[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by Tensor

My logical and educated guess in this whole GenAI and software engineers loosing job.
...
All things considered it likely takes 36-48 months more for most of the entry and mid level software devs to become redundant and makes AI more cheaper and more intelligent, most of tier 2,3 B.Tech CSE grads will have a hard time getting jobs and potentially their degree might even be useless since software engineering as a whole gets commoditised to everyone and with a few prompts building large scale apps will be available to all.
...
Obviously there won’t be a sudden layoff situation where everyone gets laid off simultaneously rather it’ll be a slow decline with less hiring and more periodic firing of people in chunks over the decade, the current trend of slump in IT jobs would very likely continue.

Great assessment. I agree with nearly everything thing you mentioned including the timeline forecasts. Your scenario of of reasoning & planning through one model and actual programming through another model is addressed through AI agent frameworks. These are in very nascent stages and will take 3-5 years to achieve the stability required to make a tangible impact. Most average software developers of today will resemble the factory workers in a highly automed manufacturing plant. We can expect unicorns which are way leaner than what we have today. AI will be a significant productivity boost to software engineering teams.

[Tensor]

Originally Posted by warrioraks

Great assessment. I agree with nearly everything thing you mentioned including the timeline forecasts. Your scenario of of reasoning & planning through one model and actual programming through another model is addressed through AI agent frameworks. These are in very nascent stages and will take 3-5 years to achieve the stability required to make a tangible impact. Most average software developers of today will resemble the factory workers in a highly automed manufacturing plant. We can expect unicorns which are way leaner than what we have today. AI will be a significant productivity boost to software engineering teams.

Yep only a few people actually understand the amount of development that’s happening in background, ask any software engineer about this and almost 90% of them get triggered and will start to cope and say it’s impossible to replace them and they have xyz skills but what they don’t realise is how dumb current LLMs are compared to the future LLMs, I’m pretty confident that even the current gen LLMs like sonnet 3.5 will steamroll any software engineer with less than 10 yoe in terms of architecture design, scaling methodologies, system design or even just pure coding.

The amount of errors generated by these LLMs are almost negligible right now compared to 20 months back.

The o1 model is such a beast in reasoning, most people in the thread claiming it’s about understanding client requirements etc just use o1 for an hour and I’m pretty sure you’ll start seeing the future of LLMs in terms of thinking and reasoning.

Here o1 is solving unseen PhD problems that are not even there on the internet in 2 minutes which otherwise takes 10 days for any smartest human to solve.

https://youtu.be/scOb0XCkWho?si=mN3htSZVROu7M4U0

https://youtu.be/a8QvnIAGjPA?si=JIf-fda01sMIJ7u-

How long until it builds 100% accurate software and not 99% as people think?
(My two cents here: Use cursor as IDE and hook up you’re anthropic/openai API or use pro plan and start coding and then you’ll start realising 99% of whatever project you build, English will be just be enough to make it a reality use replit for easy hosting and cloud flare for free CDN)

And there are still people saying AI won’t reduce the number of software engineers (delusion is literally peaking)

All I’m saying is Downsizing of teams if you’re team had 12 members it’ll reduce to 5 and remaining 7 will be redundant with no where to go even with whatever skills they have it won’t matter because someone with similar skill set will work for cheaper it’s as simple as that. I agree you’ll up skill but so does every single one of your peers and some of them don’t mind working 70+ hours a week with reduced pay.

The software industry will now ship a ton of more products, unprecedented amounts of software will be shipped compared to before. It’s now not who builds apps or better software it’s just who can get users and retain them which in turn will kill a lot of startup’s since most of them make fancy MVPs and run behind valuations without any meaningful revenue.

TLDR; No the software industry won’t collapse, just people working there will reduce by 40-50% in like 4-5 years, and No the economy won’t collapse just because IT employees are reduced there are a ton more occupations/business that spend more in an economy.

Let’s be grateful for having a magic intelligence in the sky that enables us to solve meaningful problems through our phones in a few minutes.

What a time to be alive.

[Turbohead]

Originally Posted by Tensor

TLDR; No the software industry won’t collapse, just people working there will reduce by 40-50% in like 4-5 years, and No the economy won’t collapse just because IT employees are reduced there are a ton more occupations/business that spend more in an economy.

Let’s be grateful for having a magic intelligence in the sky that enables us to solve meaningful problems through our phones in a few minutes.

What a time to be alive.

I don't think you understand the implications and effects of what you're saying. Reducing 40% of workforce in an industry of a country like India where the service industry is one of the top employers with relatively higher wages will cause massive economic downturn. I'm making up numbers but I'm guessing atleast 20% of income tax would be collected from individuals working in the service industry. It would affect so many industries not limited to real estate, consumer goods and even the food and beverage industry.

One of the videos shared above is about o1 trying to solve a physics problem which suggests that LLMs will affect not just IT/ software development but many complex professions.

Which also makes me think, if everyone is a superhero then no one is a superhero. Wouldn't the competition rise heavily to provide services and experiences that is better than the competition and what is already generated by LLMs? So will the number of jobs really reduce? I think it's still debatable. The advent of computers have only brought more work.

Let me ask one more thing. How much is this thing going to cost? It won't be cheap for long right? All these are introductory prices right? How is it going to be priced in the future since every answer generated produces varying degree of value?

You can say I'm coping but if the real cost of generating such answers is very expensive and exceeds human costs, I don't think it's viable.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by Tensor

.

Would love to hear from more experienced folks serving in product and service sectors what they think about this

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Very interesting. I really hope you notice of Samurai’s comment of what is lacking in your analysis and prediction, the customer view.

I would like to expand on that a bit. Technology development never happens in a vacuum. It is part of a much larger ecosystem, our whole society, globally. Yours is a prediction based on expected technological advancement. Which is always an interesting exercise. However, history has shown that it rarely is an accurate way to predict the future.

In the end, technology must serve some (business) purpose. Without oversimplifying your predictions it seems to be mostly about cost/efficiency. Very few businesses are built on just being the cheapest.

I think you need to take into account a number of other elements, all from a global perspective, rather than just from an Indian perspective.

- as per Samurai, the customer perspective
- what market can be addressed, what size, who are or will be the players doing what
- legislation (current and to be)
- political interference (usually leading to legislation
- general sentiment in markets to AI from the public at large.

Personally, my experience with AI has been on various applications in the Telecom space. We use(d) AI/ML extensively in managing (mobile) networks. Although cost/efficiency was a factor, we mostly focused on features that would be able to bring extra value for our customers. So increasing uptime of the network. It’s much more interesting selling high value than low cost stuff.

Also, AI let us do stuff that is simply beyond the capabilities of humans. Again, that would be a value, rather than a cost related approach.

I have said it before, I think India needs to move away from being and producing low cost services/products and focus more on value.

Jeroen

[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

I don't think you understand the implications and effects of what you're saying. Reducing 40% of workforce in an industry of a country like India where the service industry is one of the top employers with relatively higher wages will cause massive economic downturn. I'm making up numbers but I'm guessing atleast 20% of income tax would be collected from individuals working in the service industry. It would affect so many industries not limited to real estate, consumer goods and even the food and beverage industry.

...

Let me ask one more thing. How much is this thing going to cost? It won't be cheap for long right? All these are introductory prices right? How is it going to be priced in the future since every answer generated produces varying degree of value?

You can say I'm coping but if the real cost of generating such answers is very expensive and exceeds human costs, I don't think it's viable.

40% reduction in workforce in a sector is not unheard of. This is what happens when bubbles burst and massive recessions kick-in. Having said that, I do not believe that we are at such a dooms-day scenario yet. If AI evolves as good as what I believe, this will lead to a massive transformation in how we operate as humanity. Just like the internet of 2000s - there will be a host lot of new business and jobs that we cannot imagine at this point. Technology has been a net job creator over last 3 decades and will continue to be in the long term future as well.

On the commercial viability aspect of AI, human/labor is one of the biggest costs tech organizations are struggling with today. Covid led to high salaries all around and there are layoffs left, right center because of this over-hiring and overpaying. On the other hand, the beauty with tech is that the cost almost always goes down with time. And this will be the case with AI models and hardware as well. Infact, I have had so many people come up to me and express surprise on how cheap these pioneer models are for the right use-case.

I also like to think of it this way. The current automotive eco-system would not have been able to build cars and vehicles at scale if humans were still handmaking it. The industrial revolution and factory automation brought in an unheard level of productivity and quality to manufacturing output. Despite all this automation, we still have millions of folks employed in the auto sector. The same is going to happen in software sector with the advent of AI agents.

[PreludeSH]

Similar to software, are there any such tools for hardware ? Something that knows about every kind of hardware chip that is available, data sheets etc and can come up with a PCB design meeting the requirements ?

Talking about TCS reducing its staff, why would you need a company like TCS for services if companies can solve such issues themselves using AI ? Or even more very less number of such companies themselves are needed.

[Tensor]

Originally Posted by Turbohead

I don't think you understand the implications and effects of what you're saying. Reducing 40% of workforce.

Well it’s already happening in your IT industry just see the hiring scenario in your own company or among your peers, try switching to a different company with higher package like the past few years, Many people working are periodically being weeded out from the company (or I must say forced resignation and not outright firing that’s why there’s lesser news coverage) all these are ground realities currently in IT sector and not some imagination of the future(be it service or product)

Coming to service specific data:
TCS has slowed down its hiring for the first time they did not even slow down 2008 during the financial crisis or Covid.

Originally Posted by Turbohead

One of the videos shared above is about o1 trying to solve a physics problem which suggests that LLMs will affect not just IT/ software development but many complex professions.

Yes not just IT, o1 is steamrolling doctors, lawyers essentially every white collar job which involves cognitive abilities.
Here’s the data to back it :





But guess what IT employees are the lowest hanging fruits to get reduced,No Government will let AI to replace Doctors be it partially or completely in the next 5 years or lawyers in court.

But Hey in our country there is no labour laws forget a law to protect IT jobs, employees often end up working 10 hours on an average per day.

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Which also makes me think, if everyone is a superhero then no one is a superhero. Wouldn't the competition rise heavily to provide services and experiences that is better than the competition and what is already generated by LLMs? So will the number of jobs really reduce?

Exactly correct, building software now is the easiest a fresh graduate with SOTA LLM can be at par with any mid level IT employee right now. You observed a perfect pattern if everyone can build software then the inherent use of software engineers as a whole plummets and value of them reduces hence lower pay and longer working hours.

Originally Posted by Turbohead

Let me ask one more thing. How much is this thing going to cost? It won't be cheap for long right? All these are introductory prices right? How is it going to be priced in the future since every answer generated produces varying degree of value?
You can say I'm coping but if the real cost of generating such answers is very expensive and exceeds human costs, I don't think it's viable.

It’s not like car manufacturers where they have introductory pricing and jack up with time in tech it doesn’t work like that it’s the complete opposite take any tech product it always has become more cheaper and better as time progressed.

Again I can’t keep answering to these questions please refer to my post here I have explained in detail how efficiency increases with scale and the current state of chips running the LLM even if you don’t agree with my timeline it’s worth a read.

https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shift...ml#post5841641 (Is the golden era of the software engineer over?)

Also by being an IT professional I assume you must be very well informed on how fab designs get smaller with lesser power draw and more performance per watt.

Originally Posted by Jeroen

In the end, technology must serve some (business) purpose. Without oversimplifying your predictions it seems to be mostly about cost/efficiency. Very few businesses are built on just being the cheapest.

It’s not just cost reduction it’s a small part the main thing is the accuracy, use sonnet and you’ll quickly realise how shockingly accurate it gets your query and does your task its rate of error is way less than most people think (most people in Indian tech space used gpt3.5 a year ago and thought its bad and won’t improve further) and it’s now for free just see where things go in the next 20 months.

[Tensor]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

Similar to software, are there any such tools for hardware ? Something that knows about every kind of hardware chip that is available, data sheets etc and can come up with a PCB design meeting the requirements ?

Talking about TCS reducing its staff, why would you need a company like TCS for services if companies can solve such issues themselves using AI ? Or even more very less number of such companies themselves are needed.

Yep already businesses have started to ditch SaaS companies who used to sell software apparently it’s cheaper and better to build in house software as per need instead of out sourcing and having to pay recurring costs. Now it’s just the start expect more businesses to join this trend of in house software development

And coming to your initial question:
Yes, although I’m not very knowledgeable in hardware space but do checkout
NexusAI from Altium , PADS from Siemens, Ansys also has some tool.