We had some marketing folks give us a company-wide demo of Chat GPT and some other Gen AI tools and showed us how cool it is and how quick they can make stylish and sophisticated pitch decks and marketing materials now.

And the entire time I'm watching this I'm just thinking that they don't realize that they are only demonstrating the tools that are going to replace their own jobs. Kinda sad, really. Demand for soft skills and creatives is going to continue to decline.

Dev jobs too.

LLMs are good at creating single use documents, like a pitch deck used for one prospective customer (never to be used again). But for long lived documents, on which future work builds atop, the bar is higher and the value of LLMs is more grey.

And then the customers use gen AI to summarize the same pitch decks/marketing materials so they don't have to look at them. Let's cut out the middle man and just send the prompt instead.

Developers always automate themselves out of a job

but i guess to me the question is: if you're management, do you expect your workers to do more/work faster (like a TAS in a way)? or do you expect to replace your workers entirely?

I personally think we're still a ways from the latter...

I have the opposite expectation actually

In the late 90s you weee considered a prodigy if you understood how to use a search engine. I had so many opportunities simply because I could find and retain information.

So LLMs have solved this. Knowing a framework or being able to create apps is not a marketable skill any longer. What are we supposed to do now?

It’s the soft skills that matter now. Being well liked has always been more important in a job than being the best at it. We all know that engineer who knows they are hot shit but everyone avoids because they are insufferable.

Those marketing people don’t need to spend a week on their deck any longer. They can work the customer relationship now.

Knowing how to iterate with an LLM to give the customer exactly what they need is the valuable skill now.

Those marketing people may also be engaging in small talk about sports teams on the phone with customers, doing sushi and karaoke with customers, procuring coke and hookers for customers... LLMs can't yet do that. Unless the customer is also an LLM of course.

Experienced that too. They're basically forced to give those demos