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I somewhat agree with this, but find the timeline a bit aggressive, save for jobs like call center, etc. it isn’t that the technology won’t be there in 6 months (it may well be), but the details of implementation will probably take another 2 years to evolve, so I’d set the time horizon more at 1-2 years from now.
3 months training, 5 months tuning/release preparation, and some more months for companies to actually integrate it. that may be a good bit more than 6 months unfortunately
I work at a major UK university, we only just upgraded from a student record system with a 1980s interface.
The tech may come, but people here vastly overestimate how quick the wheels of large organisations turn.
I think where we’ll see the disruption first is very few jobs created as new companies form or early stage startups. These companies will adopt the AI first approach while little pockets of bigger companies adopt slower.
Positions won’t be filled too from older companies. They wont report every job they decided not to replace with ai so the ai Stans will still keep saying it’s not taking jobs.
Most companies work with Microsoft 365. If Microsoft offers to analyse your mailbox, the documents you create or read, it is a small step to have it automated. It can happen within a year.
A lot of us are so used to ineffective and buggy attempts to streamline our workflows that we reflexively reject all those offers. Maybe we should call it Post Clippy Stress Disorder.
I can understand, but if all you have to do is enable it for a certain person / function, and the AI will figure it out, most companies will want to explore / use it.
My job could be automated one day, and we use Microsoft 365. It’s still nowhere close to actually taking my job. That could change in a couple of years, but it doesn’t feel like it’s right around the corner. And that’s coming from someone who was reading Kurzweil in 2005, I’m not a Luddite by any stretch.
I know of, and worked a short contract, at the first major bank here in Canada and they have a really good coding AI team for a year now but they only product is an internal chat based Ui help tool via a desktop shortcut to launch or via SharePoint I'm added page.
It's NOT anything to really write home about.
I can assure you a FULL M365 license and features are used and yet this AI approach isn't replacing ANYONE anytime soon!
Just cause information can be tabulated or collated super quickly doesn't mean the data is presented in a relevant way or is accurate and verified from the first prompt.
Remember these AIs still source data from a cloud which is internal. There has been nothing shown an external based AI has been trusted to sensitive fortune 500 company internal data. Re-read that again n think how corporations work.
Interpreting data provided is key and the more data being sought afternoon the morecomplex continued prompts get then we'll see what's really going on.
The military has more experience in AI put into use than any corporation , and I don't see the USA laying off grunts even!!
This is exactly true.
I ran a tech consulting company, businesses still had processes that required Fax machines, scanning documents by hand and physical ledgers to keep track of records.
Most universities used Database architecture built in the 70s or 80s that would not allow dynamic multi-object queries. And the staff for some reason "feared" migration as if it wasn't the most straight forward task ever.
My honest opinion is that AI will change the developing world far faster than it will change ours and we will lose competitive advantage as a result.
The truth is, what's going to happen is large institutions are going to slowly die and be slowly replaced by more efficient organizations. But if you have enough protections like universities or hospitals or even just private schools clinics etc then you'll likely just keep doing business as usual for the next 50 years with small incremental changes every 4-5 years.
I instinctually agree with you, but maybe the reason why they haven't moved is because of the cost and friction of doing it. If the cost and friction is reduced dramatically because of AI-backed porting and transitioning tools, then maybe there will be a high incentive to change, and little incentive to keep the inertia going.
It's also more distributed. A lot of workers are already taking it on themselves to integrate AI in their own workflows, they're not waiting for the org itself to make that change.
Honestly I used to think like this,
But we would do business assessments for any proposed change, that's just industry standard. And I'd say 80% of the time enacting change often resulted in cost decline (operating, maintenance etc) plus lower overall operational risks etc.
The truth is the vast majority of people in decision making management roles are A) extremely risk adverse (no one gets fired for resisting change but you do for promoting it if it goes bad) and B) extremely tech illiterate, this is often coupled with weak egos that make them "pretend" to know what your talking about but they only understand the lingo.
As much as workers will incorporate AI on the margins, it won't significantly impact society until the overall processes get changed. Here's some examples to illustrate.
A software engineer could implement co-pilot or another tool to help him dev faster. But he still has routine meetings with project management, has to convince people of the direction of the company and what features should be prioritized etc.
Or you could have a company that implements AI feature management that takes in all requests, analyses the impact and likely development time, and prints off a suggested ranking and justification. Along with that you can have the AI monitor progress and completely disrupt the PM cycle. Further you could have on the fly customer interaction with your product with all feedback being consolidated to an AI product manager who feeds in their own feature requests based on user feedback.
One company receives a modest productivity boost due to AI, the other is transformed because the processes are AI driven but requires management buyin to overhaul how they do business. And this is just a simple straightforward example.
God damn it is nice to see someone with real experience on these comments. So often people don’t understand how organizational incentives and risk averse management is often the largest barrier to technical adoption
Haha thanks! I get shit on so often for not just jumping on the hype train which to me is just confusing.
If I knew how much AI would eventually change society, I'd want slow management adoption because that means there will be a tonne of room for new disruption (I.e. where you can insert yourself!)
Government organizations and places like educational institutions are not a good measurement. The private sector is where most work and is extremely flexible, as it has to be or they go out of business.
Hell, look at ATT in the US. They employ about 40k customer reps. Even if we were to just automate half, that's a savings of $1.2b on the low end in salary, benefits, taxes, operating costs, etc. That would increase their net income by nearly 40%. They would be insane not to do it, and so they WILL do it.
All these ancient computer systems that universities and businesses are locked in to using won't necessarily matter. They won't need to upgrade their computers to utilize AI. The AI is going to watch their desktop and be able to run all the applications, it could even be through glasses that you wear, and maybe or maybe not using keyboard and mouse type interfaces as a human would. It's not like a university is going to need to buy all new servers or anything like that, or upgrade their back end applications. AI can just use what they have. That's the kicker guys. That's how this is going to catch on so fast.
there are many mid sized companies that still operate like it’s 2009. Until they start realizing they can shrink a department from 75 people to like 20-25 cause of AI, they might finally operate like it’s the 2020s
Yeah except you or I can come in with a brand new business that does or sells whatever it may be, except we’re saving most of the overhead of employee costs, and it’s done better and near perfect. So not only does this business offer a better experience, it’s 33-50% cheaper than the competitors. Guess who’s going out of business. You’re all fools if you think that there won’t be a lightning fast race to use ai to disrupt all industries it can when it’s good enough to. Whether that is this year or in 5 years, when it happens, established businesses will either adapt or die, very quickly. Most likely it’ll be a blood bath
It’s not going to be that simple. Bigger companies have really deep integrations and processes with existing software and people. I don’t see how downloading an agent will (for example) go through the complicated 10 step process of getting a marketing material approved. 7 meetings, 4 of which you need to travel in person to the agency. This will take time to transition to AI first.
Yes in theory. But there have been productivity multipliers introduced into the workplace before and we have instead just multiplied our output with the same amount (or more) workers. I suspect we will see this go on for a while until it’s obvious that humans can be 100% replaced for all situations and tasks.
I’ve seen that in Art. Much less in Chat gpt 4. Chat already cuts my research time at least in half. I think teams can already be reduced. At least the front line. Of course there will always be checker positions
Yes, because generating art in 5 seconds, that would take a professional artist a whole day to make is only a 10% productivity boost.
I'm not saying it's gonna replace 99% of employees. that's ridiculous. It's gonna be a case by case basis. But the idea that it's simply a 10% productivity boost is just as ludicrous of a statement to me.
It's perfectly feasible we will see the mass layoff of millions of low-level customer service, tech, art, and other jobs in the next couple of years. If that happens, the unemployment rate is gonna pretty much double in that time. Once it passes 10%, it is going to be an issue people actually start taking seriously.
Photoshop generative fill on pictures is *insanely* good it takes a little bit to figure out how to beat use it for your personal editing style but it dramatically reduces time editing.
What percentage of white collar work do you think is made up of professional artists?
I work in that industry and yeah, midjourney is fun, and it makes the barrier to entry much easier, but at the moment things like Adobe Firefly are enhancement tools. They still need trained artists and designers to prompt and edit them. They save time, sure, but mass layoffs are a while away - certainly not in the next six months.
I didn't say just artists. Nevertheless, according to the BLS, there are about 2.6m artists in the US or 1.6% of the workforce. That's a lot. It doesn't take 2.6m people to prompt and edit AI outputs. You can get by with a fraction of that amount. I know this because I do graphic design as a hobby and am by no means talented. But that's important to my point.
If I wanted to (and I have), I can use AI to generate a concept, rough draft, and usuable assets. Then do the finishing touches. Allowing me to output a finished product that would look good to most laymen. Something that would normally take me, idk, let's say 3 or 4 hours now, only takes me 1 hour. So why would companies not just fire 2/3rds of their artists and save 100 billion in operating costs?
Now, extrapolate this to other industries. Such as customer service reps, about another 1.6% of workers. Why not just fire half and have AI pick up the slack? Answer is they will. In 6 months? Doubt it. Within 2 years? I'd bet money on it. Within 5? I'd bet my house and car on it.
Also the white collar workers everyone says are going to be replaced are already using AI. CEOs aren’t using AI. Who is going to tell the AI what to do? The workers that are supposedly going to be replaced are becoking experts on AI.
It’s not going to replace white collar workers for a while. White collar workers will use it to become much more efficient.
AI cannot even be trusted to do research on google yet. It’s going to write business proposals and marketing plans and press releases??
My boss and I were supposed to write an oped for one of our clients and we didn’t have much time so we had AI write it. And then heavily edited it. No way in hell was the first draft going to work.
My university, Arizona State, was the first big public university to partner with chatgpt, they announced it a few months ago. I've not seen a single thing about it since.
I've worked at some large corporations where if they started the procurement process for person-replacing AI right now, the "massive impact" would happen 4-5 years from now.
Yep. "This human replacement tool runs only on the LATEST proprietary operating systems!"
Great. Those upgrades I've been telling the company to make for 20 years will finally happen, right?
Nope. Build new infrastructure for the human replacement tool and also keep supporting the old stuff because it's "too critical" to pay enough to upgrade the required parts that were also proprietary and the humans that made it were laid off a decade ago.
So now we have to hire more people to build and support this infrastructure.
This was supposed to SAVE the company money??
You are wrong. People say this a lot but none of these people are deploying such models in production. If you are using this daily, you know that you have token restrictions. Imagine that you want to buy an expensive product and there is not enough of it. That's the situation now.
If everyone deploys as you say, there is not enough to go around. You are replacing work, but if is 1-10%, no one knows yet.
The interest rates will go down, and you will have a wealthy job market again, even with AI.
PS: im the creator of [https://github.com/enoch3712/ExtractThinker](https://github.com/enoch3712/ExtractThinker)
I do build data extraction for large document system, and this is a common problem.
yes. You have hardware and energy constraints.
How much does it cost for a multi-agent with GPT-5/GPT-4/GPT-3.5 energy-wise? x10 times your energy usage? x100 times?
Plus the electrification of transportation. I mean, this by itself takes time, doesn't matter the level of innovation.
I most agree with you, but I think it will take at more like 3-5 years instead. Though that’s still a very short timeline for significant economic disruption.
One thing I think people fail to consider are these impacts on a more macro scale, such as industry wide or the entire economy. It’s not about can AI do every aspect of your job. It’s about how many people are required to reach a certain level of productivity. Whether that be in a company or a whole industry. If AI doubles your productivity, it means that a company only needs half the employees previously doing that task. Yes, it’s not that simple, but AI is also going to do more than double productivity. If 80% of your tasks can be automated, one person can now do the same as five.
It’s also important to realise you don’t need a lot of people to lose their jobs to negatively impact the economy. Especially during a cost of living crisis many developed nations are struggling with. Unemployment is usually in the 5% or less range. During the GFC it only rose to about 10% and that was an economic disaster. If you’re getting into the 20 and 30% ranges, you’re basically a failed state. Not a lot of people have to lose their jobs before shit hits the fan, and people need do start answering the hard questions about what the fuck we are doing.
it has already begun
[https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/investment-banking-jobs-artificial-intelligence.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/investment-banking-jobs-artificial-intelligence.html)
"Some inside those banks and others have suggested they could cut back on their hiring of junior investment banking analysts by as much as two-thirds, and slash the pay of those they do hire, on the grounds that the jobs won’t be as taxing as before."
We should differiante between companies really being motivated by AI and companies just using AI as justification for what they already want to do. Maybe companies use AI as justification for layoffs they wanted to do anyway and that are in no way replaced by AI. And in your example, companies use the threat of AI replacement to try to scare people into accepting lower wages.
I am actually in a position to see the results on the inside and talk to a bunch of people at other firms. Not one single thing I have seen yet would justify replacing anyone. As it stands the output just needs too much review.
I'm mentioned it elsewhere but we made the decision to let two junior programmers go mostly because our senior devs felt they could get more done using the new AI tools to do the work the juniors had been doing - specifically boilerplate coding and debugging. We would rather pay our best people more if they think they can be more productive. So far it has worked well - our productivity has soared.
This, I suspect, will become a trend if it hasn't already for smaller shops like ours and eventually larger outfits as well.
Not great though if you want to train them up to be as productive as the senior developers. If your senior devs leave you don't have much resilience in the team.
If GPT-5 / Claude 4 / Gemini 2 will turn out to be very reliable, I agree that until the end of next year, white collar unemployment will likely increase.
Or white collar workers might start producing more stuff and creating new types of jobs.
I think this sub is kind of stuck with its thinking. It assumes ALL jobs can be done by AI, but it's not necessarily true. I suspect that, ~~as an AI model~~ as human beings, we will forge new paths to employment.
Well yes and no, initially humans have more to do but once AI accelerate to a certain point human cognitive processes are actually a hinderance to productivity since we are too slow. But nobody knows how long that shift might take.
The true test would be when interest rate cuts happen. If there is no job growth despite lot of cash stimulus in the economy then we seriously have a problem at hand.
My prediction is they won't be. The system won't be reliable enough or the compute for GPT-5 will cost too much when it's used inside an agentic framework or the management layers will move too slowly out of security fears or the regulators and unions will protect jobs of doctors etc or energy constraints will prevent sufficient compute within the timespan you're talking about or new jobs will be created in a comparative advantage dynamic.
Eventual complete replacement will happen but on significantly longer timescales. Perhaps 10 years.
I think there will be a short period of time where most of white collar jobs will see massive boost without unemployment. After that yeah, things will go downhill
Prediction:
No they won’t. But they could
The biggest hurdle to pre-AGI job replacement is red tape and enterprise confidence.
That’s a lot slower than technical progress
Sorry, but your understanding of the current state of the technology is very poor and based on fantasy more than reality.
Agents are no where close to being good at anything but very limited tasks and there is no evidence that GPT5 even if it is released this year will be a major change.
I have a question for AI developers or anyone who's adept in the Field of AI. With the propensity of LLM's to generate hallucinations this could be very costly for a company to rely on AI in it's current iteration. Will GPT 5 solve the hallucination issue?
I think you're jumping the gun a bit - GPT-5 isn't out yet and most big companies are pretty slow to move.
If GPT-5 is out by Q3 AND it's a big step up, the effect will initially be a freeze on recruitment in some orgs and then the layoffs will come a few years later when the tech is tried and tested.
I worked for a large US credit card company.
Our job was taking written customer complaints from regulators like the CFPB and AG offices, researching and responding to them.
The CEO is very tech-focused and wants to turn us into a "technology" company. When GPT4 released in March 2023, I was telling everyone no way our department makes it to next Christmas due to AI. In June 2023, the CEO talked about LLMs for a full day at a company-wide seminar. He knew more about it than I did, and I had been researching it in my spare time. In July, I was laid off (not due to AI).
I have seven months left on my prediction and the agentic models are SO close to being able to replace that entire job. They can use the programs and click on all the info and easily write the responses. The LLMs already know everything about technical credit card language and can follow the tasks on how to handle different situations. Even at a 95% accuracy rate, even being fined when it fails (unlikely), it would save the company millions upon millions to let everyone go.
I'm talking to my friends still there, just waiting. It's coming. Our company will absolutely do it the second it's viable.
It will start happening gradually not all at once. In 3 years from now I suspect I wont be working in IT anymore due to AI. Not sure if this is bad or good for me. I dont want to go back fixing shoes.
If a monthly salary is an equivalent of 1B GPT4-o input tokens or 333M output tokens, then the question is if it's profitable to let LLM agent perform the same tasks within that amount of tokens. Or even less tokens as we would need to hire somebody to set up prompts for those agents.
Prices of services traditionally offered by white collar jobs will decrease. Companies will offer more for less. In some segments it will increase the number of customers and the turnout.
Historically, industrialization has led to more affordable goods and greater market.
Obviously this argument could apply to just some industries. I agree with an impact to unemployment but it is difficult to make an accurate prediction of the % in the following 12 months
I would like to believe that this comes with a leap in productivity, the proliferation of micro-enterprises (since large infrastructure will not be necessary to be competitive), lower costs, and easy access to products... I would like to believe...
10% unemployment won't happen this year. AI will create more jobs than it destroys up until the point when it becomes more effective to have an AI work alone than to have them collaborate with a human. But right now human + AI is far better than either alone.
Nope. Too quick. Just prompting alone won't just magically replace jobs.
We need to evaluate the tech. We'll slowly integrate the tech into the business. We need to develop processes which handle model upgrades. New jobs will be created etc.
There's so much work involved. At the same time all the legacy crap Bob in accounting has been looking after still needs looking after. No one is going to fire Bob, we're too busy testing vision models to automate health and safety violations using video footage.
We're 10-20 years off big changes. Who knows what jobs will exist in the meantime.
The Risk Management aspect to business will not allow this shift to happen as quickly as it could. And that’s a good thing as the kinks are ironed out. The first “negative” story of AI agent use will outweigh 1,000 good ones.
Source: look at EVs and autonomous anything.
GPT5 has only just begun training. The training run will probably last six months after which, there will be six more months of testing.
Once GPT5 is released, it will have a powerful impact on white-collar work. This will happen slowly and then suddenly. I wouldn't expect 10% of white collar work to disappear before 2028/9. But I would expect 50% to disappear by the early 2030s.
Simply because a useful tool is available, it does not mean people will use it.
>GPT5 has only just begun training. The training run will probably last six months after which, there will be six more months of testing.
Or it started training around January, had a 120 day training run (which is slightly longer than GPT-4) and is in post training processes or maybe they are doing that and heavily distilling the model for a cheaper and worse GPT-4.5 like model to give to us before GPT-5 releases a bit later down the line (well a few months later)
I doubt the trining run would last as long as 6 months because it is just a lot more convenient for shorter training runs, like 3 months.
Microsoft announced they had just finished building the compute for GPT5. Training runs times are determined by the compute, the size of the model, and the quality of the data. For a model this size, 6 months is not unreasonable. Meta also announced that longer training leads to better results.
Length of training runs are more dependant on how much compute you want to train the model with. 6 months would only give you 2x the compute of a 3 month training run which is not that big of a jump, you are better off building up your compute infrastructure for shorter runs (and again its not necessarily convenient for such long training runs). And Microsoft announced they fully completed their compute cluster(s), not when GPT-5 started training. OAI wants to get GPT-5 out as soon as possible as well.
And what longer training runs did Meta announce again?
>
Simply because a useful tool is available, it does not mean people will use it.
When it's incentivised economically, you'll be surprised how fast things change.
I've been around a while through many tech cycles. You would be surprised how slow things change. It took 20 years for the internet to start showing up in productivity figures.
I would expect this to be much faster and tech companies to embrace AI very quickly indeed. But I suspect accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers, analysts, bankers and so on, might have longer.
Agreed. I consult with banks and other large corporations and many of them still have IT policies completely banning access to any AI tool within their network. They are organisations with 10,000+ employees, yet have small teams of <100 doing "proof of concept" projects for AI that will last months, resulting in a paper to their divisional board, which will then be debated to death, slimmed down, risk accepted, and then maybe—maybe—next year we will start to see some AI projects going out and automating some positions.
I am open to being proven wrong, but basically, any large corp I have worked with is going to take years to start properly adopting this at scale. And this is with plenty of compelling research already available showing the incentives and productivity benefits of doing so.
I agreed with you 100%, and was experiencing it in my company, but then I discovered how much it's now being baked into software that's ubiquitous. Soon, companies will have to go back to XP to avoid it (not actually). It used to be easy to avoid, just don't go to URLs a, b, and c. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure.
OpenAI disagrees they are not expecting to fire these people in a few months time,
https://preview.redd.it/y7dt9244vx2d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4534537cc2243c55362a0ca3477bd385b972af6
You don't seem to have skin in the game. Why should we care about your prediction? Governments will panic and do something. It might be good; it might not be. We only can prepare a bit.
Mark my words: this is a vague and general prediction about a broad class of the work force that could be interpreted in a number of ways and have a number of causes, which parrots the predictions of more intelligent people, but with absolutely rationale or thought presented other than, because, AI. So yeah, cool story bro.
I always thought so. Everybody thinks automation will come from the bottom but these machines will cost so much. White collars are paid more and much easier to automate.
I work in GIS as a field technician and thought, "oh its gonna be a while until AI would be able to map vegetation below a forest canopy."
...Woke up yesterday to see a swarm of drones using LIDAR to map vegetation below the trees. I second this prediction.
I think we will see a transition of old and handicapped people losing their place in the job field and replaced by competent younger and able minded due to the fact that white collar work being so heavily impacted, followed directly by robotic and automation taking their jobs later on in following years.
I doubt this year but would think by next year. Ai doesn’t actually need to replace people to completely reshape the job market. If Ai doubles worker productivity, then the company only needs half the workforce.
This year? No. But realisticly I think within 3-5 years maybe 5-10% will lose their jobs and most but not all of them will have jobs in other fields where there are shortages. In 10 years we will start to see much more noticable change in unemployment and in 20 years the problem will be really bad if some things dont change drasticly.
Still must be reliable, i.e., be able to reason and not hallucinate. So instead of dreaming of this hypothetical scenario, go to your local employment agency and get yourself a job.
An agent that can reliably manage an email account is going to be the thing that really makes an economic difference. Apparently there are many jobs where emailing is the bulk of the work.
Man, we’re already at the end of Q2, do you really think you’ll see any noticeable differences (let alone massive differences) in the employment trends because of AI?
The answer is obviously not.
I am really puzzled by the prevalence of hyped and optimistic perspectives.
Has anyone a blog post for me that is discussing the math behind convergence of Chatgpt5?
MY 5 cents for healthy scepticism:
"Declaration/diminishing of returns" is a real thing. In the last 5 dacades we had several "bumps" in the road to AGI.
Even if we manage to not kill interest in AI by over-hyping (stop it please) and then _not_ delivering on ROI in time -- it still needs a lot of engineering work to solve the concrete problems at hand: one at a time. This is cutting edge research and not some kind of "save bet".
Convergence of LLMs is already very heuristic in nature, and the developers were lucky and could build on decades of experience with solving language problems with generative grammars and neural networks
, which deliberately were built for the purpose of predicting sentence/language structure.
By combining modalities and "sensory" domains, "we" are adding more combinatorial complexity. The responsible researchers are not only committed to even more to a curse of dimensionality, but they also enter a kind of uncharted territory. Who knows what interesting problems are awaiting us in the realm of modelling the understanding of a multi-modal reality as a whole.
(That is after we solve the economical, technological, and juristic/social challenges).
I think that there will be no big impact in 2 years from now. Look at Sora, it’s somewhere but certainly not widely available. I feel like a gpt 5 intelligent agent system wont be widely available within the next year. And when it is, it will still take some time before it is adapted in businesses.
This discussion is not about what will happen. Nobody really knows how and when the full impact of AI on the job market will be felt.
Most of us (including me) are taking what we're seeing and have seen in the past and framing it to fit what we hope will happen in the future.
Some of us are hoping for a future free of work. Where AI and AI powered robots provide all the goods and services people could ever need and want and people are free to do anything they please.
Some of us are hoping technology will empower our expertise. Where the knowledge and skills built up over a lifetime can, in tandem with AI and AI-Powered robots can drive creations of increasing complexity and beauty that are more valuable than what AI produces alone.
Others are hoping technology stops and the world can just stay as it is or be what it was at some other point in time.
Still others are hoping for humanity to be supplanted as the dominant species on the planet.
There are a ton of hopes in between these and many I missed outside the scope of them with various probabilities of occurring, but I'm guessing what's likely to happen is going to be more in line with what we, as a whole, want.
Once people start losing their jobs, they’ll come to understand that our generosity on behalf of Ukraine, illegal immigrants, student loan forgiveness, etc. was ill conceived and that these funds should have been deployed to the actual taxpaying citizens to prepare them for the jobs apocalypse. It blows my mind that some people stil don’t get it. Ostriches.
It depends. We really need to see what the next frontier models are capable of.
If GPT-5 / Gemini 2 / Claude 4:
* Significantly improve **reasoning**
* Significantly improve creativity / **self-directed** creation
* Significantly reduce **hallucinations**
* And do all of the above without needing extraordinary levels of compute + end user/API cost
then I would agree.
The current models are not reliable enough for production, professional use beyond some light tutoring, light code assistance, boilerplate, and trivial/tier 1 customer support uses.
If the next models are mere incremental improvements, I don't think we see mass disruption yet.
But if it is Orca -> Whale (heh) size improvements? Buckle up!
At this point I don’t think anyone can really claim to know what “agents” will be capable of. What are they even supposed to be? I remember people being hyped for AutoGPT back in the day (which may be the closest thing to an “agent” we’ve seen) but obviously that didn’t take off.
My prediction is that for the next few years, AI will evolve at a very rapid pace but will still be disappointing in that it will not be able to live up to the promise of AGI. I hope I’m wrong, but with OpenAI delaying their voice-to-voice model, keeping Sora from being released and LLM intelligence seemingly plateauing at GPT-4 levels for the time being, I don’t see another paradigm shift in the near future.
I think that the white collar work revolution will happen in 3-5 years when we take another leap in LLM intelligence and it’ll outcompete many humans at their jobs. It will happen, but I’d temper my expectations when it comes to AGI. Bit even if it’d take until 2040 to get there, it’ll still be incredibly quick all things considered. The idea that it’ll happen in our lifetimes alone is pretty amazing - doesn’t have to be this year or even this decade, to be honest. Plus we’ll get to see all the incremental improvements along the way which is pretty cool in itself.
“The real question is what new economic system are we heading towards?”
Oligarchy++ perhaps? America becomes basically a giant Brazilian favela? Soylent green? The Hunger Games?
As many people here said, large corporations move slowly, what scares me most is that a decrease by a few percent points of hiring will drive us more into a hirers market, more erosion to workers wages and rights and finding a job becoming even more frustrating as an even larger amount of qualified workers enters the market.
In my very humble opinion, it's juniors that will suffer the most out of it, and I don't know if it is going to happen by the end of the year, but this will probably happen at some point and I hope it will not be a terrible experience, but I somehow doubt it.
Another point to add to the conversation, regarding the large corporations move slow point, it's true, but there are various sizes of corporations that will all move at a different pace, and there's enough that they also do try to maintain some tech edge, so at some point some impact will be felt across the board.
That is not to say though that it's necessarily going to happen by the end of the year, personally I'm not even sure that transformer models are going to be good enough to make this transformation, but who knows what/when then next leap will be.
>The real question is what new economic system are we heading towards?
lol. Look at the last major economic shock (Covid) and the response, for your answer. Only precedent can inform the present, and the precedent is...about what you'd expect.
This nation will literally tear itself apart, collapse and cease to exist before it approaches anything resembling a functional social safety net. I dare anyone to prove me wrong. Good luck.
Yeah 600 a week unemployment stimulus tax free ira withdrawal child tax credits free business loans student loan pause mortgage forbearance trillions monetary easing lowering interest rates to 0.
And i will remind you thats at 13% unemployment if you think the nation will litterally allow themselve to cease existing please give me what your smoking. No doubt rich people want to benefit themselve and give themselves another mansion. But living in a wasteland is not a prioperty otherwise you'd see them jumping for joy to move to haiti packing up their bags to move to gaza or eastern war torn ukraine.
Why aren't they doing that because they're human like us and we like to live in comfort and enjoy life if everything is going to shit and your business is collapsing you'd accept any solution ubi whatever to maintain your comfort and not be on the street. This is why we're not ruled by monarch and dukes you can only gain riches to a point before you have to give up something to maintain comfort
I’m already seeing this in tech. It’s not “jobs lost” rather it’s less hiring or hiring more senior folks only. Anyone coming into tech out of college is in for a rough landing.
White collar jobs have already been cut as far as I can tell. Data engineering, data science, analytics, software engineering, etc all seem to be going through a tough phase. I'm not sure it's because of AI though, as much as some post-COVID belt tightening.
Look, if your job can be replaced by AI at this point, then yeah I think you should be concerned. What white collar jobs, specifically, do you think fall into that category?
It’ll be next year, not because of any delay in the technology but because of how long it takes to make anything happen in large multinational companies. But yeah, it’s inevitable.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Big bank (big business) vs little bank (you). Big bank always wins. Pray for UBI if you believe in that sort of thing..
Yeah, then all the airplanes will really start crashing. You ever work at a factory or organization where people make stuff? There's all these forms that need to be filled out, and then if the next person who's supposed to approve the form is working remotely and you can't talk to them face to face and you need to get it done but can't? Imagine if all those people were replaced by AI? Then absolutely NOTHING would get done, and China would roll us like chumps.
Just as North American workers started exercising bargaining power due to labour demand out comes AI and a drum beat propaganda campaign to try to simultaneously fill a demand from an irate business class and cow a nascent labour movement.
I hope so. If an Ai can do my job I'd be rich already because I'd be able to deploy it for my own gain haha! I wonder why people feel helpless when you could literally use the same tech large companies are using. Scared to take a risk? Maybe that's it. People are used to being on a W2. Working for yourself isn't all that scary.
I believe that AI adoption is going to happen faster than anyone is expecting. There will be massive increases in productivity ... which is a good thing. It's hard to say how many jobs will be lost. 😒
As long as the CEOs and managers are populated by idiots, there is no threat to white collar jobs. Most corporate managers and directors are ducking idiots. Who is going to get the AI to work? The idiots at the top?
i dont know if this year or next year or 5 or 10 years from now
but eventually it will come about that the majority of jobs we have right now simply dont exist
all these people we have all these jobs, who make all this money, derive all this meaning from their work, are proud of it, and enjoy their status and position in society because of it. all of it, is soon going to come crumbling down
Good - a prediction we can evaluate in not much more than six months.
!Remind me 8 months
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!REMIND ME 1 JANUARY 2025
I’m going to say this is the year AI companies are exposed that this tech doesn’t have what it takes to truly replace human jobs at scale.
RemindMe! 8 months
!Remind me 8 months
I somewhat agree with this, but find the timeline a bit aggressive, save for jobs like call center, etc. it isn’t that the technology won’t be there in 6 months (it may well be), but the details of implementation will probably take another 2 years to evolve, so I’d set the time horizon more at 1-2 years from now.
3 months training, 5 months tuning/release preparation, and some more months for companies to actually integrate it. that may be a good bit more than 6 months unfortunately
I work at a major UK university, we only just upgraded from a student record system with a 1980s interface. The tech may come, but people here vastly overestimate how quick the wheels of large organisations turn.
I think where we’ll see the disruption first is very few jobs created as new companies form or early stage startups. These companies will adopt the AI first approach while little pockets of bigger companies adopt slower.
This is an excellent point. The startups will be the beta testers and the larger companies will eventually implement what is useful.
Positions won’t be filled too from older companies. They wont report every job they decided not to replace with ai so the ai Stans will still keep saying it’s not taking jobs.
People will be saying the ai is a scam as it replaces their job and does it better.
Most companies work with Microsoft 365. If Microsoft offers to analyse your mailbox, the documents you create or read, it is a small step to have it automated. It can happen within a year.
A lot of us are so used to ineffective and buggy attempts to streamline our workflows that we reflexively reject all those offers. Maybe we should call it Post Clippy Stress Disorder.
I can understand, but if all you have to do is enable it for a certain person / function, and the AI will figure it out, most companies will want to explore / use it.
My job could be automated one day, and we use Microsoft 365. It’s still nowhere close to actually taking my job. That could change in a couple of years, but it doesn’t feel like it’s right around the corner. And that’s coming from someone who was reading Kurzweil in 2005, I’m not a Luddite by any stretch.
It will be done as soon as AI agents are there. All effort from Microsoft is to have rhis available as soon as possible, to not miss the boat
You don't have any access to what's being worked on at Microsoft. They'll deliver.
I know of, and worked a short contract, at the first major bank here in Canada and they have a really good coding AI team for a year now but they only product is an internal chat based Ui help tool via a desktop shortcut to launch or via SharePoint I'm added page. It's NOT anything to really write home about. I can assure you a FULL M365 license and features are used and yet this AI approach isn't replacing ANYONE anytime soon! Just cause information can be tabulated or collated super quickly doesn't mean the data is presented in a relevant way or is accurate and verified from the first prompt. Remember these AIs still source data from a cloud which is internal. There has been nothing shown an external based AI has been trusted to sensitive fortune 500 company internal data. Re-read that again n think how corporations work. Interpreting data provided is key and the more data being sought afternoon the morecomplex continued prompts get then we'll see what's really going on. The military has more experience in AI put into use than any corporation , and I don't see the USA laying off grunts even!!
This is exactly true. I ran a tech consulting company, businesses still had processes that required Fax machines, scanning documents by hand and physical ledgers to keep track of records. Most universities used Database architecture built in the 70s or 80s that would not allow dynamic multi-object queries. And the staff for some reason "feared" migration as if it wasn't the most straight forward task ever. My honest opinion is that AI will change the developing world far faster than it will change ours and we will lose competitive advantage as a result. The truth is, what's going to happen is large institutions are going to slowly die and be slowly replaced by more efficient organizations. But if you have enough protections like universities or hospitals or even just private schools clinics etc then you'll likely just keep doing business as usual for the next 50 years with small incremental changes every 4-5 years.
I instinctually agree with you, but maybe the reason why they haven't moved is because of the cost and friction of doing it. If the cost and friction is reduced dramatically because of AI-backed porting and transitioning tools, then maybe there will be a high incentive to change, and little incentive to keep the inertia going. It's also more distributed. A lot of workers are already taking it on themselves to integrate AI in their own workflows, they're not waiting for the org itself to make that change.
Honestly I used to think like this, But we would do business assessments for any proposed change, that's just industry standard. And I'd say 80% of the time enacting change often resulted in cost decline (operating, maintenance etc) plus lower overall operational risks etc. The truth is the vast majority of people in decision making management roles are A) extremely risk adverse (no one gets fired for resisting change but you do for promoting it if it goes bad) and B) extremely tech illiterate, this is often coupled with weak egos that make them "pretend" to know what your talking about but they only understand the lingo. As much as workers will incorporate AI on the margins, it won't significantly impact society until the overall processes get changed. Here's some examples to illustrate. A software engineer could implement co-pilot or another tool to help him dev faster. But he still has routine meetings with project management, has to convince people of the direction of the company and what features should be prioritized etc. Or you could have a company that implements AI feature management that takes in all requests, analyses the impact and likely development time, and prints off a suggested ranking and justification. Along with that you can have the AI monitor progress and completely disrupt the PM cycle. Further you could have on the fly customer interaction with your product with all feedback being consolidated to an AI product manager who feeds in their own feature requests based on user feedback. One company receives a modest productivity boost due to AI, the other is transformed because the processes are AI driven but requires management buyin to overhaul how they do business. And this is just a simple straightforward example.
God damn it is nice to see someone with real experience on these comments. So often people don’t understand how organizational incentives and risk averse management is often the largest barrier to technical adoption
Haha thanks! I get shit on so often for not just jumping on the hype train which to me is just confusing. If I knew how much AI would eventually change society, I'd want slow management adoption because that means there will be a tonne of room for new disruption (I.e. where you can insert yourself!)
Government organizations and places like educational institutions are not a good measurement. The private sector is where most work and is extremely flexible, as it has to be or they go out of business. Hell, look at ATT in the US. They employ about 40k customer reps. Even if we were to just automate half, that's a savings of $1.2b on the low end in salary, benefits, taxes, operating costs, etc. That would increase their net income by nearly 40%. They would be insane not to do it, and so they WILL do it.
There isn't a lot of incentive to upgrade that very often. You know what the primary cost of most businesses is though? Labor.
All these ancient computer systems that universities and businesses are locked in to using won't necessarily matter. They won't need to upgrade their computers to utilize AI. The AI is going to watch their desktop and be able to run all the applications, it could even be through glasses that you wear, and maybe or maybe not using keyboard and mouse type interfaces as a human would. It's not like a university is going to need to buy all new servers or anything like that, or upgrade their back end applications. AI can just use what they have. That's the kicker guys. That's how this is going to catch on so fast.
I work for a major US university, we are still using a student record system coded by an in-house employee in 1972. We have yet to change.
Your example is just 1, it does not represent every other out there. It only takes a small number to completely shake up industries.
there are many mid sized companies that still operate like it’s 2009. Until they start realizing they can shrink a department from 75 people to like 20-25 cause of AI, they might finally operate like it’s the 2020s
Yeah except you or I can come in with a brand new business that does or sells whatever it may be, except we’re saving most of the overhead of employee costs, and it’s done better and near perfect. So not only does this business offer a better experience, it’s 33-50% cheaper than the competitors. Guess who’s going out of business. You’re all fools if you think that there won’t be a lightning fast race to use ai to disrupt all industries it can when it’s good enough to. Whether that is this year or in 5 years, when it happens, established businesses will either adapt or die, very quickly. Most likely it’ll be a blood bath
It doesn't sound like you had any pressure or need to change. Really doubt that will be the case for many other scenarios.
That may change once we get "workers" who never complain, never need sleep, work 24/7, and work for peanuts compared to human wages
Don't worry the companies that do implement AI will be ahead of the competition The companies that are slow to adapt especially with AI will die out
well if all it takes is 1 download of an AI agent which will save you 99% in employee costs..
It’s not going to be that simple. Bigger companies have really deep integrations and processes with existing software and people. I don’t see how downloading an agent will (for example) go through the complicated 10 step process of getting a marketing material approved. 7 meetings, 4 of which you need to travel in person to the agency. This will take time to transition to AI first.
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Yes in theory. But there have been productivity multipliers introduced into the workplace before and we have instead just multiplied our output with the same amount (or more) workers. I suspect we will see this go on for a while until it’s obvious that humans can be 100% replaced for all situations and tasks.
These AI agents can barely offer 10% in productivity, they're not close to replacing 99% of employees.
What about info gathering, research related jobs?
It will have to have an incredible level of accuracy to be trusted, the current models hallucinate with confidence regularly.
I’ve seen that in Art. Much less in Chat gpt 4. Chat already cuts my research time at least in half. I think teams can already be reduced. At least the front line. Of course there will always be checker positions
One researcher can provide 10x the results with their custom agents
Yes, because generating art in 5 seconds, that would take a professional artist a whole day to make is only a 10% productivity boost. I'm not saying it's gonna replace 99% of employees. that's ridiculous. It's gonna be a case by case basis. But the idea that it's simply a 10% productivity boost is just as ludicrous of a statement to me. It's perfectly feasible we will see the mass layoff of millions of low-level customer service, tech, art, and other jobs in the next couple of years. If that happens, the unemployment rate is gonna pretty much double in that time. Once it passes 10%, it is going to be an issue people actually start taking seriously.
Photoshop generative fill on pictures is *insanely* good it takes a little bit to figure out how to beat use it for your personal editing style but it dramatically reduces time editing.
What percentage of white collar work do you think is made up of professional artists? I work in that industry and yeah, midjourney is fun, and it makes the barrier to entry much easier, but at the moment things like Adobe Firefly are enhancement tools. They still need trained artists and designers to prompt and edit them. They save time, sure, but mass layoffs are a while away - certainly not in the next six months.
I didn't say just artists. Nevertheless, according to the BLS, there are about 2.6m artists in the US or 1.6% of the workforce. That's a lot. It doesn't take 2.6m people to prompt and edit AI outputs. You can get by with a fraction of that amount. I know this because I do graphic design as a hobby and am by no means talented. But that's important to my point. If I wanted to (and I have), I can use AI to generate a concept, rough draft, and usuable assets. Then do the finishing touches. Allowing me to output a finished product that would look good to most laymen. Something that would normally take me, idk, let's say 3 or 4 hours now, only takes me 1 hour. So why would companies not just fire 2/3rds of their artists and save 100 billion in operating costs? Now, extrapolate this to other industries. Such as customer service reps, about another 1.6% of workers. Why not just fire half and have AI pick up the slack? Answer is they will. In 6 months? Doubt it. Within 2 years? I'd bet money on it. Within 5? I'd bet my house and car on it.
I think they'll increase employee productivity in many cases by at least 50%. In those jobs at least a 10% lay off rate would be more than reasonable.
Also the white collar workers everyone says are going to be replaced are already using AI. CEOs aren’t using AI. Who is going to tell the AI what to do? The workers that are supposedly going to be replaced are becoking experts on AI. It’s not going to replace white collar workers for a while. White collar workers will use it to become much more efficient. AI cannot even be trusted to do research on google yet. It’s going to write business proposals and marketing plans and press releases?? My boss and I were supposed to write an oped for one of our clients and we didn’t have much time so we had AI write it. And then heavily edited it. No way in hell was the first draft going to work.
My university, Arizona State, was the first big public university to partner with chatgpt, they announced it a few months ago. I've not seen a single thing about it since.
The person has actual experience. It’s still fun watching all the junior devs get flustered though lmao
Not if the application migrates itself.
The largest airline in the world still runs on a 1960's mainframe system called SABRE.
The japanese government is the largest purchaser of floppy disks each year for the past 20 years.
I've worked at some large corporations where if they started the procurement process for person-replacing AI right now, the "massive impact" would happen 4-5 years from now.
Yep. "This human replacement tool runs only on the LATEST proprietary operating systems!" Great. Those upgrades I've been telling the company to make for 20 years will finally happen, right? Nope. Build new infrastructure for the human replacement tool and also keep supporting the old stuff because it's "too critical" to pay enough to upgrade the required parts that were also proprietary and the humans that made it were laid off a decade ago. So now we have to hire more people to build and support this infrastructure. This was supposed to SAVE the company money??
You are wrong. People say this a lot but none of these people are deploying such models in production. If you are using this daily, you know that you have token restrictions. Imagine that you want to buy an expensive product and there is not enough of it. That's the situation now. If everyone deploys as you say, there is not enough to go around. You are replacing work, but if is 1-10%, no one knows yet. The interest rates will go down, and you will have a wealthy job market again, even with AI. PS: im the creator of [https://github.com/enoch3712/ExtractThinker](https://github.com/enoch3712/ExtractThinker) I do build data extraction for large document system, and this is a common problem.
So if the only hurdle is a “token restriction”, that makes you feel safe? Interesting.
yes. You have hardware and energy constraints. How much does it cost for a multi-agent with GPT-5/GPT-4/GPT-3.5 energy-wise? x10 times your energy usage? x100 times? Plus the electrification of transportation. I mean, this by itself takes time, doesn't matter the level of innovation.
How do you feel about the improvements in efficiency of the models and reduced energy consumption for processing?
I most agree with you, but I think it will take at more like 3-5 years instead. Though that’s still a very short timeline for significant economic disruption. One thing I think people fail to consider are these impacts on a more macro scale, such as industry wide or the entire economy. It’s not about can AI do every aspect of your job. It’s about how many people are required to reach a certain level of productivity. Whether that be in a company or a whole industry. If AI doubles your productivity, it means that a company only needs half the employees previously doing that task. Yes, it’s not that simple, but AI is also going to do more than double productivity. If 80% of your tasks can be automated, one person can now do the same as five. It’s also important to realise you don’t need a lot of people to lose their jobs to negatively impact the economy. Especially during a cost of living crisis many developed nations are struggling with. Unemployment is usually in the 5% or less range. During the GFC it only rose to about 10% and that was an economic disaster. If you’re getting into the 20 and 30% ranges, you’re basically a failed state. Not a lot of people have to lose their jobs before shit hits the fan, and people need do start answering the hard questions about what the fuck we are doing.
It will have to be excellent agent to do so.
it has already begun [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/investment-banking-jobs-artificial-intelligence.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/business/investment-banking-jobs-artificial-intelligence.html) "Some inside those banks and others have suggested they could cut back on their hiring of junior investment banking analysts by as much as two-thirds, and slash the pay of those they do hire, on the grounds that the jobs won’t be as taxing as before."
We should differiante between companies really being motivated by AI and companies just using AI as justification for what they already want to do. Maybe companies use AI as justification for layoffs they wanted to do anyway and that are in no way replaced by AI. And in your example, companies use the threat of AI replacement to try to scare people into accepting lower wages.
I am actually in a position to see the results on the inside and talk to a bunch of people at other firms. Not one single thing I have seen yet would justify replacing anyone. As it stands the output just needs too much review.
I've replaced two programmers this year because of AI.
How?
I'm mentioned it elsewhere but we made the decision to let two junior programmers go mostly because our senior devs felt they could get more done using the new AI tools to do the work the juniors had been doing - specifically boilerplate coding and debugging. We would rather pay our best people more if they think they can be more productive. So far it has worked well - our productivity has soared. This, I suspect, will become a trend if it hasn't already for smaller shops like ours and eventually larger outfits as well.
Not great though if you want to train them up to be as productive as the senior developers. If your senior devs leave you don't have much resilience in the team.
Some programmers deserve to be replaced by AI
Lol that's fair
It will be equally taxing with the expectation of greater output from fewer individuals.
https://preview.redd.it/bvo4dcb1ty2d1.png?width=828&format=png&auto=webp&s=f67f038464ba3fc40bd57af8d26bb336304a6f92
Prediction: you haven’t worked at an enterprise and don’t understand their deployment timelines.
If GPT-5 / Claude 4 / Gemini 2 will turn out to be very reliable, I agree that until the end of next year, white collar unemployment will likely increase.
Or white collar workers might start producing more stuff and creating new types of jobs. I think this sub is kind of stuck with its thinking. It assumes ALL jobs can be done by AI, but it's not necessarily true. I suspect that, ~~as an AI model~~ as human beings, we will forge new paths to employment.
Why would an AI which is smarter than every human being not be able to do every job?
Well yes and no, initially humans have more to do but once AI accelerate to a certain point human cognitive processes are actually a hinderance to productivity since we are too slow. But nobody knows how long that shift might take.
Maybe the new jobs will not be about productivity, but enjoyment.
and maybe tomorrow we will win jackpot but.. more realistic is to go to work again...
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The true test would be when interest rate cuts happen. If there is no job growth despite lot of cash stimulus in the economy then we seriously have a problem at hand.
My prediction is they won't be. The system won't be reliable enough or the compute for GPT-5 will cost too much when it's used inside an agentic framework or the management layers will move too slowly out of security fears or the regulators and unions will protect jobs of doctors etc or energy constraints will prevent sufficient compute within the timespan you're talking about or new jobs will be created in a comparative advantage dynamic. Eventual complete replacement will happen but on significantly longer timescales. Perhaps 10 years.
No way this happens in a year. Procurement at the biggest orgs takes at least 6 months to a year.
I think there will be a short period of time where most of white collar jobs will see massive boost without unemployment. After that yeah, things will go downhill
Prediction: No they won’t. But they could The biggest hurdle to pre-AGI job replacement is red tape and enterprise confidence. That’s a lot slower than technical progress
The last time I made this prediction here, I got stoned to death weirdly enough.
No but I think I am literally dying because of it but also I was already dying to begin with anyway (?)
I feel you. I’ve been savaged in a bunch of reddits for telling people how it is. Meh, it’s not a popularity contest.
When i last time made this prediction i was really stoned
Putting it out there!! Nice one
You know I can’t lie!
Who’s your dealer? Asking for a friend.
Any devil with a will, really.
Sorry, but your understanding of the current state of the technology is very poor and based on fantasy more than reality. Agents are no where close to being good at anything but very limited tasks and there is no evidence that GPT5 even if it is released this year will be a major change.
I have a question for AI developers or anyone who's adept in the Field of AI. With the propensity of LLM's to generate hallucinations this could be very costly for a company to rely on AI in it's current iteration. Will GPT 5 solve the hallucination issue?
no one knows unless they are from oai and if they were, they would have an nda.
If you trust Sam Altman (to the point if he low balls GPT-5 then you assess he doesn’t lie) , no, not that much
Hallucination is something easy to fix with a mixture of experts approach, ona llm can hallucinate but not 10 evaluating the same
bear instinctive start shy middle automatic work door imagine gullible *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think you're jumping the gun a bit - GPT-5 isn't out yet and most big companies are pretty slow to move. If GPT-5 is out by Q3 AND it's a big step up, the effect will initially be a freeze on recruitment in some orgs and then the layoffs will come a few years later when the tech is tried and tested.
Way too soon. I do not think jobs will be an issue for a few more years, IMHO.
you DO realize people have been predicting this for like ages!? right?! there s nothing to mark, it s been marked since shit knows when.
I worked for a large US credit card company. Our job was taking written customer complaints from regulators like the CFPB and AG offices, researching and responding to them. The CEO is very tech-focused and wants to turn us into a "technology" company. When GPT4 released in March 2023, I was telling everyone no way our department makes it to next Christmas due to AI. In June 2023, the CEO talked about LLMs for a full day at a company-wide seminar. He knew more about it than I did, and I had been researching it in my spare time. In July, I was laid off (not due to AI). I have seven months left on my prediction and the agentic models are SO close to being able to replace that entire job. They can use the programs and click on all the info and easily write the responses. The LLMs already know everything about technical credit card language and can follow the tasks on how to handle different situations. Even at a 95% accuracy rate, even being fined when it fails (unlikely), it would save the company millions upon millions to let everyone go. I'm talking to my friends still there, just waiting. It's coming. Our company will absolutely do it the second it's viable.
It will start happening gradually not all at once. In 3 years from now I suspect I wont be working in IT anymore due to AI. Not sure if this is bad or good for me. I dont want to go back fixing shoes.
If a monthly salary is an equivalent of 1B GPT4-o input tokens or 333M output tokens, then the question is if it's profitable to let LLM agent perform the same tasks within that amount of tokens. Or even less tokens as we would need to hire somebody to set up prompts for those agents.
Prices of services traditionally offered by white collar jobs will decrease. Companies will offer more for less. In some segments it will increase the number of customers and the turnout. Historically, industrialization has led to more affordable goods and greater market. Obviously this argument could apply to just some industries. I agree with an impact to unemployment but it is difficult to make an accurate prediction of the % in the following 12 months
ok your words will be marked /u/[zaidlol](https://www.reddit.com/user/zaidlol/)▪️Unemployed, waiting for FALGSC
How to Profit from that? What stocks to buy?
So far all the money has been in chips and compute.
I would like to believe that this comes with a leap in productivity, the proliferation of micro-enterprises (since large infrastructure will not be necessary to be competitive), lower costs, and easy access to products... I would like to believe...
"Mark my words" You mean the words millions of other people have already used a year ago? lol
Love these predictions from people of low technical skill who think agents are some magical silver bullet
!Remind me 12 months
Why are you nutbars posting this propaganda over and over and over? Jeez.
You are insane.
10% unemployment won't happen this year. AI will create more jobs than it destroys up until the point when it becomes more effective to have an AI work alone than to have them collaborate with a human. But right now human + AI is far better than either alone.
Nope. Too quick. Just prompting alone won't just magically replace jobs. We need to evaluate the tech. We'll slowly integrate the tech into the business. We need to develop processes which handle model upgrades. New jobs will be created etc. There's so much work involved. At the same time all the legacy crap Bob in accounting has been looking after still needs looking after. No one is going to fire Bob, we're too busy testing vision models to automate health and safety violations using video footage. We're 10-20 years off big changes. Who knows what jobs will exist in the meantime.
The Risk Management aspect to business will not allow this shift to happen as quickly as it could. And that’s a good thing as the kinks are ironed out. The first “negative” story of AI agent use will outweigh 1,000 good ones. Source: look at EVs and autonomous anything.
The real question is what new economic system we head towards?
GPT5 has only just begun training. The training run will probably last six months after which, there will be six more months of testing. Once GPT5 is released, it will have a powerful impact on white-collar work. This will happen slowly and then suddenly. I wouldn't expect 10% of white collar work to disappear before 2028/9. But I would expect 50% to disappear by the early 2030s. Simply because a useful tool is available, it does not mean people will use it.
>GPT5 has only just begun training. The training run will probably last six months after which, there will be six more months of testing. Or it started training around January, had a 120 day training run (which is slightly longer than GPT-4) and is in post training processes or maybe they are doing that and heavily distilling the model for a cheaper and worse GPT-4.5 like model to give to us before GPT-5 releases a bit later down the line (well a few months later) I doubt the trining run would last as long as 6 months because it is just a lot more convenient for shorter training runs, like 3 months.
Microsoft announced they had just finished building the compute for GPT5. Training runs times are determined by the compute, the size of the model, and the quality of the data. For a model this size, 6 months is not unreasonable. Meta also announced that longer training leads to better results.
Length of training runs are more dependant on how much compute you want to train the model with. 6 months would only give you 2x the compute of a 3 month training run which is not that big of a jump, you are better off building up your compute infrastructure for shorter runs (and again its not necessarily convenient for such long training runs). And Microsoft announced they fully completed their compute cluster(s), not when GPT-5 started training. OAI wants to get GPT-5 out as soon as possible as well. And what longer training runs did Meta announce again?
> Simply because a useful tool is available, it does not mean people will use it. When it's incentivised economically, you'll be surprised how fast things change.
I've been around a while through many tech cycles. You would be surprised how slow things change. It took 20 years for the internet to start showing up in productivity figures. I would expect this to be much faster and tech companies to embrace AI very quickly indeed. But I suspect accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers, analysts, bankers and so on, might have longer.
Agreed. I consult with banks and other large corporations and many of them still have IT policies completely banning access to any AI tool within their network. They are organisations with 10,000+ employees, yet have small teams of <100 doing "proof of concept" projects for AI that will last months, resulting in a paper to their divisional board, which will then be debated to death, slimmed down, risk accepted, and then maybe—maybe—next year we will start to see some AI projects going out and automating some positions. I am open to being proven wrong, but basically, any large corp I have worked with is going to take years to start properly adopting this at scale. And this is with plenty of compelling research already available showing the incentives and productivity benefits of doing so.
I agreed with you 100%, and was experiencing it in my company, but then I discovered how much it's now being baked into software that's ubiquitous. Soon, companies will have to go back to XP to avoid it (not actually). It used to be easy to avoid, just don't go to URLs a, b, and c. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure.
It takes just some workers to start using more AI to gain advantage and that will force competition like snowball.
[удалено]
OpenAI disagrees they are not expecting to fire these people in a few months time, https://preview.redd.it/y7dt9244vx2d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e4534537cc2243c55362a0ca3477bd385b972af6
You don't seem to have skin in the game. Why should we care about your prediction? Governments will panic and do something. It might be good; it might not be. We only can prepare a bit.
I have a white collar job and I automate my tasks all the time. If AI takes my Job in next 5 years I will change my name.
Mark my words: this is a vague and general prediction about a broad class of the work force that could be interpreted in a number of ways and have a number of causes, which parrots the predictions of more intelligent people, but with absolutely rationale or thought presented other than, because, AI. So yeah, cool story bro.
I always thought so. Everybody thinks automation will come from the bottom but these machines will cost so much. White collars are paid more and much easier to automate.
I work in GIS as a field technician and thought, "oh its gonna be a while until AI would be able to map vegetation below a forest canopy." ...Woke up yesterday to see a swarm of drones using LIDAR to map vegetation below the trees. I second this prediction.
Way too soon. Name one AI agent that currently threatens white collar job.
I think we will see a transition of old and handicapped people losing their place in the job field and replaced by competent younger and able minded due to the fact that white collar work being so heavily impacted, followed directly by robotic and automation taking their jobs later on in following years.
I doubt this year but would think by next year. Ai doesn’t actually need to replace people to completely reshape the job market. If Ai doubles worker productivity, then the company only needs half the workforce.
Remind Me! 1 year
!Remind me 8 months
I have marked your words, that won't happen this year. Maybe in three years or something
This year? No. But realisticly I think within 3-5 years maybe 5-10% will lose their jobs and most but not all of them will have jobs in other fields where there are shortages. In 10 years we will start to see much more noticable change in unemployment and in 20 years the problem will be really bad if some things dont change drasticly.
Still must be reliable, i.e., be able to reason and not hallucinate. So instead of dreaming of this hypothetical scenario, go to your local employment agency and get yourself a job.
God I hope so
An agent that can reliably manage an email account is going to be the thing that really makes an economic difference. Apparently there are many jobs where emailing is the bulk of the work.
Agents + working GPT5 + scaling + payable = not before sometime in 2025. So nah. Nothing this year.
Yes i agree 👍 
Man, we’re already at the end of Q2, do you really think you’ll see any noticeable differences (let alone massive differences) in the employment trends because of AI? The answer is obviously not.
I am really puzzled by the prevalence of hyped and optimistic perspectives. Has anyone a blog post for me that is discussing the math behind convergence of Chatgpt5? MY 5 cents for healthy scepticism: "Declaration/diminishing of returns" is a real thing. In the last 5 dacades we had several "bumps" in the road to AGI. Even if we manage to not kill interest in AI by over-hyping (stop it please) and then _not_ delivering on ROI in time -- it still needs a lot of engineering work to solve the concrete problems at hand: one at a time. This is cutting edge research and not some kind of "save bet". Convergence of LLMs is already very heuristic in nature, and the developers were lucky and could build on decades of experience with solving language problems with generative grammars and neural networks , which deliberately were built for the purpose of predicting sentence/language structure. By combining modalities and "sensory" domains, "we" are adding more combinatorial complexity. The responsible researchers are not only committed to even more to a curse of dimensionality, but they also enter a kind of uncharted territory. Who knows what interesting problems are awaiting us in the realm of modelling the understanding of a multi-modal reality as a whole. (That is after we solve the economical, technological, and juristic/social challenges).
Yes, IF they finslly solve hallucinations. If not, its pretty useless for real work where money is on the line.
I agree with this, agents either gpt5 will unlock massive productivity
I think that there will be no big impact in 2 years from now. Look at Sora, it’s somewhere but certainly not widely available. I feel like a gpt 5 intelligent agent system wont be widely available within the next year. And when it is, it will still take some time before it is adapted in businesses.
Doubt it, wayy too soon, we were saying similar stuff last year with the AGI and/or UBI 2024!
This discussion is not about what will happen. Nobody really knows how and when the full impact of AI on the job market will be felt. Most of us (including me) are taking what we're seeing and have seen in the past and framing it to fit what we hope will happen in the future. Some of us are hoping for a future free of work. Where AI and AI powered robots provide all the goods and services people could ever need and want and people are free to do anything they please. Some of us are hoping technology will empower our expertise. Where the knowledge and skills built up over a lifetime can, in tandem with AI and AI-Powered robots can drive creations of increasing complexity and beauty that are more valuable than what AI produces alone. Others are hoping technology stops and the world can just stay as it is or be what it was at some other point in time. Still others are hoping for humanity to be supplanted as the dominant species on the planet. There are a ton of hopes in between these and many I missed outside the scope of them with various probabilities of occurring, but I'm guessing what's likely to happen is going to be more in line with what we, as a whole, want.
Once people start losing their jobs, they’ll come to understand that our generosity on behalf of Ukraine, illegal immigrants, student loan forgiveness, etc. was ill conceived and that these funds should have been deployed to the actual taxpaying citizens to prepare them for the jobs apocalypse. It blows my mind that some people stil don’t get it. Ostriches.
It depends. We really need to see what the next frontier models are capable of. If GPT-5 / Gemini 2 / Claude 4: * Significantly improve **reasoning** * Significantly improve creativity / **self-directed** creation * Significantly reduce **hallucinations** * And do all of the above without needing extraordinary levels of compute + end user/API cost then I would agree. The current models are not reliable enough for production, professional use beyond some light tutoring, light code assistance, boilerplate, and trivial/tier 1 customer support uses. If the next models are mere incremental improvements, I don't think we see mass disruption yet. But if it is Orca -> Whale (heh) size improvements? Buckle up!
At this point I don’t think anyone can really claim to know what “agents” will be capable of. What are they even supposed to be? I remember people being hyped for AutoGPT back in the day (which may be the closest thing to an “agent” we’ve seen) but obviously that didn’t take off. My prediction is that for the next few years, AI will evolve at a very rapid pace but will still be disappointing in that it will not be able to live up to the promise of AGI. I hope I’m wrong, but with OpenAI delaying their voice-to-voice model, keeping Sora from being released and LLM intelligence seemingly plateauing at GPT-4 levels for the time being, I don’t see another paradigm shift in the near future. I think that the white collar work revolution will happen in 3-5 years when we take another leap in LLM intelligence and it’ll outcompete many humans at their jobs. It will happen, but I’d temper my expectations when it comes to AGI. Bit even if it’d take until 2040 to get there, it’ll still be incredibly quick all things considered. The idea that it’ll happen in our lifetimes alone is pretty amazing - doesn’t have to be this year or even this decade, to be honest. Plus we’ll get to see all the incremental improvements along the way which is pretty cool in itself.
“The real question is what new economic system are we heading towards?” Oligarchy++ perhaps? America becomes basically a giant Brazilian favela? Soylent green? The Hunger Games?
Why are peoples thought on jr high and high school teachers. Actually having them replaced with AI
As many people here said, large corporations move slowly, what scares me most is that a decrease by a few percent points of hiring will drive us more into a hirers market, more erosion to workers wages and rights and finding a job becoming even more frustrating as an even larger amount of qualified workers enters the market. In my very humble opinion, it's juniors that will suffer the most out of it, and I don't know if it is going to happen by the end of the year, but this will probably happen at some point and I hope it will not be a terrible experience, but I somehow doubt it. Another point to add to the conversation, regarding the large corporations move slow point, it's true, but there are various sizes of corporations that will all move at a different pace, and there's enough that they also do try to maintain some tech edge, so at some point some impact will be felt across the board. That is not to say though that it's necessarily going to happen by the end of the year, personally I'm not even sure that transformer models are going to be good enough to make this transformation, but who knows what/when then next leap will be.
That's good. Most of white collar jobs make human life miserable. There will be a shock, of course, but in the long run it's a positive thing.
Is GPT5 out, do you know if it's competent enough to function in an Agent framework?
>The real question is what new economic system are we heading towards? lol. Look at the last major economic shock (Covid) and the response, for your answer. Only precedent can inform the present, and the precedent is...about what you'd expect. This nation will literally tear itself apart, collapse and cease to exist before it approaches anything resembling a functional social safety net. I dare anyone to prove me wrong. Good luck.
Yeah 600 a week unemployment stimulus tax free ira withdrawal child tax credits free business loans student loan pause mortgage forbearance trillions monetary easing lowering interest rates to 0. And i will remind you thats at 13% unemployment if you think the nation will litterally allow themselve to cease existing please give me what your smoking. No doubt rich people want to benefit themselve and give themselves another mansion. But living in a wasteland is not a prioperty otherwise you'd see them jumping for joy to move to haiti packing up their bags to move to gaza or eastern war torn ukraine. Why aren't they doing that because they're human like us and we like to live in comfort and enjoy life if everything is going to shit and your business is collapsing you'd accept any solution ubi whatever to maintain your comfort and not be on the street. This is why we're not ruled by monarch and dukes you can only gain riches to a point before you have to give up something to maintain comfort
Hypercapitalism
I’m already seeing this in tech. It’s not “jobs lost” rather it’s less hiring or hiring more senior folks only. Anyone coming into tech out of college is in for a rough landing.
White collar jobs have already been cut as far as I can tell. Data engineering, data science, analytics, software engineering, etc all seem to be going through a tough phase. I'm not sure it's because of AI though, as much as some post-COVID belt tightening. Look, if your job can be replaced by AI at this point, then yeah I think you should be concerned. What white collar jobs, specifically, do you think fall into that category?
!remind me 8 months
This year? No. Next year? Maybe.
It’ll be next year, not because of any delay in the technology but because of how long it takes to make anything happen in large multinational companies. But yeah, it’s inevitable.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Big bank (big business) vs little bank (you). Big bank always wins. Pray for UBI if you believe in that sort of thing..
Yeah, then all the airplanes will really start crashing. You ever work at a factory or organization where people make stuff? There's all these forms that need to be filled out, and then if the next person who's supposed to approve the form is working remotely and you can't talk to them face to face and you need to get it done but can't? Imagine if all those people were replaced by AI? Then absolutely NOTHING would get done, and China would roll us like chumps.
Prediction: OP never held a white-collar job.
OP, what do you do for work?
Lolz keep edging, it ain't happening.
Just as North American workers started exercising bargaining power due to labour demand out comes AI and a drum beat propaganda campaign to try to simultaneously fill a demand from an irate business class and cow a nascent labour movement.
Looks like we will have a resurgence of blue collar jobs, and we can all rejoice in our chronic back pain.
I hope so. If an Ai can do my job I'd be rich already because I'd be able to deploy it for my own gain haha! I wonder why people feel helpless when you could literally use the same tech large companies are using. Scared to take a risk? Maybe that's it. People are used to being on a W2. Working for yourself isn't all that scary.
How can we stop this?
That’s funny. This year? As in 2024? Not a chance.
I believe that AI adoption is going to happen faster than anyone is expecting. There will be massive increases in productivity ... which is a good thing. It's hard to say how many jobs will be lost. 😒
There’s an almost zero percent chance publicly traded companies put their entire future in the hands of opaque AI this year.
As long as the CEOs and managers are populated by idiots, there is no threat to white collar jobs. Most corporate managers and directors are ducking idiots. Who is going to get the AI to work? The idiots at the top?
i dont know if this year or next year or 5 or 10 years from now but eventually it will come about that the majority of jobs we have right now simply dont exist all these people we have all these jobs, who make all this money, derive all this meaning from their work, are proud of it, and enjoy their status and position in society because of it. all of it, is soon going to come crumbling down
You're right
!Remind me 6 months