If you need a clean break from the news that Amazon laid off 16,000 workers, Block cut nearly half of its workforce, Atlassian laid off 10% of its employees, and Meta is reportedly considering yet another massive round of layoffs, all in the name of AI, then we invite you to browse the responses to a recent post on Xman Alt.
Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, shared this on Tuesday:
“I have so much gratitude for the people who wrote extremely complex software individually. It’s already hard to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.”
The problem with this sweet sentiment is that Altman’s company launched the AI that is now being used as an excuse to lay off programmers and cut jobs for young programmers. And he did it by training in massive amounts of code written the old-fashioned way — by the very people he now pleases.
His post implies that the really hard to master developer task is now like a rotary phone: obsolete and redundant.
Naturally, Altman’s comments drew more memes and responses than his post. While some were straight angry(“You’re welcome. Glad to know our reward is getting our jobs taken away”), much of the internet did what it always does: jokes.
There are thousands of comments. Some of our favorites:
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“Sam’s eulogy for software engineers”
“It’s moments like these that I really miss the Sam Altman parody account”
“Dear Developers You will lose your jobs forever and forced to work in the coal mines But you can rest easy knowing that Sam Altman is grateful. ❤️ 🙏”
“Billion dollar app idea: AI that reads billionaires’ tweets before they post and says “this is going to make you sound incredibly irrelevant, are you sure?”
“I am grateful to OpenAI to do all the AI work so I can use free Chinese open source AI models 🙏”
“This reads like something the Mayans would say just before the ceremony began.’
And finally, another reason to pull this meme out:
