Recent layoffs blamed on AI are mostly from over-hiring and under-performance, not automation. When everyone uses the same AI models the same way, the output becomes cheap and generic. Real value now comes from taking that commoditized competence and applying it creatively to make something different.
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The AI jobpocalypse is not really a thing. Absolutely, we see companies starting to reorganize, and I think that makes a lot of sense. To be honest, a lot of the reorganization, you can say it's AI, but it's we overhired and the company's not doing as well and all that kind of, it was coming and this is a good excuse. But the mass unemployment thing, I think that some AI CEOs are talking about, that's not going to happen. The pattern that I see so far is that what a new model drop does is they make yesterday's human competence cheap. They ingest all this data of what has happened already and they make it really cheap to deploy that in whatever situation you want. This is a new power that everyone has. So it gets adopted super rapidly and suddenly that stuff is everywhere. Suddenly anyone can make a landing page. There's new landing pages everywhere. Suddenly everyone can write. There's slop tweets everywhere. But what's interesting is because it's all coming from these models and everyone's using basically the same models, it all looks the same if you use it in the most default basic way. And so it becomes commoditized. It's not valuable anymore. And what humans do is we go in there and we're like, yeah, we have all this frozen human competence from yesterday. How do I use this to make something new and interesting?
