Original Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1t2xz7z/sam_altman_says_the_quiet_part_out_loud/
Meanwhile:
Productivity gains from AI are appearing in many of the same fields where entry-level employment is starting to decline. Employment among software developers aged 22–25 has plummeted nearly 20% since 2024, even as their older colleagues’ headcount grows. The pattern repeats in other jobs with higher levels of AI exposure, like customer service. Meanwhile, firm surveys indicate executives expect this trend to accelerate, with planned headcount reductions outpacing recent cuts. Translation: The disruption is targeted and just beginning.
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report
This looks more like senior staff being forced to pick up more work with the same pay.
There’s already an increased productivity KPI at the corpo I work at. They expect faster completion of deliverables by some percentage as AI adoption grows (imposed).
At least in software development they can expect whatever the fuck they want, but when people are overworked due to trying to fulfill unreasonable expectations they make stupid mistakes so there are more bugs that slip through to much later phases were they’re harder to correct and the consequences of them are way more costly to undo and have no time for “spring cleaning” kind of work such as Refactoring code, so the codebase much more quickly becomes heavy, unwieldy and more bug prone - so harder to change (for example, do add new features or fix problems) and more likely to fail when it is change - leading to the need for a full rewrite (which costs $$$) much sooner.
In other words, increase the load on people and what you’re doing is causing a bit more work results delivered now in exchange for A TON of otherwise unnecessary work that will have to be done later (from extra bug fixing and even fixing the consequences of bugs, to full system re-writes because the old code base is an unmanageable mess) as well as a massive fall in productivity because the code has turned into a hot mess.
And this is without even taking in the account the consequences of using AI to generate code: unless we’re talking about such a minuscule project that it can be generated all in one go (i.e. non-professional stuff or tiny helper scripts), it’s not going to be a single consistent design with consistent coding practices, thus from the start already being a hot mess, way harder (read time consuming, read costly) to bugfix and change.
IMHO, there’s going to be some serious fireworks in just about all companies that went full-on with vibe coding, with the recent sequence of truly idiotic problems with Github and Windows 11 probably being a visible display of the beginning of that.
(Mind you, the funny bit is that all those senior techies that are already being hired to fix this shit and will need to be hired in larger numbers, are way more likely to tell any manager with unreasonable KPIs to go fuck themselves and even leave if pressed too hard to work themselves to the bone to try to achieve that which they know with absolute certainty is impossible, since it already is and it’s going to be even more a “sellers’ market” for the more experienced types so leaving is no problem).
Someone should add more KPIs into the mix. Surely we can play business politics better than those shit brained AI peddling monkeys.
- What’s your rework percentage?
- What’s your failure rate?
- What’s your code churn rate?
- What’s your spec-drift rate?
- What’s your mean time to recovery?
- What’s your defect-escape rate?
- What’s your code cohesion score?
- What’s your problem-discovery time?
- What’s your cost per change over time?
- What’s your risk appetite for losing all your devs to an inadequate replacement?
We’ve been finding ways to track dev performance for a long time. Surely we can call upon the correct set of KPI overlords to demonstrate, without actually saying, that AI is hot garbage for the scope it’s given.
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I do wonder where all the non-juniors are spawning in, i guess the it will be time to whine about a shortage then.
They assume AI is only to get much better and will be able to replace higher expertise levels every year until everybody developer is replaced.
You assume long term planning ? Haw haw. Line must go up this quarter!
You know how it goes. Fire people and assume AI is better next quarter. If it doesn’t work out, it’s also a problem for next quarter.
Are we in the era of “Altman says” news already?
Ugh god im so happy its not just me sick of this stuff… reddit (is trash) technology sub has literally become post after post of
Sam Altman says this
Sam Altman says that
Sam Altman says things
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says hes butthurt
Anthropics Mythos this
Anthropic Mythos that
Jensen says Chinas winning bro just let me sell to them
Mythos
Mythos
Sam altman
Sam
Sam
Mythos
Mythos
Jensen
Mythos
Sam
Sam
Just shut the fuck up already
Pretty soon it’ll be “Altman slams Musk”
Altman says, Musk says, Polymarket says, etc etc seems to be what mainstream news sites focus on a lot now. It takes a lot of filter words to make my news RSS feed tolerable now.
In the early days of social media, social media used to steal attention/clicks from news sites by regurgitating news site material. Now news sites are trying to compete with social media by regurgitating whatever shit shows up on social media sites.
I’ve learned to ignore pretty much any article that is about what someone is saying. Report about things being done. Talking heads are not a headline.
Filters make the fediverse so much nicer :)
I might have to make a couple more after all of this.
This doesn’t seem particularly shocking for him to say, pointing out that his product is being used as a scapegoat seems like sensible reputation management.
Same reason why a CEO with a half-arsed strategy they want to enact hires a highly paid management consultancy which by an amazing coincide produces an “analysis” or “study” that “identifies” “problems with the company” and “recommends” that the company executes said half-arsed strategy, and later after it fails miserable, said CEO will blame the consultancy.
Modern publicly traded company CEO’s aren’t hired on actual competence as strategists or top-level organizers, they’re hired on self-aggrandizing skills, personal connections, near-fraudulent misportrayal of their capabilities, or in other words, salesmanship.
I mean it’s also kind of true though…
AI is taking some jobs, in situations where the limiting factor is the rate at which work can be done rather than the skills required to do it. Say you have five people in PR, of which three are responsible for trawling through sources to find out what’s actually being said about the company, and two are responsible for writing press releases. The jobs of two of the people trawling through sources could be replaced with AI, as the limiting factor is the amount of posts, documents and stories you can read. While you’d still need an overseer to fact check and collate, that sort of work can be done much faster than actually reading and finding sources. If the company also lays off one of the people responsible for writing press releases, however, that would be unrelated to AI as that sort of job isn’t replaceable by AI (right now at least) due to the majority of the work being something that probabilistic models just aren’t correct enough to do, so that’d be an unrelated layoff being blamed on AI, even if whoever orders it genuinely believes that AI has replaced the job.
I mean I agree to an extent but also of course he would say that. Him saying this means less than nothing.
How does one confirm something they have no way of knowing with certainty?…
He knows his shit can’t do those jobs
They ask AI!
Wow. So brave of him.
Trying to get the people back on his side after signing those military contracts? Fuck off and die!
As if we were ever on his side in the first place
What? You mean when they are giving excuses for layoffs, the excuses are NOT the real reason? I’ve ALWAYS assumed they were ALWAYS telling us the truth! How can they do this? My entire world-view is smashed! I’m shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you!
A lot of companies building AI datacenters, are laying off people to afford the gamble. Oracle, Meta the biggest ones. So there’s a real burning of core bridges effect to get into the bubble gold rush.
I’m not surprised. It was very apparent after interest rates rose that tech companies had to immediately start worrying about making money and not making long term bets which might make money. When you aren’t making as much software as you used to, why have that many programmers in payroll?
