AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study

Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation".

Was good while it lasted though.

Maybe it's just the nature of being early adopters.

Other fields will get their turn once a baseline of best practices is established that the consultants can sell training for.

In the meantime, memes aside, I'm not too worried about being completely automated away.

These models are extremely unreliable when unsupervised.

It doesn't feel like that will change fundamentally with just incrementally better training.

Does it have to? Stack enough "it's 5% better" on top of each other and the exponent will crush you.

AI training costs are increasing around 3x annually across each of the last 8 years to achieve its performance improvements. Last year, spending across all labs was $150bn. Keeping the 3x trend means that, to keep pace with current advances, costs should rise to $450bn in 2025, $900bn in 2026, $2.7tn in 2027, $8.1tn in 2028, $25tn in 2028, and $75tn in 2029 and $225tn in 2030. For reference, the GDP of the world is around $125tn.

I think the labs will be crushed by the exponent on their costs faster white-collar work will be crushed by the 5% improvement exponent.

Be careful you're not confusing the costs of training an LLM and the spending from each firm. Much of that spending is on expanding access to older LLMs, building new infrastructure, and other costs.