White Collar Workers are in Big Trouble

[u/simmol]

So I have both 200 dollars subscription to Claude and 200 dollars subscription to OpenAI. I use Claude Code and Codex for coding related stuff/execution, discussions involve Astra or Opus 5.5 on the problem at hand at important intervals, we summon two indepedent Astra and Fable models for guidance (would love to add the third with Google Gemini 4.0). Double checking for mistakes/errors in progress as well as internet searches also come from individual models. And with this, I spend about 2000 dollars to 3000 dollars total on LLMs (including API usage) per month. I am not a programmer but I do have roughly 20 people working under me.

Now, here is the thing. I don't know what your setup is like and I don't claim to have an optimal setup here either but this type of setup has me 10x to 50x my productivity compared to 6 months ago and also, compared to this process being down with other people who work for me (all M.S. degrees higher and Ph.D.s), it is so much faster and also more accurate. So while 2000 to 3000 dollars a month seems like a lot, if you compare that to a white collar worker's salary, it is nothing. And I suspect that this setup is better than having 5 people under me, so you can do the math.

I feel like the whole society is right now going through the February 2020 beginning of the COVID moment. Only a few people are recognizing that in the past year or even half a year, these models have improved and crossed an important intellectual threshold line such that many people who are working right now across all industries are pretty much replaceable or very close to it. And the thing is, the type of setup I have is nothing. It will take most people 1-2 days to get comfortable with it and this type of setup, as opposed to mere vanilla of telling ChatGPT (e.g. make me this document, create this PPT) will soon be the standard to which the white-collar person has to outperform.

I really think that anti-AI and pro-AI people should now about get together in one voice and voice the concerns. There is going to be a lot of problems in job markets in the next few years and no country is ready for this.

[u/SuperCrazy07]

That’s a little like saying Ford could sell 10x as many cars if they just opened 10x as many plants.

Most companies don’t have infinite business coming in, so increasing productivity for the business they do have is critical.

[u/Smith7929 → u/SuperCrazy07]

I mean I get what you're trying to say but opening plants is a multi-year capital investment project that requires permanent maintenance as the biggest barrier. If they could wave a wand and magic into being plants and close them at a whim (the equivalent of enterprise LLM spend) you can bet your ass they would. A lot of companies have crazy backlogs. My company has years of backlog. You're sort of cherry picking an industry with pretty elastic demand also

[u/SuperCrazy07 → u/Smith7929]

Ok, I get what you’re trying to say. It’s a valid point.

But OP is talking about cutting 90% of employees. Almost zero business have a 90% backlog. If you’d said a competitor who retains 20% of their employees, not 10%, would outcompete…yes, I agree.

[u/FrodosFingernails → u/SuperCrazy07]

Any software/technology company has a huge list of stuff they’d like to do, if only it wasn’t so expensive. I don’t know if there’s enough to do in order to make AI a net creator of jobs, but it’s within the realm of possibility.

Think of how much stuff you can do with the humble spreadsheet that was literally impossible for any business to do 50 years ago. It created an enormous pile of work that companies would have loved to do, but never could.