"Nobody Lost Their Job to AI, Just the Promise of AI" - This Week in AI Ep 15

28:10People have been, I mean, it's a raging discussion that I think we're going to have to keep having because Meta laid off 8 ,000 people, about 10 % of its staff. And then at the same time, record profits lifting their 2026 AI CapEx by up to 10 billion, which is a total of 145 billion. These are very large numbers in terms of cap spent in a year. They're spending over$10 billion per month to build out infrastructure. Intuit cut 3 ,000 jobs. That's 17 % of their workforce. And they explicitly said this is to fund AI integration. Goldman Sachs on the other side, CEO David Solomon said in an AI job loss, he said the AI job loss narrative is overblown in an op-ed in the New York Times, quote, the historical pattern is clear.

28:59the U.S. economy can and will adapt to major advances in technology. But Goldman economists estimate AI may automate 25 % of current work hours over the next decade. ISO, he cited a Stanford study showing entry-level employment in AI-exposed roles, software engineering, customer support down 16%. So here we are. This thing is raging back and forth, Richard. And And clearly, we had bloated big tech companies. Everybody hired. That was the playbook. Take talent off the field. Hire based on what you need in two years, not what you need today, was the common knowledge. So you're just always building infrastructure, office space.

29:40You're always hiring. You're putting butts in seats in those office spaces. You're always building out infrastructure, upgrading your servers, upgrading your finances, and keeping more capital going. That's been the entrepreneurial playbook. But something's changed here. The reward system is now move the dollars from employees to infrastructure. That seems to be what Wall Street's responding to. So what's your take on this, Richard? Is it overblown or is it going to be chaotic for the next couple of years, the employment? And how often do you change your opinion on this, in all honesty, where you go from feeling like doom scenarios to feeling like, oh, my God, this is incredible.

30:23Anybody can do anything. We're all superheroes now. I think there's a difference between sort of long-term and short-term. I think long-term, I'm extremely optimistic. It's just technology has had a record of making people's lives better. And in the moment, it's hard for people to see that, feel that progress, right? But if you look over any 10, 20, 30 year time horizon, things that used to be luxury goods for a select few are now common and have common access. Everyone has common access to it. When I see things like, oh, we automate 25 % of current work hours, that doesn't mean there's going to be 25 % unemployment.

31:05That is called the lump of labor fallacy. that labor is this like fixed slump. And when you take 10 % off, now they're going to be 10 % unemployed people. That has never happened in the past. It used to be 150 years ago that over 95 % of people worked in agriculture. Now it's less than 5 % of people work in agriculture. And yes, in the moment when a tractor does the work that you used to do manually, it feels like, holy shit, this tractor sucks. Like this weaving machine sucks. But because we have weaving machines now, we don't have rags to riches stories anymore because no matter how poor you are, you can afford real clothing and not just wear rags.

31:41And so there's so many of these. So I'm often surprised of how people come up with these fallacies, like the lump of labor fallacy, and then stick to it. Now, you have to also acknowledge that meta is called meta after the metaverse. So they hired a ton of people to build the metaverse and then realized AI is much more relevant to the future than the metaverse. and it didn't quite work out and make sense to make big bets. And then sometimes these bets don't work out. And so, yes, they have to transition their whole company. I do think we see a mix of just people increasing efficiencies, sometimes with AI and sometimes just like they let their lowest performers go.

32:20And sometimes it's a mix of the two. And so I do think every company, every industry will change. Every organization, every person working in organization, every country needs to think about how to adjust for this new reality. Maybe it could make sense to help have some unemployment benefits to smoothen out the transition. Yeah, and we have those. It changes things. Tine, we have all those for people as a safeguard, and we've extended them in the past, where if there was something cataclysmic, they say, oh, you know, it's COVID. We're going to give everybody six months or 12 months more unemployment just to smooth this out because we don't want people to crash and burn here in the United States.

32:56We want to give them a soft landing. But Matthew Prince did an article last week. again, he said, hey, record profits, record growth, we're doing fantastic, but we're going to get rid of these measurers because the people who measure stuff, I don't know if you saw it today, but your thoughts on who gets cut and then where are you in terms of worrying about this as a major issue or just not being concerned at all? And how often do you change your position? I think my position on this has been relatively consistent for the last year, pretty much, which is a long, long time in the world of AI. The major thing to acknowledge is I think, for example, like, oh, Meta is taking their money from spending on humans and spending it in AI is muddling a bunch of things together because the real thing is the pain that people are feeling is, hey, we spent 10 years of our life planning for this career and then four years in college to get this computer science degree thinking we're going to go and be a software engineer.

33:59And guess what? Reality slaps you in the face. And that career you've been planning for for 15 years is deleted. And that is the pain that people are feeling. And that, of course, comes up in a lot of different ways. And it's hatred towards large companies. But it's generally a feeling of just deep loss and that is not something we could that is just the reality of the situation and so one, just understanding that helps build empathy on where people are really coming from and it's like yeah, this is a really really shitty situation to be in on the other side I don't believe there is lesser jobs that need to be filled.

34:47I was looking at that stat yesterday. There's 200 ,000 just open roles. And at Whisper, we have, like we are still doubling our headcount every six months. Like we're 60 people right now by the end of the year, want to be 120, 150. That is so much work to be done, even though AI is doing a lot. But with every product we're launching, every new market we're launching, like all the things that we were talking about, like, hey, you need just a human to deeply, deeply care about this. You need the people. So the profile of the person we hire is completely changed. When I'm hiring for a software engineer, I care a lot more about what their prompt to clawed looks like than the actual code that they produce with AI.

35:31Because that tells me how they think. And if somebody is a good thinker and they can read it from first principles and they have good product taste, that is something you cannot take away with AI and you're going to leverage it to do much more with these tools. And so that's the kind of profile I look for across every single role. And Deneit brings up an interesting thing, which is like you can actually have narratives both pro and con early career people. Yes, maybe you started this career four years ago in software engineering and it's changed now. But it's also clear that companies want young, hungry talent that knows how to use these tools, has grown up with these tools and are now bringing them into the workplace versus they have to get folks that are established and know and have done this exact job in this exact role for many years.

36:20And so you can have both narratives and I think they all cancel each other. But what I think is funny though, is like, I don't think actually anyone has lost a job because of AI, like directly. I don't think like Zuck woke up and he said like, oh, these engineers over here are more productive, so I'm going to fire. I think what happened was, it's the promise of AI means they want to invest a lot more money into AI. So because of that CapEx, they're basically trimming the rest of the company. And I think that's generally true across the entire economy is that very few people have actually lost jobs due to the reality of AI.

36:52A lot of people have lost jobs due to promise of AI. It's a little bit like self-fulfilling in a sense, right? Which I find quite ironic. Well, entrepreneurs are capital allocators, talent allocators. So they're looking at it saying, Where do I allocate these resources in order to get the output? Exactly. And I think that's what's happening. To say, give more tokens to a small number of people. We're reallocating a lot of capital to building data centers, to building AI. Tane is hiring a lot of people to build AI. Meta is choosing, oh, we're going to shut down all these organizations that are maybe not performing as well and move all of it to AI.

37:27But again, it's still a bet. And I think it's going to pan out. I'm very hopeful. But I think very few so far have actually lost their jobs due to the reality of AI. It's all the promise of AI. There are people, I think, at Marvel, they gutted the place from what I understand. And it's strictly because AI. And then what? Yeah, I mean, it's also a convenient excuse, right? I don't disagree that there are some people that have actually lost their jobs due to the reality of AI. But I think it's way 10x more that have lost due to the promise of AI. I thought about this a little bit. I think here's my here's I think the algorithm which you can predict whether AI is going to lead to job loss or not.

38:06And that is all based on the elasticity of demand, given how much cheaper you can make a product with AI. So if, for instance, you can make illustrations go from several hundreds of dollars for one illustration where only a few newspapers and fancy corporate blog posts can afford an illustration to make an illustration worth like a cent. Now, will the demand for illustrations go up by billions? No, there are only so many blog posts and newspaper articles and so on that need an illustration, right? So it'll go up a little bit, but it's not super elastic. Software, on the other hand, when you make it much, much cheaper to build software, I think the demand will just increase.

38:46We could all have a custom app, a custom suite of apps. Yeah, 100%. You can have billions of different types of software. And so there, the sort of Jensen's paradox will also kick in more where making it cheaper will actually make you end up using a lot more of that good. And hence, the demand for people creating that good or service will go up. That's where I've started to lie. We're seeing many more startups. We're seeing people who are laid off, start companies. So the question I ask myself is, do we still have enough problem surface area for humans to be productive? So is there more software incrementally for people to build that would make people's lives better, make things cheaper, better, faster, more entertaining?

39:30And the answer is yes. Now, is it possible? I think the optimistic take is there was 10 ,000 people building a metaverse that very few people used. Hopefully, they can go and start startups that actually contribute to society in more meaningful ways. You made a product people didn't want. Congratulations. Now you have to shut it down. I mean, it could be as simple as that, but they're also studying everybody's behavior with key capture and some desktop software they created in-house to do training. And this has people shook. So, Tane, what do you think of this concept of at the same time Zuckerberg is announcing the 8000 layoffs?

40:08He's saying, and we're recording your computers to do reinforcement learning for our models at a pretty granular level. But don't worry, it's anonymized. but we're recording it and we know when people leak information to the press so maybe it's not so anonymized what did you think of putting those two announcements together again i look at them all very differently and i have a couple of friends who work at meta uh what's the back channel the back channel is like people are not happy people are not happy there is like some version of this that companies do which is you have your your mdm system that they can use to kind of lock your computer.

40:44And so many of the companies, especially during COVID, set and installing time tracking and software to see what applications they're using, if you're actually working or not. But usually that happens in low trust environments. Like here, you're working with a bunch of contractors. You want to make sure the contractors are doing work. Makes sense. Or a regulated industry. Or regulated industry. This is one of the times when you see it here. And so the sense generally is like these folks felt that they were in a higher trust environment. And now once you start putting guardrails like this, it uses slightly sour taste in their mouth.

41:20And I can totally understand why Meta's doing this, right? They need to collect the data from somewhere, and they've gotten a lot of backlash from collecting it from their users over the years. And so that was this, but the one thing I would have changed that is at least change the messaging somehow. That it'd be a bit more opt-in, because I think company culture matters a lot. and I wouldn't place that above the cost of data. The company culture seems to be broken over there, or to some extent, or maybe it's just so cataclysmic right now when you're saying goodbye to people every 18 months. It's just hard for anybody to enjoy that.

42:01It's like being in this extended, never-ending war, right, Richard? You've been there. There's a survivor guilt for people in these kinds of situations often, and a lot of their friends go and so on. I think what's interesting here is that if you are an entrepreneur and you just care about the outputs of your organization, then you love AI. If you get paid by the hour and everything you do is owned by the company and you don't own any equity and significant shares of that company, then you may actually hate AI. Because, yeah, when you do something, the AI will record it and then Meta will clearly say, well, we can now do what this person has been doing.

42:39So they're going to be fired. Right. And so I think that could be a push to many more solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, because then they can love AI and AI is the future versus being feeling like the ice is learning what they're doing and then it's going to do it for them. I think that it might push more startups to be formed. Eric, this is the power of equity and everybody rowing in the same direction. If you worked at Meta and they were like, yeah, you have$10 million in equity,$5 million in equity,$1 million in equity, and they were like, you lost your job, but the company's massively profitable and the stock's going up 7 % a year.

43:15It's going up 12 % a year now. It's like, okay, well, if I have$2 million in RSUs, you're telling me it's going up 12 % a year? I'm making a quarter million dollars not working here, but you gave me enough equity? It's almost like what they're doing with these Trump accounts. They're trying to get every American into the stock market. So if there is job loss and companies are becoming more efficient, at least you can root for them from the sidelines and be like, yeah, I own some shares in that. It takes the edge off, yeah? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. And of course, it's sad when people lose jobs.

43:48But hopefully, the economy gets better over time and people find other jobs. And I'm very optimistic about the future. Here's an interesting chart that we threw up on the screen just a minute ago. we'll throw it back up here. This is software developer jobs. These had come crashing down to since mid-25, as you see, the software developer jobs are that light blue line that just does a complete V. And then you have the overall job postings. And these are on Indeed and Bloomberg, I guess, and Indeed did this together. Okay, so here is a job board posting showing a trend. Who knows if this is correct or not, but 125 million job postings down to 100 million overall, but software jobs coming plummeting down to 62 million and then back up to 74 million.

44:39So theoretically, since this time last year, we've seen a lot, 10 million more job postings on this one particular job board. I don't know if this is representative, But what we're seeing here is I think what we're seeing overall is people are picking the number they like to support their narrative. If you're in the Trump administration or you're a Republican and you're want to build the and you're building software and tools, you want to believe jobs are coming back. And if you're a doomer, you represent the unions, or maybe you're a Democrat who hates the right, you think that this is complete, utter job destruction.

45:19My P-Doom is pretty good right now. I think anybody coming out of college today who says they're an AI-first employee and they know how to use perplexity computer or rock computer or Claude co-work, anybody with, I don't know, 60 days of experience using those tools, I think it's a job instantly. I would hire somebody like that to work side by side with me 20 hours a day, every day. I'm actually looking for somebody like that right now. It's like, please come help me because I have so much to do. That position is, so you're young. So like roughly like say like 22 to 25, you are willing to basically like be beside me or sleeping in the office.

46:03It's like, okay so crazy work ethic crazy energy yeah to be the chief of something yes uh gonna be chief of staff i want them to be high emotional maturity right because they're going to be managing my my inbox and doing honestly a lot of things on my behalf they're going to be my second brain essentially and there's a good amount of automation that i do like at this point i don't open my inbox anymore because i built a whole inbox tool for myself and a lot of these tools i built for myself. I build inside the product. And I just want somebody high bandwidth to do that. Because for me, I had my younger brother.

46:41He's seven years younger to me. He's 21 right now. I just want another one of him to just be maniacally focused on this. And he's starting his own company. He raised money for it. So he's doing his things. I can't get him anymore. But that's what I'm desperately looking for. A backup brain. Yeah. Like you want an agent. I look at this as like Almost like guys used to have like a butler who like helped them dress like I'm, you know, and help their make sure their cars and their, you know, shotguns were all tweaked perfectly. Like somebody who is like your your body man standing next to you doing your driving and your security and everything.

47:19There's this need for somebody to do that, but to make software for you, like to be a software butler who just makes you bespoke software to solve all of your problems. but yeah anybody coming out of school eric with any kind of familiarity with ai is going to get a job yeah i'm not so sure i actually would take the other side of it yeah please i mean like i think what you saw like during the zirp era with like you know boot cramp grad could just you know spend like a couple months like learning basic coding and then get a job i do think it's gotten harder i do think you know in order to get it like an entry-level job today you do need to spend a little bit more time like learning the sort of ladders of abstraction and writing a lot more code And I have a feeling that part of the market is a little bit harder.

48:00I'm still bullish on software engineers. Like, I do think there's going to be an enormous amount of job creation. But I do think the bar, in my opinion, probably has gone up a little bit. I love the idea of a software valet. Here's another chart. Just try to make sense of this, folks. This is all workers and their unemployment rate, which is at a pretty close to our lifetime low. This is a little bit earlier in the year, 4.2. I think it's 4.4 right now overall. And then recent college graduates, age 22 to 27, 5.6 % unemployment. And then all college graduates, 3.1%. So it's hard to understand this data, except that recent college graduates almost never trailed all workers.

48:43They were more hireable. So there's something about college-age people recently out of the workforce that are, you know, maybe their unemployment's up 20 % or something. But it doesn't seem to be cataclysmic like we might see if something like self-driving works. Suddenly, we have self-driving work. I think, as usual, averages kind of are hard to interpret because you could have multimodal and bimodal distributions. My hunch is the young graduates that are bringing AI into organizations are highly sought after. And then there are some graduates who, you know, they studied history. and the history used to be fine.

49:22If you want to go to McKinsey and just become a general consultant or something, you could have felt okay with that, like be okay with that. But like now they're like, they don't know AI either. So, and they're like ramping them up. It will take them years before they get to an AI. And so I think it'll likely be bimodal and the average now is slightly increasing because there are more people studying social sciences and so on than like computer science and other AI adjacent people. If we look at these like wine vintages, you could have a season where like there's a group of people out there who are not AI first.

49:55And since they're the recent graduates are, you could have recent graduates, you know, outpacing these non recent graduates. You know, the people who maybe graduated five years ago, pre-Chat GPT, and they weren't using Chat GPT to cheat in school and Claude Co. You know, to do all their assignments, which was super weird. I don't know if you guys saw all the booing at the commencement addresses for AI. It feels like there's just generations of people who, it just gives them the ick, I think, as the kids say. The Pope also says AI needs to be disarmed a bit. Quote, artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.

50:38It must be at the service of all and the common good. That's Pope Leo. He warned, AI threatens to normalize an anti-human vision and said the concentration of digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be counted. Here's a video of that moment. Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know. But deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward. for humanity. The Church has long been working for nuclear disarmament, aware that every great technical power can affect people's lives and so must be accompanied by adequate moral discernment and public control.

51:29Nuclear disarmament remains a service to peace and the dignity of the human family. In a similar sense, artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death. Eric, clearly, the services you're providing and this infrastructure is in the service of domination and death. How are you planning to burn in purgatory for all time, Eric? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I do think that there's something where tech isn't fully aware of the PR battle here. Like there is something happening where like there's the general public is very nervous.

52:17And I don't think it's, you know, I don't think, you know, big figures are doing a great service when they're going out and talking about massive job losses and probability of doom and all these things. Like I look at all our customers and the amazing value creation that's happening. Like we have customers who are working on new drugs, like drug discovery that could cure amazing, you know, diseases we haven't been able to cure before. Like we have other customers that build amazing consumer products. And so like I feel like there's this very like pessimistic scenario leading to this like backlash to data centers and all these things.

52:53Like the problem with tech is like they have this sort of slightly autistic, like truth telling, you know, desire. And they're very dramatic and self-absorbed sometimes. And like, I think I feel like the tech industry almost like needs to hire like a couple of PR people. And then like engineers just need to like chill out a little bit and try to be a little bit more optimistic or else there's going to be some massive backlash against this technology. Richard, you're nodding here. how does it feel to be building tools to dominate, exclude, and create death and destruction amongst the populace of humanity, according to the Pope?

53:33Death, exclusion, and domination. We have to overturn this AI. There's a lot to unpack here. I mean, pretty dramatic words from the Pope, and he says, hey, I'm being dramatic for a reason. Do you think he believes what he does? I think he does. I think so. I think the future needs better marketing. I think that much is clear. I agree with Eric. I think LA is, you know, because they have a lot of illustrators and people and special effects and you can now create lots of special effects in virtual worlds very quickly. There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment there and they're trading most stories when you watch the studio, right, and others.

54:10They're like, literally say, yeah, like, fuck the AI and like, and so on. a lot of storytelling of dystopian futures and not a lot of positive storytelling where you can have drama but in an otherwise optimistic and positive future. I think that's true. I think it's also true that AI is only as good as the systems, the people and the data that influence it. It is a general purpose tool and just like the internet you can focus on all the horrible torture porn that's on the internet. I'm guessing it's there. You read about it sometimes and we should make that illegal and that is clearly regulated correctly.

54:44So, and you can focus on the internet just having horrible things and bullying and so on on it, or you can focus on the internet bringing amazing communication to everyone and connecting the world and bringing knowledge and making it super cheap to learn whatever you want to learn nowadays. And both can be true at the same time, right? This is omni-use technology. And maybe a last point is, I do think it's dangerous when CEOs say, this is the most dangerous technology ever. also we are the only ones who can do it really really safely and you should trust us and give us billions of dollars to make it as good as possible and then at this like at the end of that people will just remember the it's super dangerous and by the way i don't trust that random tech ceo to make it better and so why are they even building it in the first place and then it's just like a negative loop uh and and i am worried uh about uh some of those patterns that we're now seeing attacks on, you know, people's houses here in San Francisco, like Sam Alton's house and so on.

55:39I think as CEOs amp up this PDoom conversation, pretend like this is this like super hardcore technology that's bad. Now, at the same time, I think it makes sense to not focus on the negative applications. And some of those regulations, as they really influence people's lives do need strong regulation. Like we do need regulation on how AI is used in warfare. It's not something I want to work on. I don't think superintelligence should be used in warfare because that could literally lead to the kind of Skynet like scenarios. But you do need to regulate AI when it gets actually, you know, impactful for people's lives.

56:23And then in other areas, I think it's best not to overregulate too soon before you really know all the implications. Like there are a lot of stories where you can say, oh, AI has been really bad for mental health for these five cases, right? And you make those very public. But there are no stories where many people actually improve their mental health by talking through their problems with an AI. Those are sort of silently like happening as well. So there's a lot of gray in between the black and white. Yeah. And some companies maybe aren't doing themselves any favors or maybe if they want to get more attention.

57:00I think it's worked really well for marketing for those companies. It's worked really well for Anthropic with Mythos and like the valuation of the company and like, hey, the delusion of grandeur is like a known psychological phenomenon where people want to be important. They want to believe that they created the technology that then solves every problem in humanity. Here's Christopher Ola talking about the real possibility that human labor will go away. His holiness call for discernment is profoundly timely. I wish to name three questions where I think the church's voice is especially needed. The first is our duty to the global poor.

57:41There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions. Okay. So, uh, today, uh, you're hiring like crazy, uh, and, uh, the product is helping people communicate faster, better, more accurately. Uh, what, what do you think about the Pope's comments and anthropics, you know, pronouncements that like mythos is gonna, it's too powerful for anybody to have. It's gonna hack everything. It's all omni, omnient and can see through all hacks and problems and, you know, this sort of, are these delusions of grandeur or these, you know, thoughtful, you know, missives that we should consider as a society?

58:35There's a couple of people I know who think about these things deeply and they sound basically how Dario talks about these topics. and what I realized is once you really understand the meat of what they're actually talking about it makes a lot more sense but there's essentially like two kinds of people one who's very philosophical very intellectual like a big brain person like that's how I just mentally think about it and then there's people who are just more tactical more in the present and a lot of times you hear that and you hear like oh there's this going to be this this cognitive displacement of labor it doesn't resonate and it sounds like a far-fetched fear but there's actually a lot of truth to it and so what I found at least is being able to translate that into a way that is much more like resonates a lot more with people and what it actually tactically means today that way they can actually understand it and that is one thing that is like my my personal wish for for these folks, because if you read some of what Dario, if we go two years into the future, and we read all the things that Dario and Anthropik say today, it will make so much sense.

59:49But there's that communication gap where the way they phrase it out isn't how the average person consumes it. And so those get missed. And this has been historically what has happened with philosophers in the world. I know because my co-founder is like this, right? He says these very profound things to me that make sense to me six months later. And then I do work with him to figure out how can you tell me these things in ways that enter my brain. So I understand it now instead of it making sense six months later. And that's when I started to realize this trend emerged and got me appreciation for, oh, this is what you're trying to say that, but this is definitely not landing with anybody the way you wanted it to.

1:00:33And it feels more like fear-mongering when it's something completely different. I think it's well said. And I think maybe for our last topic here, talk a little bit about the explosion in Chinese models and their token usage. There's a data source called OpenRouter, and they are claiming that Chinese AI models hit 9 trillion tokens the week of May 18th, up 20 % basically week over week versus U.S. models up 16 % week over week at 5 trillion tokens. And the Chinese models have led weekly usage for four consecutive weeks. DeepSeek version 4 Flash, now the number one model globally at 3.4 trillion tokens top us models um claude opus sonnet and then gemini 3 flash preview all at uh or at 1.9 1.9 and 1.1 trillion respectively quinn 3.7 max also dropped this week eric are you seeing um american companies starting to embrace these models yet or yes yeah at a massive scale i mean the chinese models are very good and and i wish there were better open source models coming out of the US.

1:01:50But the reality is there isn't. Why is that? Why are we seeing two different approaches? I mean, it's sort of like all of us, but for the audience, yeah. Some people claim, and I think there's some legitimacy to the argument that the Chinese models, they're all distilled on US proprietary models and or subsidized by the Chinese government in order to build better models. I think there is some logic to that argument. And I think it's worth discussing those things. I also think to some extent that the Chinese teams are very good. If you read the DeepSeek paper, it's just sentence after sentence of just profound research that is very, very deep.

1:02:31And so I don't know. I wish we had better models in the US that are open source, but today we don't. You're using these models currently or forking them, building off them? What can you tell us a little bit about the Chinese models think about them we're experimenting with some of them and they are really good they are really good when it comes to like what's their open source and i mean same as eric like i think the way the way capitalism is set up in the u.s none of these companies are incentivized to build open source models and then this is what we have to eventually lean on to but the one issue that we saw happening with them is they have very interesting and strange biases that come into these models.

1:03:19And so we can't deploy them as is. So that's, again, because we end up being the layer between what you say and what eventually gets written out. And the last thing you want is any kind of censoring or misinterpretation of what you said to go out. So we decided not to deploy these models directly as the core thing that's running, but using them a lot for some other internal tools. presumably you can fine-tune them and though and like still like get like okay results have you ever looked into that you could there's all these little edge cases that comes up uh one was really funny like is taiwan a country something tiananmen square how do i get there yeah see see those things those things but one was really funny this didn't happen with the chinese model happened with another model, but it had this very little nuance where if you said, hey, ladies, with like a Latino accent, it would convert it and write, hey, mamas.

1:04:22And this is such like a rare edge case. I do not know how that came into the model. We found one little thing that came in from there. But really, with the breadth of usage, it's very hard to test all of this. And so you need to have like massive, massive eval sets to actually get it to work. This could be actually a feature set. You could just be able to set Whisperflow like, hey, I would like everything I say to go through like a Gen Z filter and just drop in, you know, Riz and whatever. I want mine to go through the Urban Dictionary. I want mine to go through like 70s and 80s slang. The Gen Z filter we actually launched last week.

1:04:58People are really enjoying that one. Awesome. All right. Listen, another amazing episode of This Week in AI. Thank you, Richard, Tanei, and Eric. you guys are all hiring in the AI job apocalypse. So take from that what you will, dear audience. But maybe you could each give a little plug for who you're trying to hire and how people can find out more. We're hiring primarily systems engineers and we're based in New York. So if you're on the West Coast or on the East Coast, we're also hiring SF, but primarily in New York, hiring a lot of people who love building complex systems, low-level performance optimization, stuff like that.

1:05:36Right. And Eric is giving everybody who comes and joins a pair of tickets to the next finals. So if you refer a SIF admin, he'll buy you a pair of tickets to the finals. I'm joking. I just made that up. Richard? So at Recursive, we're hiring also infrastructure folks, folks who can wrangle tens of thousands of GPUs. And that's mostly it. some very, very strong researchers that are able to build very large frontier models. We have a few roles too. And then at U.com, we're looking for a lot of senior backend engineers, folks that want to wrangle very large search indices to actually make these models up-to-date, accurate, and have citations.

1:06:21And Tunei? We're hiring a lot of ex-founders, product leads, GMs for all the new business units that we're building, hiring researchers, engineers across the stack, salespeople,

1:06:41and marketing and growth folks. And the key things that we really care about is if you're somebody who is a first principles thinker, you're low ego, and you're hungry to win, then you're going to fit right in. And we are hiring associates in training. So we like to train up associates out of school to learn the craft of being a great investor, you can go to x.com slash launch and you can DM launch to get more details. If you follow our x.com slash launch, previously known as Twitter, we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.