Comment by DebtDeflation

19 days ago

The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?

It seems to me to be coming from the CEO echo chamber (the rumored group chats we keep hearing about). The only way to keep the stock price increasing in these low growth high interest rate times is to cut costs every quarter. The single largest cost is employee salaries. So we have to shed a larger and larger percentage of the workforce and the only way to do that is to replace them with AI. It doesn't matter whether the AI is capable enough to actually replace the workers, it has to replace them because the stock price demands it.

We all know this will eventually end in tears.

Yep. I heard someone at Microsoft venting about management constantly pleading with them to use AI so that they could tell investors their employees love AI, while senior (7+ year) team members were being “randomly” fired.

> the only way to do that is to replace them with AI

I guess money-wise it kind of makes sense when you're outsourcing the LLM inference. But for companies like Microsoft, where they aren't outsourcing it, and have to actually pay the cost of hosting the infrastructure, I wonder if the calculation still make sense. Since they're doing this huge push, I guess someone somewhere said it does make sense, but looking at the infrastructure OpenAI and others are having to build (like Stargate or whatever it's called), I wonder how realistic it is.

> The question is who is setting these OKRs/Metrics for management and why?

Masters of the Universe, because they think they will become more rich or at least more masterful.