GoKawiilBrian Barrett: Set aside the legal merits, who knows? We've got on the jury, we've got a psychiatrist, we've got a painter, we've got a former Lockheed Martin employee, and that's the beauty of the American justice system, but who knows what this group of people is going to decide this on or why. We'll find out soon. There's another story involving the AI industry going on this week. It's actually been going on for months, but we had an inflection point recently that makes it, I think, worth talking about now. Meta recently announced layoffs that are supposedly being made because of AI potentially. At least that's what people say. The company plans to cut 10 percent of its workforce, which is going to be about 8,000 employees, and it's also planning to close another 6,000 open roles. The same day Meta makes that announcement, Microsoft said it would offer voluntary buyouts to nearly 9,000 employees. It's the first time that Microsoft has made that kind of offer. The memo where Meta shared the news about its layoffs, it doesn't explicitly mention AI, but the company has obviously announced that it's nearly doubling spending on the technology. It is huge amount of sums going towards data centers, CapEx, infrastructure, and it's not just white collar employees that are being affected. That gets a lot of the headlines, but there's a particular group of contractors that WIRED's Joel Khalili talked to that's being hit by the layoffs as well. It's more than 700 workers based in Ireland. And what's interesting there is they're the ones who have been training Meta's AI models themselves or among the people, the contractors who work to train these models. They're employed by a Dublin based firm called Covalen, which handles various content moderation and labeling service jobs for Meta. And their job is to check the material generated by Meta AI models against the company's rules that bar dangerous and illegal stuff. It's tough work, right? It's tough both for what it is and also the realization that while you're doing it, you're basically training AI to take over your job. It is a job that is just designed to be obsolete as soon as you do it well enough.
Leah Feiger: This is such a good opportunity for us to have really our quarterly conversation: Is AI taking jobs? And Zoë, I mean, I'm always so interested in your insight here. I'd love to hear you weigh in, not just on Meta and Microsoft, but generally what you're seeing up and down the board.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. So it's really interesting. There was a study from Stanford that came out months ago that said AI, from what we can tell, is in fact taking jobs from younger workers. And that makes sense, because you still need people managing the AI agents, but if AI agents can do the work of more junior employees, then perhaps you need less of them. At the same time, we know that the way that AI is being rolled out at a lot of companies is not actually creating the efficiencies that people have expected, at least not yet. But I think having talked to a lot of people in Silicon Valley lately, both people who are affected by the layoffs, managers who are going all in on this kind of new AI forward company structure, that there is actually, and I hope I don't get completely taken down on the internet for this. I think that at least when we're talking about software companies, a lot of them are bloated in the AI era. I think that if you do AI correctly, you genuinely can have a single engineer who does a lot more than that person could previously do. And therefore, you might need fewer overall engineers, unless you want to, as a company, do a whole lot more things or roll out a bunch more products or whatever, which is also an option. And so I think we are going to see a lot of companies doing what Meta is doing. We already are. Amazon has taken similar steps, both because it looks good to investors. And I know that this is an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely do think it makes sense to restructure. If you can vibe code, say Shopify on a weekend with two really, really good engineers, why does Shopify need hundreds and hundreds of them? I don't want those people to lose their jobs, but frankly, I don't know. I do believe that.