Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They’re Fired Because of AI, it’s hurting Nvidia’s stock price.
It’s also a lie. LLMs can’t replace a single worker, and most CEOs know that, they are using it as an excuse to cover up the consequences of mismanagement and/or increase short term profits at the expense of future growth.
Saying you’re doing layoffs lowers stock price. Saying you’re replacing workers and stocks might even go up. It’s a pretty big incentive if your pay package depends on the stock price.
What is this magical place where saying you do layoffs lowers the stock price. I’d like to go there.
LLMs can’t replace a single worker,
I don’t think that’s true, it’s just not how the execs are seeing it.
If you have 100 staff using AI within the means of what it can actually do, you might not need the whole 100 staff. Maybe you only need 98 now to get the same outcome, or whatever it is.
What it can’t do is replace a whole job category. You can’t replace all your customer service with it, or all your developers or all your marketing team. You still need those people, but if you employ enough people in a category, eventually it could reduce how many you need, which is essentially replacing them.
You’d be surprised…
An AI hype company did a fairly ok study with programmers. Some used ai some didn’t and they compared the difference in completion time.
The AI users were 20% slower than the non AI users, but thought they were faster.
So for your scenario, the company would need to hire 20 extra people to make up for the lost productivity.
Not just 20 extra people. I’m seeing a funny trend in my company where managers decide to get into vibe coding and they get super excited at getting something somewhat functional running, so now they’ve been presenting “their work” and expecting developers to merge their heaping trash in. That’ll require quite a few more people.
This is the real problem thats leading to them thinking they can fire so many people. They get all excited because it can sometimes do something (and possibly do it terribly behind the scenes, but still do it) and oh shit we don’t need any humans anymore!
Then you get companies regretting laying people off. The wrong people are making the decisions without understanding what is happening.
Honestly I find this darkly hilarious. The circlejerk is becoming more and more obvious. I’m going to be surprised if the bubble doesn’t pop within the next 6 months or so - definitely before the end of the year.
All it took for this to happen was:
- skyrocketing energy prices
- skyrocketing hardware prices
- skyrocketing water usage
- the effective priceout of PC/homelab enthusiasts and hobbyists which will probably destroy much of the community, and thus most of the consumer-oriented hardware manufacturers
- turning the US economy into a house of cards
- sharply accelerated enshitification of all major search engines (in the interest of pushing people to use LLM bullshit for no good reason, when a perfectly suitable and deterministic alternative already existed and was deployed at scale everywhere)
- flagrantly ignoring licensing and usage terms for basically any and all open source software projects hosted anywhere on the internet
- the hollowing out of software engineering as a discipline, the collapse of the hiring prospects of fresh grads/juniors because “ai can do that”, and the creation of a generational gap in staffing across huge swathes of the tech industry writ large
- the (even more) accelerated enshitification of social media as it becomes a series of gigantic LLM bot farms talking to each other
- we can go on
What a time to be alive.
Jensen can suck my Huang.
Where I work the leadership 100% tels people if they dont spend tokens they get canned. Theres dashboards and everything. I hate it but appreciate not being lied to, at least.
Stop telling fired employees the truth says billionaire CEO.
He finally took off that stupid leather jacket
He’s getting a new one made of human skin.
Whoever gets to wear his skin is going to look amazing, à la that scene in Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller.
Imagine it.Can’t help but laugh after imagining the finished product lol
Nvidia is only begging because they didn’t realise that putting out a free product that essentially makes most work redundant would bite them in the ass as it would mean less people able to buy their products.
Oh, and because they’re worried about what happens when they start charging the companies who fired everyone the real price of the AI service they’re currently providing for free.
Nvidia is not selling AI, they sell the hardware the AI runs on. They’re selling shovels in this gold rush, but they forgot the one golden rule: “Cash up front”.
