Meta Bets on Scale + Apple’s A.I. Struggles + Listeners on Job Automation

25:08It might be a couple hundred people worldwide. Unfortunately for Meta, all of those people are already rich. They can work anywhere they want. They can make whatever they want. These people are writing their own checks. And so I'm not sure that there is a sufficient amount of money you could pay some of these people to give up their jobs and come work for Mark Zuckerberg. The second reason I'm skeptical is that I think that even if Meta does manage to sort of assemble this Avengers super team of AI researchers, I still don't think they have an attractive or coherent AI strategy that is going to motivate these people to work hard there.

25:49If you actually look at what Meta has said so far about what it is doing with all of the AI stuff that it has built, it has basically said two things. One, it wants to make AI companions. The second thing it has announced is that it is going to build weapons for the military, right? This came out of a recent story where Meta is going to partner with Anduril, the sort of military technology company, and they are going to build something like an augmented reality headset for soldiers in the battlefield. That might be a worthy project. It might even be a profitable project, but that is not the kind of thing that top AI researchers want to spend their time working on, at least the ones that I'm talking to.

26:30And I will close my analysis of this situation by reading you a text that I got from a leading AI researcher who I texted this weekend to go ask if they were going to work for the Meta AI Super Intelligence Lab. All right, let's hear it.

26:47LOL, LMAO. So, Casey, I think that tells you about how successful this new recruiting push by Meta is going to be. Yeah, I would be more optimistic about this if this was the first big reorg that Meta was doing in its AI division, but it's not. You know, the big reorg they did in January 2024 was also not the first reorg that they had done in this division. You know, you mentioned a couple of the key ways that Meta has been using AI, and to your point, this is just like not really instigating. inspiring stuff for a lot of those researchers. But more importantly, I don't see a way how to get from here to the there that they are envisioning, which is super intelligent.

27:26So look, this is one of the most interesting stories in tech to me right now for this reason. Mark Zuckerberg is, on many days, the most competitive person in the entire industry, and he's now legitimately behind in a race that he might not be able to afford to lose. So for that reason, Kevin, I think we just want to keep our eyes on this story because I suspect this will not be the last big move that Meta makes as it tries to get back in this game. All right. When we come back, there's another big tech company that is struggling to find its AI future. We'll talk about Apple and what it announced this week at its annual developer conference.

28:18Well, Casey, let's talk about the other big tech news this week, which is also about a large technology company that is on the AI struggle bus. This week was Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC. And unlike last year, when the two of us were invited to Cupertino to take part in the festivities, we were not invited this year. We were. And whenever I get uninvited to something, I think this company's in trouble. Yeah, I don't think it is because we were rude or ate too much food at lunch or smelled bad. I think what's going on here is that Apple is embarrassed about what has happened since last year's WWDC when they announced a bunch of new AI features under their banner of Apple intelligence, and then many of those features did not actually ship.

29:06Yeah, last year they had a story about AI that they were really excited to tell. This year, that was not the case. Yes. So the big thing that people were excited about at last year's WWDC was this new and improved Siri that would not only be able to respond to more complicated questions on your iPhone, but would be able to kind of pull things from all of your apps and your data and your text messages and cross-reference your email with your messages, with your calendar, and sort of do all that seamlessly. Yeah, the classic example was like, hey, you know, send an Uber to go pick up my mom at the airport when her flight gets in.

29:39Right, which is like a very complicated multi-part query that involves communicating with many apps. And we saw that. We're like, oh, yeah, that'd be really cool if that worked. Yes. And that did not work, apparently, because Apple still, a year later, has not shipped that version of Siri. And I still have to pick up my mom from the airport in a regular car, like an animal. It's a disaster. So we were not there. we were not able to grill Apple executives about what the heck was happening with Siri and why it has been so delayed in its new and improved form. But friend of the pod, Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal was invited and she did interview some Apple executives about what was going on with Siri and all these delayed features.

30:17And I want to just play a clip from that because I think it really shows you how defensive they are. In this clip, Joanna is talking to Craig Federighi, who is Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. Let's hear it. So many people associate Apple and AI with Siri since plus 10 years ago now. Sure. And so there is a real expectation that Siri should be as good, if not better, than the competition. I think ultimately it should be. But it's not right now. That's certainly our mission. Yeah, but that's our mission. You know, we set out to tell people last year where we were going. I think people were very excited about Apple's values there, an experience that's integrated into everything you do, not a bolt-on chatbot on the side, something that is personal, something that is private.

31:09We started building some of those and delivering some of those capabilities. I, in a way, appreciate the fact that people really wanted the next version of Siri, and we really want to deliver it for them, but we want to do it the right way. When's the right way going to come along? Well, in this case, we really want to make sure that we have it very much in hand before we start talking about dates for obvious reasons. So, Casey, they have a mission. They have a vision. They have values. What they do not have is a date when any of this will be available. Yeah. So bad news for anybody whose mom is still stuck at the airport.

31:45I shouldn't keep coming back to that joke. But no, that's, you know, look, on some level, it's like, what can they say? they tried to build it. It didn't work. It's better not to ship it and to delay it than to ship something that doesn't work. There has been some great reporting over the past couple of months about what happened inside of Apple that led us to this point. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has done a ton of amazing reporting on this. And the gist is like, there just were not a lot of AI true believers inside of this company. It really kind of rhymes with the story that we just told about Meta.

32:18Apple is working on its own thing. They have an incredible business. The last thing that they want is to be disrupted by some coming wave of AI. And so they just kind of gave it short shrift. AI systems don't work like the systems they know how to build. They know how to build these rigid, deterministic, if this, then that type of systems. Very polished, very predictable. And they do an incredible job at it. But AI isn't like that. It's chaotic. It's messy. It's probabilistic. It doesn't work the same way every time. They've had a lot of trouble wrapping their arms around that. So I want to diagnose more about what is going on with Apple when it comes to AI.

32:58But first, let's talk about what they actually did announce at WWDC. Casey, what were your top highlights from their announcements? Well, Kevin, obviously, we have to talk about liquid glass. Now, I don't know if you've seen the YouTube video of WWDC, where they promoted liquid glass, but the YouTube play button sort of appeared over a couple of the letters, so it looked like Apple had announced liquid ass. So if you're still thinking that that's what they announced, I want to correct that. It's actually called liquid glass. Now, what is liquid glass? Liquid glass is a redesign of the operating system.

33:32And on one hand, I don't want to underrate the significance of a redesign. These devices are used by hundreds of millions, if not more than a billion people. And when you give something a new look, it is kind of a big deal, right? You might have to relearn how certain things work. On the other hand, when that's your marquee announcement after a year of development, when the last year you were like, the AI future is here. And this year you're like, control center is a different color. It really speaks to the kind of difference between the two presentations, Kevin. Yes, it was such a small ball presentation.

34:02I did watch the event from afar. And I gotta say, it was like very strange to watch these Apple executives get on stage and like express like, delirious enthusiasm over adding polls to iMessage. You can now start a poll with your friends in the group chat, which, you know, I got to say, cool feature. I'll probably use it a bunch, mostly as a joke, but that is not the sort of marquee futuristic vision that I was expecting out of Apple this year. No. And because Apple made these new features available to developers basically right away, we've started to get some early feedback about how they work.

34:45And some fair number of people are complaining that this liquid glass look in particular, it kind of just makes everything harder to read, right? The basic idea in here is that all of the operating system elements are like literal glass and they'll sort of, you know, slide over each other. And of course, you know, the presentations were like very beautiful, but then you put it onto your phone and it's like you find yourself squinting a lot. And, you know, I found myself thinking, Kevin, about this old Steve Jobs quote that I like. And, you know, I want to acknowledge it's very hacky and cliche to quote Steve Jobs.

35:19But he has this quote, and it's actually from the New York Times in this interview he did in 2003 about the iPod. And the thing that he said was, essentially, design is not how it looks. Design is how it works. And as I found myself looking at liquid glass, I thought, this is a design that is about how it looks. it is not about how it works. I don't know what this design is supposed to do that it didn't before. All Apple really said was like, everything is more beautiful than ever, you know? But it's still very familiar, but it's more beautiful. And, you know, I don't want to tell people don't make things that are beautiful for their own sake.

35:54I appreciate beauty as much as the next fella. But on the other hand, I thought, this doesn't actually really seem in keeping with the Apple design spirit of the past. Yeah, well, Casey, I want to bring some light to this discussion by quoting another Steve Jobs quote that was sort of lost in the archives where he said, what if we made a phone where everything was transparent and you couldn't see anything? Oh, wow, I missed that one. And so I think the Apple design team really found that and ran with it. So that's liquid glass. Let's talk about some of the other stuff that came out of this. Yeah, what caught your eye?

36:24Yeah, so the place where it seemed like they'd put the most engineering into a feature that might help people just get things done a little bit more efficiently was Spotlight. Spotlight is the feature, if you press Command Space on your MacBook, that brings up a search bar. It's great for finding files. It hasn't evolved much over the years, but around a long time. This year, they were like, well, we're going to start to convert this into a little bit more of what they call a launcher app. We talked about launcher apps on the show before. I love and use one called Raycast. And the basic idea is this could be kind of the command center for your Mac.

37:01So instead of just searching for a file or like, you know, opening Keynote, it's now going to be about actually using it to take some actions, run some shortcuts, that sort of thing. Like what could you do with the new Spotlight that you couldn't do with the old one? What's an example of something they might type in? So, for example, you could like trigger a shortcut. Shortcuts are these like automated routines that you can set up on your Apple devices. So maybe you have one that's like, okay, I'm like, you know, going to bed for the night, like turn off all the lights in my house, and you can just open up Spotlight, run that shortcut and do that without, you know, having to do it some other way.

37:32The main benefit of doing it this way is that it just becomes second nature to hit command space and then do something as opposed to grabbing your mouse, looking for the icon somewhere on a desktop, double clicking, opening it up, right? It's just you're just trying to take a few steps out of it to get things done slightly faster. Now, I'm very conscious as I describe this of like, this does not sound that interesting. I didn't say it. Yeah. And I say that as somebody who loves little productivity hacks and getting stuff done faster on my computer. But that said, it was like, at least in the spirit of the Apple I love, which is like, help me get more stuff done.

38:05Make me a more creative and effective person. Okay. So new spotlight. What else caught your eye? There are a couple of like lightly interesting new features. Like there's live translation. although we're not exactly sure which languages that's going to be available in um something i'm excited about is there's apparently a phone app that's coming to the desktop so you can like start calls from your mac which i think is probably something that i will do a lot they are also yet again rethinking how the ipad works right like how ipad should operate has been a kind of long-standing unresolved question where it's like it looks a lot like a mac but it doesn't work quite like a Mac.

38:41This year, it's starting to feel ever more like a Mac because, Kevin, you can resize the windows on an iPad now. Thank God. Every day for the past 10 years, I have woken up in a cold sweat thinking, when can I resize the windows on my iPad? One feature I'm not particularly excited about is you will now be able to change the backgrounds in your iMessage chats. And, you know, I am in some group chats with some real jokers, and I feel like this could potentially wreak havoc in my group chat. I also saw they're introducing like a typing indicator for group chat. So you can now see the little bubbles that say like this is, you know, someone's typing.

39:19Yeah, you know, you can already see that on a one-on-one chat. For some reason, you couldn't see that in the group chat. So, you know, by now I feel like most of our listeners has been like, one, I can't believe they're still talking about this. And two, how is that everything that Apple announced this year? But I think it's important just to mention for this reason. For the past, call it a decade, I feel like Apple's main priority has been trying to figure out what is a seventh subscription we can sell you on this iPhone, right? And while that was happening, the future was being born across town and they were not paying attention and they haven't really started to pay the price for it.

39:58But you come to the end of this presentation and you can kind of start to see the cracks in the armor of a company that has looked pretty invincible for a long time. Yeah, I watched this presentation and I thought, this is a company that has not yet admitted that it made a bad bet when it came to AI. This is a company that is still not bought into the idea that language models are important or powerful or useful or that they might unlock new ways of interacting with computers. I think you're right that it rhymes with our last segment on Meta because Apple had its own version of Jan LeCun, a sort of senior AI researcher who was brought in to lead the strategy of AI at Apple.

40:46This guy named John Gianandrena, or JG as he's called, was brought in from Google years ago to kind of oversee all of Apple's AI research. And according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, JG did not believe in large language models either. He thought they were sort of a distraction. He was convinced that consumers were turned off by chatbots. He didn't think that Apple should be putting a lot of efforts and investment into developing its own language models. And I think we're really now seeing the fruits of that decision coming out or not coming out, in Apple's case, on stage at WWDC. Yes. Now, here is what I will say in Apple's defense, Kevin.

41:26for everything that we have just said, it is also true that if you were to pick up a Pixel phone, which is the phone made by Google, which has access to all of the much more advanced AI features that Google offers, I still don't think there is one feature on that Pixel phone that would make the average person say, oh, wow, I got to ditch my iPhone for this. The way that Google has figured out AI, I am so excited to ditch, you know, iMessage and become a green bubble over in this other ecosystem. And I think that speaks to the fact that for as advanced as these systems are getting, there has been a surprisingly long lag in turning them into really good products.

42:07You know, just this week, Amazon said that its new version of Alexa, which is sort of souped up, AI-powered, had finally reached one million customers. Now, Amazon has a lot more customers than that. They had been rolling this thing out at a glacial pace because they're still so uncertain about the reliability that they're trying to make sure that it doesn't blow up in its face. So while we're being hard on Apple here, I just want to point out that really, it's all of the tech giants that are having this problem, that folks like you and I are having a pretty good time figuring out how to slot AI into our lives, and it mostly just involves using chatbots.

42:42The other big companies, though, have not figured out how do we bolt this on to what we're doing in a way that is going to make people really excited. Yeah. Yeah. There's one more Apple-related story from the past week that we should talk about, and it is not something that was discussed at WWDC, but it is something that a lot of people have been emailing us and that a lot of people I know have been talking about. And this is this research paper that came out of Apple's machine learning research division. And this paper was called The Illusion of Thinking, Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the lens of problem complexity, which I'll say could have used an Apple iOS rewrite on that.

43:27All right, well, so try to describe, Kevin, concisely. What did this paper say? So this paper was basically an attempt to pour some water on the hype around these so-called reasoning models, which are kind of like large language models with an additional step performed at inference time to sort of improve the outputs. So we've talked about this before, OpenAI's 01, the latest versions of Gemini and Claude, they all have these reasoning features built into them. And what this publication, this research paper said, is that this is not actually reasoning, that these systems are not actually doing anything like thinking, that there are some big limits to how much this approach to improving language model performance can scale.

44:18And basically, they released this and it was immediately seized on by a bunch of people who said, aha, there is proof that the AI companies are on the wrong track, that all this is hitting a wall and that these models are not actually getting us closer to general intelligence. Yes, this paper was beloved by what I have come to think of as the AI cope bubble. So people who are looking for reasons not to worry about AI, I, oh, this paper was manna from heaven. Yes. So, Casey, why is this paper so controversial and so beloved by what you call the coat bubble? Well, I think one issue here is essentially semantic, which is the paper is trying to make the case that, as you put it, this is not actual reasoning, which is to say that large language models are not reasoning in the way that human beings are doing.

45:04I think everyone involved would stipulate, like, yes, that is the case, that large language models do not work in the exact manner that the human brain does, even if there are maybe some interesting parallels. So it's presented as this gotcha, aha, these things are not reasoning like human beings, when in fact, again, anyone who's paying attention could have told you that from the start. The second problem with this paper does relate to just the limitations of the way that these models are constructed, which is they can only output a certain number of tokens. And so in order to reason through the most difficult problems given to them by the researchers, they simply did not have enough room.

45:43Now, if you want to say that is a reason why large language models are bad, okay, fine. Yeah, there are like some problems that they can't solve. But that is not how this paper has been received within the AI code bubble. within the AI code bubble, it is, oh, well, this proves that LLMs can't reason like human beings, and therefore we should just junk it because it is essentially not real and it is not going to have any meaningful impact on my life. Yeah. So I would say this paper did not change my sort of view of large language models or the kind of reasoning models that have become popular recently.

46:17It did, however, help me understand what is going on inside Apple, where you simultaneously have a company that is trying to be seen as being on or close to the AI frontier, but where a lot of the intellectual firepower and research is still being directed at trying to prove that all of this is just hype and fake, and it doesn't actually work, and we should maybe stop investing in it. Yeah, I think we should say this is probably Apple's highest profile AI paper, at least in the last year, maybe ever. And I think it had a lot of problems. Yeah. So let's tie that back to WWDC, Kevin. What does it all mean?

46:52I think what it means is that Apple is still undergoing this kind of identity crisis about what it wants to be. Is it a hardware company that wants to make phones? Is it a software company that wants to sell subscriptions to put on those phones? I think both of those business models are being challenged right now. Apple's iPhone sales have been sort of flat to declining over the last few years. They really haven't gotten that much different from model to model. We may kind of be reaching the sort of pinnacle of what a smartphone can be. And a service business is being challenged by all these antitrust actions and these court decisions that say things like you can't, you know, stop people from paying for things outside of the Apple App Store anymore.

47:34And so I think they are still struggling to find the next gusher of cash that could replace declines in some of these other areas. and I don't think they have sort of come up with a solution yet, but it sounds like they are still trying to make up their mind about AI and how big a deal it is. I agree with all that. Fortunately, Kevin, you know, as you know, on this podcast, we always try to be problem solvers. We like to come up with solutions for the companies that we talk about. And I think I know what Apple could do to turn the ship around here. What's that? They have to hire Alexander Wang.

48:07I don't care how much it costs. I think they go to him right now. They say 49 % stake. We'll take all. how much money do you want? We can afford it. Just name your price, Alex. And, you know, not only would that turn around their fortunes in AI, Kevin, think about how mad it would make Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, boy. He would blow a gasket over that one. Siri, throw to commercial. Didn't even work. Siri, pick Casey's mom up from the airport. She's been there for a year. Actually, can I tell you what happened on my computer when I said just now, Siri, throw to commercial. It opened up a map to something called the Commercial Coverage Insurance.

48:43agency. No. Why? You're looking at it right now.

48:53When we come back, it's time to pass the mic. We'll hear from you, our listeners, about how your jobs are changing as a result of AI.

49:30Well, Casey, in the past few weeks, we have been talking a lot about a different topic related to AI, which is what is happening with AI and jobs. Yes, you recently wrote an article saying that we were starting to see the early signs of AI job loss. And so we threw it out to our listeners to say, what have you been experiencing? Yeah. So today we're going to go through some of the many, many responses we got to our call out for stories about AI and whether it's taking your jobs. And I think we should start with a question that I think captures a common frustration that we hear from listeners. Oh, that we say like and and and um too much?

50:07that were too handsome. No, here is listener Christian Danielson. Hey, Casey and Kevin, this is Christian from Hood River, Oregon. I've noticed in a lot of interviews, yours and others with tech executives that almost all of them seem to think there's going to be a categorically different level of job displacement due to this technology rolling out. And yet, almost all of them also don't seem like they have any real concrete plans or putting nearly the amount of energy they are into their products around how to mitigate that. It just seems like they don't feel like it's really their responsibility or it's someone else's problem to manage that side of things.

50:48So I'm hoping you might pose the question why it is that the government shouldn't really, frankly, just tax the shit out of their technology, both as a way to potentially compensate people for all this wealth that's going to be concentrated into the hands of a very small number of people, and also to slow the technology down a bit until our aging policy process can kind of catch up. Thanks. Yeah, so why is there no sort of plan from these executives, Kevin? And what do you think about the idea of taxes? Yeah, I think it's a really useful and important point. I think many of the executives and the companies building this technology, their goal is just to automate the jobs away, right?

51:35They are not thinking or talking much about what will happen on the other side of that to all the people whose jobs are displaced if they are successful. And, you know, some of them have done some studies or made some suggestions, like Sam Altman actually funded a big research project where they gave people these unconditional cash payments and sort of studied what would UBI or something like UBI do. And Dario Amadei from Anthropic has actually proposed something like our listener is suggesting. He called it the token tax. And basically the idea is if you have all these AI models out there generating billions of dollars of revenue by automating people's jobs, some portion of that should go back to fund the sort of welfare programs and social safety net for the people who are displaced.

52:22But I will say that most people I've talked to about this issue inside the AI industry are not even getting that far. They are not even proposing solutions or they're just kind of doing hand-waving about how the government will have to step in and take care of people who lose their jobs this way. I would like to see a lot more people not only coming up with ideas but actually advocating for those ideas with policymakers. Yeah. I mean the main thing I would say is that like it's not up to the corporations to run our society. Like that is the job of our elected officials who should absolutely have plans in place.

52:55they should be developing them right now for a world where we do experience significant job loss through automation. I think most lawmakers are probably getting on board at this point with the idea that this is, if nothing else, a real threat. And so it's unfortunate that there has just been so little movement in this direction, because I do think a lot of this is going to come true, and we're going to wish we had better plans in place. Yeah. Now for some listener stories. This first one is from the perspective of a young person navigating a tighter labor market. Listener Sarah writes, Hey, Hard Fork!

53:32I'm one of the junior software engineers who was thoroughly depressed by the latest episode on the AI job apocalypse, mostly because it was exactly in line with my current experience. I graduated in 2022 and felt very lucky to get an amazing job straight out of college where I felt very supported and valued by my team. That entire team was laid off last year to be replaced with cheaper human labor, not AI. And after a grueling job search, I ended up at a very large company that's a well-respected household name. They're not really a tech company, but the leadership wants us to embrace that culture and has proclaimed us to be an AI-first company.

54:04Developers are evaluated based on what percentage of our code we say is written by AI, and those with low scores are laid off. Obviously, we all say that most of our code is written by AI now. It's been thoroughly depressing working here, and I've been looking to move jobs since about my second week, but there are almost no openings for someone with only two years of experience. I think my only real chance is to stick around for a year and hope that my career still exists by then. With some luck, maybe I can make it into a mid-level position before the ladder is pulled up behind me. I feel terrible for the people just now graduating.

54:35Wow, does this one break my heart. Can I just say, this is what we've been talking about the whole time. Is people like Sarah having this exact experience? Yes. And what makes this particularly bleak is this is something that I actually do think is going to become a major problem for these companies is that they are just going to lose their pipeline of their future leaders, right? If you are replacing your junior workers with AI or just forcing everyone to use AI, you are really neglecting your own future because you are not doing the kinds of skill building and training and mentorship that is going to allow people like Sarah, who may be your next executive, to build the skills and the experience that she needs to come in and do that job.

55:23Let her cook. Yeah, but here's the problem. I think it's so silly that companies like this are creating incentives for their workers to lie to them about how they are using AI. You're just going to get a very distorted sense of what AI is doing in your company. And then if you lay off those people because you're thinking, oh, AI is already doing 80 % of everything, then you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble. So this just seems like a classic self-defeating like corporate thing. And these people need to get a better sense of what's really happening. But in any case, Sarah, thank you for writing in.

55:53And, you know, here's hoping that your next job is better than this one. All right. Here's a story we got from an executive. This is from listener Joseph Esparaguera. He writes, I'm the CFO of a$150 million plus home remodeling business. Wow. Okay, Bragg. I'm in the wrong business. I'm reaching out because I think I'm living in the awkward middle of the AI transformation story. Not at a tech startup, not at a Fortune 500, but in the trenches of a mid-sized company where AI could and should have massive impact, especially in accounting and HR. He continues, I'm trying to get ahead of the curve.

56:31I want my current staff to be the ones who survive and thrive as AI reshapes their fields, but I'm hitting resistance. They'll use AI to clean up an email or write a job posting, but they don't seem to grasp or want to grasp the bigger opportunity. I believe AI should let us do more with fewer people and the ones who adapt will stay. But if my current team doesn't evolve, I'll be forced to hire different people who will. Casey, what do you make of this email? So I suspect that this is playing out at a lot of companies where you have managers who are more excited about AI than their workers are.

57:06I think this is true of lots of different kinds of software, by the way. I remember I used to get really excited about like project management software like Asana, and I would like try to get my old company to like adopt it. And then like that had actually happened, the company adopted it, and no one wanted to use it because it was like, you know, why do I want to go like fill out a new form every day saying what my tasks are, you know? So it's like a lot of times software has more obvious value to the manager than it does to the worker who, you know, in many cases is just trying to get to 5pm so they can like get home to their family.

57:37So I think this is like kind of a durable tension in workplaces. At the same time, I think that this is going to be part of like the rough part of this transition is more and more managers being like, no, really, like you actually have to use this thing because if you're doing it another way, it is going to make you slower and worse at your job. And so I expect that there are going to be a lot of clashes. By the way, I think this opens up a lot of opportunity for listeners like Sarah who can show up at the front door and say, yes, I know how to use AI and you're not going to have to twist my arm into doing it.

58:09But I think there's gonna be a lot of pain along the way. Yeah. I think this is a really important moment for a lot of companies that are starting to think about how to use AI. And my intuition on this is that the companies that are having the most success with AI right now are the companies that are doing this in a very bottoms up way, right? They are soliciting ideas from workers about how they could use AI to maybe improve the parts of their job that they don't love doing or maybe eliminate them altogether. They're holding sort of hackathons or having sort of days set aside to just get together in a room and figure out how to use this stuff.

58:50They are not sort of imposing it from the top down, right? They are not the ones sending memos out saying everyone must use AI and we're going to be tracking how much you're using AI. And if you don't use AI, we're going to replace you with someone who will. I think that is a short-term solution, and that's the direction, unfortunately, that I think a lot of companies have chosen to go. But I don't think that's a strategy for durable transformation. You really need to get people excited about this and thinking about what it could do for them. Well, so what does Joseph do here? Because, you know, it sounds like if he doesn't act, there isn't going to be any bottoms-up enthusiasm for AI at his company.

59:27I think what you do is you basically start a competition among your employees. You say, we're going to set aside a day or a half a day, or we're going to do an off-site sometime in the next few months. We're going to give everyone access to all of the tools. We're going to buy them subscriptions to all the tools they might possibly need to do their jobs using AI. And the person who comes up with the best idea or the team that comes up with the best idea... Gets to live. We'll call it the Hunger Games. No, they get a bonus. They get a reward of some kind. and you kind of make it a thing where people are excited to contribute because it is in their best interest to do so.

1:00:07That's what I would do if I were the CFO of a company, which let's say it, we're all glad I'm not. Well, but the day is young. Who knows what might happen to you later, Kevin? All right, now let's hear from a listener who feels critical of the approach that some executives are taking to AI. So this person writes, hey guys, while my job isn't being replaced by AI yet, my boss is completely obsessed with it without actually doing anything meaningful with it himself. He's effectively put a hiring freeze on all process jobs because he believes that AI can do them better and more importantly, cheaper.

1:00:38I'm in charge of the sales and marketing teams and my very meager headcount, ask as we grow rapidly, is challenged or ignored because there's an AI tool he heard of somewhere. I get messages at all hours from him with links to hacky LinkedIn posts full of emoji bullet points about how Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or Insert program here will soon be obsolete thanks to these new AI tools or here are 20 AI miracles to revolutionize your workload. You know, our listener says, I'm far from being an AI skeptic. I make use of it daily, but honestly, maybe I will lose my job by my own hand soon because his attitude is exhausting.

1:01:12And right now I just need a few more human people without spending all my time going down rabbit holes of half solutions or privacy nightmares. I think the time spent on reading up on AI and testing bad AI right now isn't considered enough when looking at the cost benefit analysis. So, Kevin, what do you make of this listener's dilemma? I think this is really interesting. It does sort of hit that there's like a new kind of boss emerging in the sort of halls of corporate America, which is like the AI addict boss. We've heard a lot of stories along these lines of like, my boss is completely obsessed with AI.

1:01:47And I think it's tough, right? I think this is a very good point that like businesses have immediate short-term needs that AI cannot do yet. and maybe by thinking about sort of where this stuff is all heading so much, you are actually like not listening to your employees who are telling you, just give me three people so that I can solve this problem. And I don't know what to do about that because a manager's job, an executive's job is to think about and plan for the future. But you also do have these very short-term needs that need to be addressed. Yeah, I mean, here, my question to the big boss here is like, what is the actual objective that we're trying to hit, right?

1:02:25It seems like maybe there's too much discussion about tools in this workplace and not enough discussion about goals and what is the best way to get to those goals. You know, it sounds like this person has a pretty informed perspective that AI is not going to be the thing that gets them to the goals that they have. And the manager needs to listen to that. Yeah. Have a conversation or post on LinkedIn. They'll probably read it there. All right. Finally, let's hear a voice memo from listener George Dilfey, who is trying to find some short-term solutions to keep the staff he trains employable in this changing market.

1:02:59Hey, guys. My name's George Dilfey. I live in Stanford, Connecticut, and I work at a high-growth B2B staff startup called Clay. And my role, I actually head up the support team. So one of the things that I've sort of leaned into is trying to hire a really, really good people for our support team, but also sort of like turning those folks into kind of expert generalists. So the idea being that like they're rotating through different parts of the company, sort of learning about product or learning about engineering or learning about marketing with the hope that they've sort of gained like a number of different skills across the company and can sort of just like generalize into any other department.

1:03:35So just wanted to share. That was pretty interesting. Love the show. Thanks so much. Tell me what you make of this one. I like this one. I think that support and customer service are always talked about as sort of being the first jobs to go under the new AI regime. And we've talked about some companies that are trying to develop these AI customer service chatbots. But I think if you are working in customer service, you don't want to just be sort of reading off the script on a computer trying to help people solve their problems. You really want to sort of offer a more bespoke, personalized, high-touch kind of service.

1:04:11And I actually, one of my long-term complaints about tech companies is that they just do not take customer service seriously. Like for many years, people have said, you know, there's no way to get someone on the phone if something happens to your Facebook account or your Instagram account or your YouTube account. And I think people at the senior levels of these companies should be doing a rotation through customer service just to get a sense of what their customers and users are actually experiencing. And maybe that would lead them to invest more in these areas. So I think this is a good idea.

1:04:45I think that the experience of doing customer service, if you are good at it and are not just sort of reading off a script on a computer, is useful in many, many jobs. I think that in the future, that will become very important, especially as the more sort of rote and routine parts of the job get automated. What do you think? Yeah, I think that people who work in customer support roles often have a much better sense of what's happening in the business at the ground level as executives. And so I love the idea that we're creating new opportunities for those people. I think that those folks can often just bring experiences to the roles that you're just truly not going to get with an AI system.

1:05:22All right, Casey, have we said enough on AI and jobs this week? I think we have. We thank all of the listeners who wrote in to share their stories. I imagine this will not be the last time we return to this subject. But it's very clear, Kevin, that already we're starting to see the effects of AI on the job market. And I imagine that's only going to accelerate from here. Yeah, and I think we're going to have some more conversations on this topic coming up soon. we won't spoil them now but let's just say this is an area where I think we are going to spend a lot of time because this is something that many many people out there are starting to experience

1:06:16Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones we're edited this week by Jen Poyant were fact-checked by Anna Alvarado. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Mary Lozano, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Qui Wing Tam, Dalia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. If you liked this episode and you found any of it useful or interesting or maybe a little funny, you can share it with a friend or leave us a review on your favorite podcast app.

1:06:54You can email us as always at hardfork at nytimes.com. Send us your job offers with nine figure salaries. I'd settle for eight. Such a humanitarian.

1:07:19Thank you.