AI eliminates 7,800 workers on Labor Day, permanently

"This is not a drill, AI will make people unemployed for real!"

During this Labor Day holiday, the technology giant IBM announced:

It will suspend the employment of jobs that can be replaced by AI. Recruitment, about 7,800 people will be permanently eliminated.

Although the bluffing news that "we are going to be replaced by AI" has appeared for the first time, as foreign media Ars Technica said:

IBM directly "put this issue on the table."

In other words, IBM has fired the first shot of a technology giant using AI to replace human jobs.

Not only IBM, giants such as Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have previously stopped a wave of job recruitment, and have expressed their intention to follow the footsteps of AI.

Even under this wave of generative AI, the "first company to be disrupted" has already appeared -

After a listed Internet company admitted that its business was impacted by ChatGPT, its stock price fell instantly. 50%.

Some netizens lamented: This wave of iPhone moments in the AI ​​world has indeed come, and countless BlackBerrys and Nokia will fall.

AI blasts 7,800 people, saving $2 billion a year

According to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, this slowdown Recruitment will start with "non-customer-facing" positions.

In other words, back-office functional departments such as human resources bear the brunt.

Currently, such positions involve a total of 26,000 active employees, and Arvind Krishna said that 30% of them will be easily replaced by AI and automation in the next five years.

Converting this, that means 7,800 people will be fired by AI.

Who will be fired specifically?

Krishna said it’s positions with more mundane tasks such as providing employment verification letters or transferring employees between departments.

Therefore, the same HR task is to evaluate "higher-order tasks" such as workforce composition and employee productivity (performance), which may not be affected in the next ten years.

Similarly, software development and customer-facing positions will not be affected and will continue to be recruited.

Interestingly, Krishna said: It is easier to recruit talents this year than a year ago.

Currently, IBM has a total of 260,000 employees worldwide, with a total market value of US$113.6 billion (approximately RMB 785 billion).

At the beginning of this year, IBM announced that it would lay off approximately 1.5% of its global workforce, or 3,900 people. But in the first quarter of this year, about 7,000 new employees were actually added.

The latest financial report shows that IBM’s first-quarter revenue was US$14.252 billion, a year-on-year increase of 0.4%; net profit was US$927 million, compared with US$733 million in the same period last year, exceeding expectations.

IBM attributed the reason to "expense management," including the layoffs announced at the beginning of the year.

At the same time, the CFO stated that by the end of 2024, new cost reduction and efficiency improvement measures are expected to save the company US$2 billion (approximately 13.8 billion yuan) per year, which includes "7,800 people Explosion plan."

The higher the education level, the greater the impact of AI.

Not only IBM, many giants have already begun to try to replace human positions with AI.

The first person to start doing this kind of experiment was Microsoft.

Previously, Microsoft News tried to use an AI news gathering system to replace dozens of editors at once.

This AI will evaluate the topics, opinions, and freshness of the news from several angles, and give sorting and editing suggestions. Only a small number of editors can complete the rest of the work.

Under the new wave of ChatGPT, Microsoft began to try the effect of AI sales. If appropriate, the demand for sales positions will also shrink.

Although major companies such as Meta and Amazon have not explicitly stated that they will use AI to replace human positions, they have recently been carrying out "resource transfer" work.

Meta stated as early as March this year that the company would carry out a major AI transformation and use its largest investment in AI; at the same time, 10,000 people and 5,000 jobs would be created during this round of transformation. Was passed.

In addition, Amazon, which laid off nearly 27,000 people some time ago, also recently announced a major business transformation, and will "invest more financial resources and energy into large language models and generative AI." and reduce resources devoted to other areas.

Dropbox, an online storage service company founded by two MIT alumni, also recently faced layoffs of about 500 people. Its CEO stated in an employee letter that "the AI ​​era of computers has arrived."

Not long ago, Goldman Sachs Group’s latest report also stated that as many as 300 million jobs globally may be affected by AI such as ChatGPT, bringing “major chaos” to the labor market.

Under this wave, which positions are most likely to be affected by AI?

The Goldman Sachs report stated that in the United States, office and administrative support work has the highest proportion of tasks that can be automated, reaching 46%; followed by jobs related to the legal industry at 44%; and construction and engineering fields will also have 37% tasks are automated.

Following these three are the fields of life, physical and social sciences, with a proportion of 36%; business and financial services rank in the top five with 35%.

In addition, a study from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University showed that:

Those who are most affected by AI are those who are the most educated, creative and Highest paying jobs.

After being impacted by ChatGPT, the company’s stock price plummeted 50%

Of course, it was severely “washed away” by AI "It's not just workers, but also quite a number of companies.

Just yesterday, Chegg, an 18-year-old online education technology company, suddenly saw its stock plummet 50% after announcing its financial report.

The financial report shows that ChatGPT has had an impact on its business:

We have not seen the obvious impact of ChatGPT at the beginning. Until now, we have to admit that it has Our customer growth rate has had a huge impact.

In essence, Chegg is a bit like the American college student version of the "Homework Help" APP. It is a "college student homework answer finder tool". Has a database containing answers to tens of millions of textbooks and exam questions.

If students want to check the answers to their homework or exams, they will purchase the Chegg Study service and find the answers they want in a few seconds, or Ask the experts on Chegg to help answer your questions online.

Users include many college students from prestigious universities, such as Columbia University, Brown University, New York University, etc.

The emergence of ChatGPT has allowed college students to find a new "magic tool for finding homework answers". Chegg's service is no longer a must-have.

Although Chegg emphasized in its financial report that it was already introducing ChatGPT technology to "save" all this, that is, launching the CheggMate product with AI conversation function, the stock price still leaked all the way.

Some netizens pointed out the problem: Since it is already free, why should we buy a paid chat service?

Some netizens joked that the irony is that companies like Chegg also have a lot of data "nutrients" that can be used to train LLM, because it has a huge database with many standard answers to questions. ：

Judging from this incident, some netizens believe that AI "puts humans out of work" is no longer accurate, but more of "makes humans unemployed" The entire company disappeared overnight”:

However, under the impact of this wave of uproar about AI, some netizens hold different opinions:

This wave of AI will eventually create a huge demand for manpower, and talents are the resources of the future.

This view coincides with the view in Goldman Sachs’ previous unemployment report of 300 million people. The report stated:

Historically, technological progress not only makes some jobs redundant, it also creates new jobs.

What do you think of this wave of AI replacing human jobs?

Reference link:

[1]//m.sbmmt.com/link/d1d6a7eae40b025e869ac0853049efc2

[2]https ://m.sbmmt.com/link/0ebefbe6a3b4e5e0d786c26affc419ad

[3]//m.sbmmt.com/link/cddaa6e1ad5ba4c70c6c05db38099fa0

[ 4]//m.sbmmt.com/link/7364e0bb7f15ebfbc9e12d5b13f51a02

[5]//m.sbmmt.com/link/b2303e95600891090f6519df2b23eb09

[6]https://s21.q4cdn.com/596622263/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/Final-1Q23-Press-Release.pdf

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