The Latest AI Job Loss Predictions

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, the growing conversation about AI job displacement. Before that, in the headlines, how Chad Shibiti is shifting the business model of the internet. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:23All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. Welcome back from the long holiday weekend for those of you who are in the U.S. and celebrating. First of all, a big thank you to today's sponsors, Blitzy, Plum, and Superintelligent. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief. Ad-free starts at just$3 a month. Today we're kicking off with a discussion of how the business model of the internet is changing thanks to AI, LLMs, ChatGPT, etc. And specifically, we're looking at new data from similar web that shows just how quickly the flow of web traffic is changing.

0:56The report found that referrals from ChatGPT are growing rapidly, but not fast enough to offset the decline in clicks. From the launch of Google's AI overviews in May of last year, the number of so-called zero-click news searches rose from 56 to 69%. These searches terminate with the users finding their information within the AI summary, as opposed to, of course, heading off to some other website, which was always the bargain of search engines. Yes, you can index our websites in exchange for sending us traffic. Well, now you're not necessarily sending them traffic. Over the same period, organic traffic to news sites dropped from 2.3 billion to 1.7 billion, a 25 % decline.

1:31Interestingly, there was a huge spike in traffic last summer, maybe a result of outrage over Google's AI features, but that quickly died off as users shifted to getting their news direct from AI overviews. Simultaneously, news-related prompts in ChatGPT grew by more than 200 % since January of last year. During that time, referrals to news websites from ChatGPT grew from less than a million to more than 25 million. This suggests that there is a new behavior happening where ChatGPT users are clicking through to the original source, but it is not enough to replace the traffic that's being lost from Google.

1:59SimilarWeb also noted that search rank isn't translating into web traffic in the same way it used to. Some SEO consultants have noted that impressions have completely decoupled from clicks, threatening in some ways the entire premise of SEO. Digging into individual news sources, the sites experiencing the most additional traffic from ChatGPT are the biggies. Reuters, The New York Post, and Business Insider. SimilarWeb also looked at the most searched topics for ChatGPT as a news source, finding that stocks and finance were a combined 54 % of news-related prompts, with sports and weather being at 17 % and 15 % respectively.

2:30Economics, politics, and tariffs were also above 10%. TLDR, the AI format is absolutely having a foundational impact on the consumption of news. Users seem to be moving away from passively consuming curated news stories towards a more active exploration of current events, which if you're an optimist could breed a lot of new opportunities. Certainly not without some challenges in the meantime though, and that is of course I think the story with basically all the changes of AI. We have a very optimistic future and a very chaotic in between, and how well we navigate the in-between is going to dictate a lot about how well we get to enjoy that future.

3:01If nothing else, there is a new bonanza for people who are designing entire new businesses around generative engine optimization or whatever term you want to use for it. So expect a lot of entrepreneurial activity there. Now, speaking of Google and AI overviews, the company is facing a new antitrust complaint in the EU after publishers push back on those AI overviews. As we just discussed, the doomsayer's take on all of this is that the business model of the web has been fundamentally undermined. And in the EU, publishers are not sitting around and passively letting this happen. The Independent Publishers Alliance argued, Google's core search engine service is misusing web content for Google's AI overviews in Google Search, which have caused and continue to cause significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership, and revenue loss.

3:41The complaint noted that publishers have no ability to opt out of AI overviews without losing their ability to appear in traditional search results. Google, however, is maintaining their position that AI overviews is net new demand for search, stating, new AI experiences in search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered. The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interest of users, and regular algorithmic updates to search. Still, while Google is denying the impact in the press, their actions do suggest that they know that back-end changes are required to sustain the open web.

4:14Bloomberg, for example, reports that Google is considering modifications to their shopping experience to comply with the EU's digital markets regulations. For travel and e-commerce searches, Google is considering including a drop-down menu of various offers that link to external websites. And although fines and lawsuits may be flying, there is still a general recognition that the era of 10 Blue Links is coming to a close. Even if Google buckles to demands, consumer preference is shifting towards AI search, and many other companies are poised to take advantage. Andrew Yan, co-founder of AI search startup Athena, said, Companies have been spending the last 10 or 20 years optimizing their website for the 10 Blue Links version of Google.

4:45That version of Google is changing very fast and is changing forever. Like I said before, there are going to be so many interesting entrepreneurial innovations in this space. For example, optimizing for agent searches instead of human searches. But for now, again, this in-between period is going to be very, very messy. Next up, some big acquisition news. Grammarly has acquired AI email client Superhuman as part of their transformation into a full productivity platform. In a press release, the company said that drafting emails is already their number one use case, so in that way, the acquisition makes a ton of sense.

5:15Grammarly will now have a native platform for using their core product. Still, their ambitions go much further. The company wrote, Grammarly is evolving into a productivity platform for apps and agents moving towards a multi-product company with hundreds of intelligent task-specific agents. Email represents the ideal environment for this multi-agent assistance, with professionals spending more than three hours daily in their inboxes and email remaining foundational to any productivity suite. And I think hold aside the details, you now have multiple labs racing to put together their own productivity suites, basically wanting to own a distribution channel for their agentic workflows.

5:46Joy Guo writes,

5:54Still, some couldn't resist a little bit of a joke. YC founder Hendrix Liu writes,

6:04Next up, following up on the fallout of Zuckerberg's big poaching expedition, Ilya Sutskever will be taking over as CEO of Safe Superintelligence following the departure of Daniel Gross. In a post on X, Ilya confirmed that Gross has signed a deal to join Meta's superintelligence team as one of their key leaders. He also announced that former OpenAI researcher Daniel Levy will be elevated to the role of president. Addressing rumors that Meta had attempted to buy the company, Sutsgeber wrote, You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through.

6:32We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together, we will keep building safe superintelligence. Writes TechCrunch, Naturally, Gross's departure may raise questions about the startup. If safe superintelligence was close to its goal, surely a groundbreaking technology as it's described, why would its co-founder leave to start something new seemingly at Meta? And this is a really interesting question. I think assuming that this has much to do with where Ilya and his startup are is a little bit dangerous. I think FutureSearch founder Dan Schwartz has the right of it when he writes, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross joining Meta seems odd, but what would you do in their position if you were completely superintelligence-pilled?

7:07They want A, a zillion GPUs, and B, a seat at the table. Zuckerberg can offer that. Lastly today, if you are keeping track of pricing norms, Perplexity has joined rivals in introducing a premium$200 a month subscription. The big selling point for Perplexity Max is unlimited access to the Labs feature. Introduced in late May, the feature allowed users to spin up custom dashboards, web apps, and assorted documents within the platform. The goal was to shift Perplexity away from being just an AI search engine towards being, you guessed it, based on our previous conversation about Grammarly, an AI productivity suite.

7:38Max also offers early access to new features, with the company's soon-to-be-released Agendic browser being the first on offer. So now we have OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity all offering this$200 a month super premium subscription. This will be a huge test of Perplexity's user base to see how deep the devotion really goes. In other words, is the average Perplexity subscriber just a super user who's also subscribed to everything else? It seems much less likely that that type of user is going to jump from$20 to$200. Instead, the people who are going to be willing to spend$200 for perplexity are more likely to be people who are actually using their specific features in a core way.

8:14For that reason, I think it's a good move even if it doesn't have all that many subscribers in that it's extremely valuable for perplexity to understand who their core users really are. Anyways, if nothing else, interesting to see how people are gravitating towards this$200 number. For now though, that is going to do it for today's headlines. Next up, the main episode. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context. Blitzy is used alongside your favorite coding co-pilot as your batch software development platform for the enterprise seeking dramatic development acceleration on large-scale codebases.

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10:01The New Superintelligent is a platform that helps enterprises figure out which agents to adopt, and then with our marketplace, go and find the partners that can help them actually build, buy, customize, and deploy those agents. At the key of that experience is what we call our agent readiness audits. We deploy a set of voice agents which can interview people across your team to uncover where agents are going to be most effective in driving real business value. From there, we make a set of recommendations which can turn into RFPs on the marketplace or other sort of change management activities that help get you ready for the new agent-powered economy.

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11:08Again, that's agent at bsuper.ai, and put the word consultant in the subject line. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. One of the biggest conversations surrounding AI is the threat of potential job displacement. Over the last 12 months, but especially the last six months, this has definitely overtaken any sort of robot uprising as the primary consideration and discussion point for people who are concerned about how AI might negatively impact the future. And part of that is, of course, being driven by a certain growing loudness in the way that people are discussing the issue. You might remember that back in April, we got a wave of CEOs from companies like Shopify and Duolingo saying that they were driving towards a more AI-native strategy.

11:51Shopify's was the first, and the big banner headline of that one was a soft ban on new hiring. Basically, Shopify teams would now need to prove that they couldn't do what they needed to do with AI before they got approval for hiring new people. Duolingo, as I mentioned, followed Shopify, but with an even more direct impact on their business, given that they were explicitly shifting away from contractual content creators for learning modules and instead replacing them with AI-generated content. Now, Duolingo tried to argue that they had always been constrained in their ability to create content by the fact that they had to do it with humans, but there was definitely a bit more backlash around that one.

12:26Klarna, meanwhile, has been something of a ground zero, always trying to be first when it comes to AI innovation, And they made a bunch of news recently when they seemingly backtracked on their pure AI approach to customer service, determining after some experimentation that there was always going to be some need or desire for a premium level of human service. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a recent note that he anticipated that because of AI, there likely would be a smaller workforce, although they weren't putting any goals around that now. And of course, the CEO of Fiverr had perhaps the bluntest assessment of the situation, saying that AI is coming for all of our jobs.

12:59Still, maybe the thing that got the most headlines was when Anthropics CEO Dario Amadei started putting some numbers around these estimates. In a recent set of interviews, he said that he thought that AI could eliminate up to 50 % of entry-level white-collar jobs and lead to 10 % to 20 % unemployment overall. And indeed, over the last couple of months, this focus on entry-level jobs and the lack of structures that allow people to grow into new positions has definitely been a focus area for people who are looking at the potential impact of this problem. The New York Times encapsulated this in their piece, For some recent graduates, the AI job apocalypse may already be here.

13:33The most recent leg of this story comes from comments from Ford CEO Jim Farley at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. And what it seems to represent is perhaps a shift in the discourse, with Fortune 500 CEOs starting to acknowledge that AI adoption could have a pretty significant impact on the workforce. At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, Ford CEO Jim Farley said, artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S. AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind. With slightly less dramatic but still significant numbers, Marion Lake, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase's consumer and community business, also told investors recently that she saw its operations headcount falling by 10%, once again thanks to AI.

14:14The Wall Street Journal wrote, The Ford CEO's comments are among the most pointed to date from a large company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish. And what's interesting, I think, about Farley's comments specifically is that they are very clearly an attempt to start a conversation from the basis of reality. He said, We have to acknowledge that these new technologies are great.

14:43They'll make a lot of people's lives better. But what are we going to do as a society for people that it leaves behind, that are valuable humans? For our society, we have to have a plan for sustainment, and we don't have a plan today. One example of perhaps not the conversation to have were comments from Microsoft's Xbox Games executive producer Matt Turnbull. In the wake of the recent round of layoffs at Microsoft, Turnbull wrote on LinkedIn in a now-deleted post, These are really challenging times, and if you're navigating a layoff or even quietly preparing for one, you're not alone and you don't have to go it alone.

15:12I know these types of tools engender strong feelings in people, but I'd be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances. I've been experimenting with ways to use LLM AI tools like ChatGPT or co-pilot to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss. Turnbull argued, at a time when mental energy is scarce, these tools can help you get unstuck faster, calmer, and with more clarity. Brandon Sheffield, the director of Necrosoft Games, called the comments out for being tone-deaf, posting, after thousands of people getting laid off from your company, maybe don't suggest they turn to the thing you're trying to replace them with for solace.

15:43Now, on the one hand, this does bring up a question of what the actual genesis of Microsoft's layoffs are. I think as clean as the narrative would be if it was just AI, There's also a lot of post-COVID realignment and reversion to the mean, as well as just preparing for resilience and macro headwinds. But I think directionally, of course, it is accurate to say that AI is, on a longer time horizon, the big force that is going to shape the nature of the workforce. And honestly, outside of a new headline, there hasn't been some big new story. The reason we're covering it today is that it does feel like there's a shift in the nature of the discussion and a new intentionality that's coming towards it as well.

16:20Bloomberg's chief U.S. economist Anna Wong, commenting on the Wall Street Journal story, wrote, I'm glad this quiet part is being spoken. Let me speak other quiet parts out loud. AI is disproportionately affecting jobs that had benefited from globalization. Manufacturing jobs may be a hedge to loss of white-collar jobs. I think that second part is particularly important because what it represents is that you're starting to see people, as we have this conversation, start to wade in with their thoughts on what might be done. So in Anna's case here, she's talking about a potential return of manufacturing jobs and what that might look like.

16:50Then, of course, we've recently covered what Bernie Sanders is arguing for with all this, which is basically that the productivity gains of AI should at least be partially redistributed to workers in the form of a shorter standard work week. What I said when I covered that a couple of weeks ago was that regardless of what you think about that, it's important to be having the conversation and actually advocating for policies that make sense in the context of these changes coming. So from here, what I'm going to be looking for on this show is not only the latest evidence of how job losses are happening, but also how the societal conversation around what we should do about it is changing.

17:21As you can probably tell, I think that there are optimistic early signals, if too small to really call a trend, of people acknowledging the reality of the extent of the changes coming and starting to try to think positively about how we can navigate it. This is going to be a conversation for all of us that implicates nothing less than a full revision and re-evaluation of the social contract. So of course, I am glad to be here having that conversation with you. For now though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.