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Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They're Fired Because of AI (futurism.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 308 points 5 months ago (17 children)

Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They're Fired Because of AI, it's hurting Nvidia's stock price.

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  • [–] 179 points 5 months ago (14 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 74 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 43 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    What is this magical place where saying you do layoffs lowers the stock price. I'd like to go there.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The real world apparently. But if your company is far enough in la-la land and the disconnect between profit and reality is big enough, weird things happen.

    If a big part of the market is floating in la-la land then that's a good impression of Wile E. Coyote before he looks down.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago* (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago* (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

    It's one study, so I'd take it with a grain of salt, and also the study says

    However, we see positive speedup for the one developer who has more than 50 hours of Cursor experience, so it's plausible that there is a high skill ceiling for using Cursor, such that developers with significant experience see positive speedup.

    And a comment I read on it says "56% of the participants had never used Cursor before, 1/4th of the participants did better, 3/4 did worse. One of the top performers for AI was also someone with the most previous Cursor use. "

    So it really might just be a tooling / experience issue, and the tooling has also improved substantially over the past year, like Claude Code and Chat GPT's Codex. Outputs from LLMs are substantially better in programming than a year ago.

    Edit: Looks like they did a followup study with some of the same participants which is always nice to see. I hope they do a 2027 one and they have the same participants again.

    https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#wider-adoption-of-ai-has-made-it-more-difficult-to-measure-task-level-productivity

    Our raw results show some evidence for speedup. Our early 2025 study found the use of AI causes tasks to take 19% longer, with a confidence interval between +2% and +39%. For the subset of the original developers who participated in the later study, we now estimate a speedup of -18% with a confidence interval between -38% and +9%. Among newly-recruited developers the estimated speedup is -4%, with a confidence interval between -15% and +9%.

    So it's likely people getting used to it, tooling is better, and now they're potentially seeing modest improvements.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    They tested it again back in March and got similar results which, being an AI hype company, they buried in their paper.

    Many of the programmers refused to not use AI, probably related to the declined cognitive function that some other studies have shown to occur in AI users. I read one testimonial saying that his head would explode if he couldn’t use AI.

    So plenty of experience by that point.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I was editing my reply as you replied, but the new study showed they fared better, not worse or the same. Even the new people to the study fared better, but worse than the existing.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    They said it did better, every news story for their March test says the opposite.

    They are an AI hype company. It’s in their interest to tweak the results and the study to make things look better.

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