idea that there is somehow Unlimited Demand to tap is just woefully underexposed to business realities. Demand at most businesses is a river, not a municipal waterline with a spigot at one end. It ebbs and it flows, and building for a hypothetical high-demand future is what you do when you have venture capital expecting it of you--not when you're building a "small business" (or even a medium to large one, if you want to be resilient).
It is, however, a really convenient excuse for people who don't regularly think about how people who don't work "above the API" actually exist in the world.
This! If you can 10X an employee, the obvious play is to retain all ten employees and get 10X widget output. Yes, you could fire nine people to retain 1X output—but your competition also has access to LLMs, and may choose the former option. Can you compete?
No, but I have been an employee in a business that had layoffs, then had reduced capacity, and had to scramble to hire new employees.
You can't be too reactive with talent. If you hired 10 people, you should be figuring out how to make that talent pool as happy and productive as possible, not firing them out of fear at the earliest opportunity.
"Replace" is very different from "Enhance" or "Augment." There are certainly roles that could be 100% replaced, but I think they'll be the exception, not the rule. Guess we'll find out!
This assumes that there is a need for 10x amount whichever service these entities are providing. For some cases that may be true, but for many (most?) it is not. In fact demand will most likely remain about the same, and all competitors will need to adpot LLMs and fire 9 people to remain afloat.
Because information curated by an AI with validation by a subject matter expert is worth significantly more than that which was done without a human in the loop. There's no determinism with these systems, and from experience with GPT-4 doing classification tasks, it'll do everything exactly right until it doesn't.
If it's like many businesses in the classification world, they aren't lacking for work, so it's more like they'll be able to do 10x the work done by keeping the same number of people.
Not if the output quality matters - which in medical and biological classification tasks, quality labeling really really does matter. Garbage in, garbage out.
If I was paying someone for labeling or classification, and the quality dropped to 90%, 50%, 30% accuracy, I'd quickly fire them.
What's your idea of "subject matter expert"? The term is used in court. Mine would probably include no more than double the number of people with doctorate degrees. It wouldn't include Priya right now, maybe after more education and/or a few years of exceptional experience.
(Yes, this could be a really stupid decision for the company in question. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)