I’m surprised, hacker news is not questioning this in the slightest?
Is anyone really buying they laid off 4k people _because_ they really thought they’d replace them with an LLM agent? The article is suspect at best and this doesn’t even in the slightest align with my experience with LLMs at work (it’s created more work for me).
The layoff always smelled like it was because of the economy.
Hmm, actually lines up for me at least. It was a pretty big news item a few months ago when Salesforce did this drastic reduction in their Customer Service department, and Marc Benioff raved about how great AI was (you might have just missed it):
I’m beginning to doubt very much that will happen. AI/LLMs are already based on 99% of all accessible text in the world (I made that stat up, but I think I’m not far off). Where will the additional intelligence come from that SalesForce needs for the long tail, the nuance, and the tough cases? AI is good at what it’s already good at - I predict we won’t see another order of magnitude improvement with all the current approaches.
I mean, this might be a case where it’s actually sort of credible. It was a _very_ deep cut (basically half the workforce), the salesforce guy is a particularly over-the-top ai true believer, and if they are now reversing course and re-hiring, well, nothing has happened to the economy in the last couple months that would suggest that, if it was related to the economy. If anything, things are looking even more uncertain/ominous.
weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do. Unless you're of course, willing to YOLO the entire company on output you haven't actually checked yourself.
for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.
one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
>weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.
When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.
I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.
p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
Genies, maybe? They are omnipotent and (generally) sufficiently aware of your desires that they shouldn't actually get "confused". Genies are tricksters that will do their absolute best to fulfill the letter of your wish but not the meaning.
Right, but you have to do a lot of work, and really most of your work is in this area. Less on the actual building stuff.
Figuring out what to build is 80% of the work, building it is maybe 20%. The 20% has never been the bottleneck. We make a lot of software, and most of it is not optimal and requires years if not decades of tweaking to meet the true requirements.
> In reality, even an ASI won’t know your intent unless you communicate it clearly and unambiguously.
I recently came to this realization as well, and it now seems so obvious. I feel dumb for not realizing it sooner. Is there any good writing or podcast on this topic?
Not really a bar raise - many people have assumed that "AGI" would mean essentially omnipotent/omniscient AI since the concept of the technological singularity came into being. Read Kurzweil or Rudy Rucker, there's a reason this sort of thing used to be called the "rapture for nerds."
If anything I've noticed the bar being lowered by the pro-AI set, except for humans, because the prevailing belief is that LLMs must already be AGI but any limitations are dismissed as also being human limitations, and therefore evidence that LLMs are already human equivalent in any way that matters.
And instead of the singularity we have Roko's Basilisk.
>you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.
It is very untrue in my experience.
Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.
> even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do
no no no you don't get it, you would have ANOTHER AI for that
Move fast and break things. When a black box can be blamed, why care about quality? What we need is EXTREMELY strict liability on harms done by AIs and other black box processes. If a company adopts a black box, that should be considered reckless behavior until proven otherwise. Taking humans out of the loop is a conscious decision they make therefore they should be fully responsible for any mistakes or harms that result.
fair. I used to think that too, but I find at least for golang, the sota models write tests way faster than I would be able to. tdd is actually really possible with ai imo. except of course you get the scaffolding implementation (I haven't figured out a way to get models to write tests in a way that ensures the tests actually do something useful without an implementation).
Your final sentence is interesting. I'm not a strict doctrine adherent, but in TDD, don't you write some minimal test, then implement the system to pass the test?
yes, but I find it hard to constrain it to a minimal implementation. what usually happens is it writes some tests, then an implementation, and then according to the thinking, makes some modification. it works with a relatively precise prompt, but starts to go a bit off the rails when you say things in broad terms ("write tests to ensure concurrency works, and the implementation to ensure said tests are correct")
It's not even about humans "needing" to be in the loop, but that humans "want" to be in the loop. AI is like a genius employee who has no ego and no desire to rise up the ranks, forever a peon while more willful colleagues surpass them in the hierarchy.
Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.
Humans need to be in the loop for the same reason other humans peer review humans pull requests: we all fuck up. And AI makes just as many mistakes as humans do. They just do so significantly quicker.
It is impossible to verify anything in this article. For example "In recent internal discussions and public remarks". Where are these public remarks? How did this author get access to internal discussions? I rate this article as clickbait nonsense.
It does seem like Salesforce relies on Agentforce and therefore doesn't need as much support stuff. But the pressure was also to “reduce heads”, which is a bit of a tone-deaf way to describe firing thousands of people.
What is this site? maarthandam.com? Is it a blog? An AI generated “newspaper”? An internet Newspaper? The menu doesn’t work on mobile, no articles appear to have a by-line, and there’s no link to outside sources to indicate the provenance of these quotes.
For an AI agent to do a good job at customer support, you would need to
1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)
2. Build good enough search to find those things
3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts
4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)
5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
> declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting
LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.
When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
A big chunk of it is like an enterprisey, old TwentyCRM. It connects with everything, and nobody got fired for choosing salesforce. And the decision makers all play golf together.
The most stupid narrative ever. If AI is so good for productivity, why don't you use it to make your 4000 workers produce even more than other companies? Why you need to fire them, so now you have hands tied to your back, and go back to produce the same amount of software? It is completely obvious that the goal is to fire workers, not to get AI stuff done.
Salesforce is B2B and a complex software. I wouldn’t expected them to layoff that much support. Surprising. They should be empowering their support staff with AI tools to improve customer experiences.
Though I’m a bit surprised they have that much support staff.
Executive compensation is justified by "...enormous impact leadership decisions have on company outcomes..." yet when those decisions blow up spectacularly, the accountability somehow evaporates.
If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?
Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
We all know the answer. There is no actual defense of inflated CEO salaries. It’s just the people in power maintaining their power and always has been.
In this case I think it came from the very top down — Benioff has been very bullish on AI and they’ve pretty much re-branded behind their Agent Force offerings.
Also probably a part of their go-to-market strategy. If they can prove it internally they can sell it externally.
every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.
I wanted to express similar sentiment, but I didn't understand how I would without leaving a rule breaking comment.
It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt.
I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc.
I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream.
I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.
While someone does have to be the first to experiment I think you've implied a bit of a false dichotomy here. Experimentation can be good for sure, but it also doesn't have to involve such extremes. Sucks for the people left who now have to make up for the fact that someone's experiment didn't work out so well.
I think that as an employee it’s good to have a clear failure case study to point to from a large and credible organisation that this idea your boss has to fire everyone and just LLM everything isn’t going to work the way you expect it to.
The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.
I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.
Makes no sense - why would Salesforce's customers care if the company is using AI or not, other than when it impacts them (the customer) such as worse customer service.
This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.
If you consider the extent to which our economy has become financialized, then you see these decisions have little to do with providing a product for customers but rather a stock for investors.
they contribute very little except of course that without jobs their products have created 14.8647% of US population would starve to death. HN seems like a perfect place where people upvote stupid shit like some of the most successful companies in the history of mankind contributing nothing to society. bravo!! :)
And when they can't undo their mistake will they accept the consequences, or will they cry to the government that there are no workers available to do the jobs so national policy must be modified to give Salesforce an even larger firehose of candidates to ignore? Companies complain endlessly that there isn't a huge stable of unicorns for them pick and choose from but those 4000 experienced staff were known good workers and they dumped them anyway to chase fantasies. Salesforce will demand the government fix their mistake for them. The larger the company, the more they expect to never have to pay for their mistakes.
Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
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Yes this reads like vacuous AI slop and and the **randomly bolded** text everywhere is a **dead giveaway**. At this point it's becoming a stronger signal than em-dashes.
He also uses cultural revolution tactics and uses the young ones against the old. I imagine AI house of cards will collapse soon and he'll be remembered as the person who enshittified Windows after the board fires him.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately, reflecting a growing recognition that AI performance in controlled demonstrations did not translate cleanly into real-world customer environments
Yeah I can't see a source for the internal admissions of regret.
If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.
I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
Competent management would have implemented a trial run to evaluate the feasibility of the plan. These sociopaths ensured their own failure by lunging for the prize without realizing they stepped off a cliff.
I’m surprised, hacker news is not questioning this in the slightest?
Is anyone really buying they laid off 4k people _because_ they really thought they’d replace them with an LLM agent? The article is suspect at best and this doesn’t even in the slightest align with my experience with LLMs at work (it’s created more work for me).
The layoff always smelled like it was because of the economy.
The article also reads like it was written with a chatbot.
I checked and this appears to be the source.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...
It isn't regret, they are trying to sell their Agentforce product.
Dogfooding hype!
Hmm, actually lines up for me at least. It was a pretty big news item a few months ago when Salesforce did this drastic reduction in their Customer Service department, and Marc Benioff raved about how great AI was (you might have just missed it):
At the time, it was such a big deal to a lot of us because it was a signal what could eventually happen to the rest of us white collar workers.Of course, it could still happen, as maybe AI systems just need another few years to mature before trying to fully replace jobs like this...
... although, one thing I agree with you is that there isn't much info online on these quotes from Salesforce executives, so could be made up.
I’m beginning to doubt very much that will happen. AI/LLMs are already based on 99% of all accessible text in the world (I made that stat up, but I think I’m not far off). Where will the additional intelligence come from that SalesForce needs for the long tail, the nuance, and the tough cases? AI is good at what it’s already good at - I predict we won’t see another order of magnitude improvement with all the current approaches.
I mean, this might be a case where it’s actually sort of credible. It was a _very_ deep cut (basically half the workforce), the salesforce guy is a particularly over-the-top ai true believer, and if they are now reversing course and re-hiring, well, nothing has happened to the economy in the last couple months that would suggest that, if it was related to the economy. If anything, things are looking even more uncertain/ominous.
weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do. Unless you're of course, willing to YOLO the entire company on output you haven't actually checked yourself.
for that reason alone humans will always need to be in the loop. of course you can debate how many people you need to the above activity, but given that AI isn't omniscient, nor omnipotent I expect that number to be quite high for the foreseeable future.
one example - I've been vibe coding some stuff, and even though a pretty comprehensive set of tests are passing, I still end up reading all of the code. if I'm being honest some of the decisions the AI makes are a bit opaque to me so I end up spending a bunch of time asking it why (of course there's no real ego there, but bare with me...), re-reading the code, thinking about whether that actually makes sense. I personally prefer this activity/mode since the tests pass (which were written by the AI too), and I know anything I manually change can be tested, but it's not something I could just submit to prod right away. this is just a MVP. I can't imagine delegating if real money/customers were on the line without even more scrutiny.
>weird - even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
one would hope that one ability of an 'omniscient and omnipotent' AI would be greater understanding.
When speaking of the divine (the only typical example of the omniscient and omnipotent that comes to mind) we never consider what happens when God (or whoever) misunderstands our intent -- we just rely on the fact that an All-Being type thing would just know.
I think the understanding of minute intent is one such trait an omniscient and omnipotent system must have.
p.s. what a bar raise -- we used to just be happy with AGI!
Genies, maybe? They are omnipotent and (generally) sufficiently aware of your desires that they shouldn't actually get "confused". Genies are tricksters that will do their absolute best to fulfill the letter of your wish but not the meaning.
That’s because gods are a mythical/supernatural invention. No technology can ever really be omniscient or omnipotent. It will always have limitations.
In reality, even an ASI won’t know your intent unless you communicate it clearly and unambiguously.
The communication I get from customers is seldom clear and never unambiguous but I’ve managed since the 90’s
Right, but you have to do a lot of work, and really most of your work is in this area. Less on the actual building stuff.
Figuring out what to build is 80% of the work, building it is maybe 20%. The 20% has never been the bottleneck. We make a lot of software, and most of it is not optimal and requires years if not decades of tweaking to meet the true requirements.
> In reality, even an ASI won’t know your intent unless you communicate it clearly and unambiguously.
I recently came to this realization as well, and it now seems so obvious. I feel dumb for not realizing it sooner. Is there any good writing or podcast on this topic?
Not really a bar raise - many people have assumed that "AGI" would mean essentially omnipotent/omniscient AI since the concept of the technological singularity came into being. Read Kurzweil or Rudy Rucker, there's a reason this sort of thing used to be called the "rapture for nerds."
If anything I've noticed the bar being lowered by the pro-AI set, except for humans, because the prevailing belief is that LLMs must already be AGI but any limitations are dismissed as also being human limitations, and therefore evidence that LLMs are already human equivalent in any way that matters.
And instead of the singularity we have Roko's Basilisk.
>you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do.
this sort of assumes that most humans actually know what they want to do.
It is very untrue in my experience.
Its like most complaints I hear about AI art. yes, it is generic and bland. just like 90% of what human artists produce.
> even if AI was literally omnipotent and omniscient, you would still be bottlenecked on human's ability to actually evaluate and verify what it is doing and reconciling that with what you wanted it to do
no no no you don't get it, you would have ANOTHER AI for that
You're being sarcastic but if I "LLM as judge" one more time, I might jump off a bridge.
Also, it does appear that there are companies willing to YOLO themselves off a cliff with AI
Move fast and break things. When a black box can be blamed, why care about quality? What we need is EXTREMELY strict liability on harms done by AIs and other black box processes. If a company adopts a black box, that should be considered reckless behavior until proven otherwise. Taking humans out of the loop is a conscious decision they make therefore they should be fully responsible for any mistakes or harms that result.
Shhhhh that’s a primary unspoken feature - lack of responsibility
I've always found it much quicker to just... do the work myself. AI slows me down more than anything.
fair. I used to think that too, but I find at least for golang, the sota models write tests way faster than I would be able to. tdd is actually really possible with ai imo. except of course you get the scaffolding implementation (I haven't figured out a way to get models to write tests in a way that ensures the tests actually do something useful without an implementation).
Your final sentence is interesting. I'm not a strict doctrine adherent, but in TDD, don't you write some minimal test, then implement the system to pass the test?
yes, but I find it hard to constrain it to a minimal implementation. what usually happens is it writes some tests, then an implementation, and then according to the thinking, makes some modification. it works with a relatively precise prompt, but starts to go a bit off the rails when you say things in broad terms ("write tests to ensure concurrency works, and the implementation to ensure said tests are correct")
It's not even about humans "needing" to be in the loop, but that humans "want" to be in the loop. AI is like a genius employee who has no ego and no desire to rise up the ranks, forever a peon while more willful colleagues surpass them in the hierarchy.
Until AI gets ego and will of its own (probably the end of humanity) it will simply be a tool, regardless of how intelligent and capable it is.
Humans need to be in the loop for the same reason other humans peer review humans pull requests: we all fuck up. And AI makes just as many mistakes as humans do. They just do so significantly quicker.
This is the opposite of both what the article is saying, and reality
Yes, "Mecha-hitler" has no aspirations. /s
It is impossible to verify anything in this article. For example "In recent internal discussions and public remarks". Where are these public remarks? How did this author get access to internal discussions? I rate this article as clickbait nonsense.
Seems based off CNBC's more informative article: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/02/salesforce-ceo-confirms-4000...
It does seem like Salesforce relies on Agentforce and therefore doesn't need as much support stuff. But the pressure was also to “reduce heads”, which is a bit of a tone-deaf way to describe firing thousands of people.
What is this site? maarthandam.com? Is it a blog? An AI generated “newspaper”? An internet Newspaper? The menu doesn’t work on mobile, no articles appear to have a by-line, and there’s no link to outside sources to indicate the provenance of these quotes.
one shotted vibe coded blog
Regrets that the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out, not that they fired anyone.
For an AI agent to do a good job at customer support, you would need to
1. literally document everything in the product and keep documentation up to date (could be partially automated?)
2. Build good enough search to find those things
3. Be able to troubleshoot / reason / abstract beyond those facts
4. Handle customer information that goes against the assumptions in the core set of facts (ie customers find bugs or don’t understand fundamental concepts about computers)
5. Be prepared to restart the entire conversation when the customer gets frustrated with 1-4 (this is very annoying)
> declining service quality, higher complaint volumes, and internal firefighting
LLMs are a great technology for making up plausible looking text. When correctness matters, and you don't have a second system that can reliably check it, the output turns out to be unreliable.
When you're dealing with customer support, everyone involved has already been failed by the regular system. So they're an exception, and they're unhappy. So you really don't want to inflict a second mistake on them.
I bounced out of this article pretty quick after seeing it was generated by AI.
The senior leadership are accountable here. I assume none of them held themselves to task.
“Mistakes were made.”
Public company logic:
Firing people = smart cost cutting
Hiring people = strong vote of confidence in continued growth
Ahem did you mean "rightsizing" and "rapid growth"?
This reads like a polished newspaper article, but I've never heard of this website before and there are no links.
A search found an similar article from Times of India which credits The Information, there's no good way for non-subscribers to search it.
Probably the first time I'm saying this, but this site appears heavily AI written.
Sauce https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/aft...
The Information article can be found on archive.is.
Both the OP article and this Times of India article appear to be AI-generated summaries of the original article.
Craziness!
This site have zero reputation.
Thanks. Link should be changed to this.
Edit: oh wait, this article isn't the source either. It references an article by "The Information", which I assume is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-executive... There's also this follow-up: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-de...
It's paywalled, so I can't verify.
I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?
They make hideously complicated software to help businesses manage their business. You need consultants to help integrate it and to make any changes to it. The interfaces are convoluted and require learning how they work rather than having any kind of discoverability. Switching to their systems often involves a dip in customer satisfaction. Switching off of their systems is nearly impossible by design.
Sounds like SAP
A big chunk of it is like an enterprisey, old TwentyCRM. It connects with everything, and nobody got fired for choosing salesforce. And the decision makers all play golf together.
We use it as basically a customer-facing bug tracker, except it's absolute garbage even compared to stuff like Jira.
The most stupid narrative ever. If AI is so good for productivity, why don't you use it to make your 4000 workers produce even more than other companies? Why you need to fire them, so now you have hands tied to your back, and go back to produce the same amount of software? It is completely obvious that the goal is to fire workers, not to get AI stuff done.
> If AI is so good for productivity, why don't you use it to make your 4000 workers produce even more than other companies?
Because they don't have 4000+ workers worth of work to do?
Salesforce is B2B and a complex software. I wouldn’t expected them to layoff that much support. Surprising. They should be empowering their support staff with AI tools to improve customer experiences.
Though I’m a bit surprised they have that much support staff.
Customer experience is secondary to making the C-suite more money.
Executive compensation is justified by "...enormous impact leadership decisions have on company outcomes..." yet when those decisions blow up spectacularly, the accountability somehow evaporates.
If your pay is 400 times average employee salary because of your unique strategic vision, surely firing 4000 people based on faulty assumptions should come with proportional consequences?
Or does the high risk, high reward, philosophy only apply to the reward part?
We all know the answer. There is no actual defense of inflated CEO salaries. It’s just the people in power maintaining their power and always has been.
Some real leadership in contrast: https://www.wsj.com/business/fibrebond-eaton-bonus-walker-30...
I’d love my old job back at this point. I genuinely miss working with such talented colleagues.
But have they hired anyone back?
Why would they, “AI” will be much better in 6 months!
> the company overestimated AI’s readiness for real-world deployment
The root problem is they /estimated/.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
... and /assumed/.
Testing? Field trials? Phased deployment?
No, someone just wanted their bonus for being forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting, opex cutters. I'm sure they got it.
In this case I think it came from the very top down — Benioff has been very bullish on AI and they’ve pretty much re-branded behind their Agent Force offerings.
Also probably a part of their go-to-market strategy. If they can prove it internally they can sell it externally.
And there will be no consequences for those who made these decisions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639532
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42639791
Perhaps.
Unless people wise up to the fact what's destroying jobs here isn't "Artificial Intelligence".
It is simply natural stupidity.
every single HN comment on these articles makes me doubt both the sentience of my fellow nerds and whether there are any actual human users of this website remaining.
I wanted to express similar sentiment, but I didn't understand how I would without leaving a rule breaking comment.
It's my sincerely held opinion that we're fostering a culture here that ignores the "human impact" of the technology that we're rushing to adopt.
I'm well aware that many members of this community have achieved "success" through software. This includes the rapid adoption of new computing paradigms, new technology stacks, new frameworks, etc.
I am fortunate to be employed. But around me, when I step out of my house, it's painful. People are hurting. They're unemployed. They're depressed. And the younger generation is even worse. They can't even afford to dream.
I live in a corporate world of forced smiles and fake enthusiasm. I would hate for that same culture to take root here. We need to be able to express significant doubt, or even cynicism against AI, without fear of backlash.
Somebody has to be the brave experimenter that tries the new thing. I'm just glad it was these folk. Since they make no tangible product and contribute nothing to society, they were perhaps the optimal choice to undergo these first catastrophic failed attempts at AI business.
While someone does have to be the first to experiment I think you've implied a bit of a false dichotomy here. Experimentation can be good for sure, but it also doesn't have to involve such extremes. Sucks for the people left who now have to make up for the fact that someone's experiment didn't work out so well.
I think the OP was being sarcastic there...
There's always someone that reads it and replies with a straight face.
I think that as an employee it’s good to have a clear failure case study to point to from a large and credible organisation that this idea your boss has to fire everyone and just LLM everything isn’t going to work the way you expect it to.
The more examples of this going badly we can get together the better.
I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.
Makes no sense - why would Salesforce's customers care if the company is using AI or not, other than when it impacts them (the customer) such as worse customer service.
This just seems a poor decision made by C-suite folk who were neither AI-savvy enough to understand the limits of the tech, nor smart enough to run a meaningful trial to evaluate it. A failure of wishful thinking over rational evaluation.
If you consider the extent to which our economy has become financialized, then you see these decisions have little to do with providing a product for customers but rather a stock for investors.
The product is the press release.
I figured the messaging is target more at investors than customers
I need to talk to Jim, where is Jim?
It was signaling to Wall Street and the rest of the tech industry. They want to be seen as profit focused and innovation driven.
they contribute very little except of course that without jobs their products have created 14.8647% of US population would starve to death. HN seems like a perfect place where people upvote stupid shit like some of the most successful companies in the history of mankind contributing nothing to society. bravo!! :)
Boom, roasted.
Agree on broad strokes, but slack is a useful product.
They didn't create Slack, they just bought it.
Sure. However, the hiccup that salesforce faces will affect slack usage.
Salesforce the crm not slack
Most disastrous non intuitive UI ever seen...
ever tried teams?
Teams is confusing but Slack is gaslighting...
What swe would want to work there after reading this.
Maybe where AI needs to take over is at the CEO level.
And when they can't undo their mistake will they accept the consequences, or will they cry to the government that there are no workers available to do the jobs so national policy must be modified to give Salesforce an even larger firehose of candidates to ignore? Companies complain endlessly that there isn't a huge stable of unicorns for them pick and choose from but those 4000 experienced staff were known good workers and they dumped them anyway to chase fantasies. Salesforce will demand the government fix their mistake for them. The larger the company, the more they expect to never have to pay for their mistakes.
maarthandam.com is a weird website. Recent posts:
Looks like a clickbait farm of some sort?Is it just me or anyone else see that this article has no real references to its claims and the articles look like AI slop.
Yes this reads like vacuous AI slop and and the **randomly bolded** text everywhere is a **dead giveaway**. At this point it's becoming a stronger signal than em-dashes.
So Salesforce is ahead of Microsoft in wisdom. Nadella is focusing on his grand visions again and is telling dissenters to leave:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
He also uses cultural revolution tactics and uses the young ones against the old. I imagine AI house of cards will collapse soon and he'll be remembered as the person who enshittified Windows after the board fires him.
> “We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately, reflecting a growing recognition that AI performance in controlled demonstrations did not translate cleanly into real-world customer environments
stop. reading. evals.
what is the source for this? seems like a random blog?
Yeah I can't see a source for the internal admissions of regret.
If we take out the AI part of this and treat it like any other project, if what they admit is true, it represents a massive failure of judgement and implementation.
I can't see anyone admitting that in public, as it would probably end their career, or should do at least. Especially if a company is a "meritocracy"
Competent management would have implemented a trial run to evaluate the feasibility of the plan. These sociopaths ensured their own failure by lunging for the prize without realizing they stepped off a cliff.
This is a misread of Benioff's intent behind his comment lol.
Salesforce has a vested interest in maintaing its seat based licenses, so it's not in favor of mass layoffs.
Internally Salesforce is pushing AgentForce full stop