You’ve probably seen the headlines: AI might be killing jobs for the young. A widely-shared academic paper – the “canaries in the coal mine” paper by Stanford colleagues – found a 16% employment decline for young workers (ages 22-25) in AI-exposed occupations since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The implication seems clear: AI is already eliminating the first rung of the career ladder, and we’re witnessing the beginning of a massive technological displacement.
It’s a compelling narrative, and it matches our fears. After all, if AI can write code and answer customer queries, why would companies hire junior people to do those things?
But a new paper from the Economic Innovation Group looks more carefully at the data. And when you do, the story becomes a lot less clear. The paper is by Zanna Iscenko (AI & Economy Lead, Chief Economist’s Team), and Fabien Curto Millet (Chief Economist), both at Google. — Read More
Recent Updates
Google’s Demis Hassabis, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei Debate the World After AGI
Introducing The Eleven Album
Today, ElevenLabs launches The Eleven Album, a landmark musical release created in collaboration with world-class artists and powered by Eleven Music, our model for generating fully original, studio-quality compositions.
Spanning rap, pop, R&B, EDM, cinematic scoring, and global sounds, the album brings together GRAMMY-winning legends, chart-topping producers, and next-generation creators to explore what’s possible when artists and AI create together. — Read More
The Man Behind Google’s AI Machine | Demis Hassabis Interview
Why We’ve Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969
Every decade brings new promises: this time, we’ll finally make software development simple enough that we won’t need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated with slow delivery and high costs. Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of software work. — Read More
The A in AGI stands for Ads
Here we go again, the tech press is having another AI doom cycle.
I’ve primarily written this as a response to an NYT analyst painting a completely unsubstantiated, baseless, speculative, outrageous, EGREGIOUS, preposterous “grim picture” on OpenAI going bust.
Mate come on. OpenAI is not dying, they’re not running out of money. Yes, they’re creating possibly the craziest circular economy and defying every economics law since Adam Smith published ‘The Wealth of Nations’. $1T in commitments is genuinely insane. But I doubt they’re looking to be acquired; honestly by who? you don’t raise $40 BILLION at $260 BILLION VALUATION to get acquired. It’s all for the $1T IPO. — Read More
ChatGPT users are about to get hit with targeted ads
An ongoing conversation — both within and outside of the tech community — has been about just how and when OpenAI, which is currently valued at $500 billion, will make money. Well, there’s one surefire way to do that, and that is through advertising. In the near term, that seems to be the AI giant’s plan, as it announced this week that limited ads are headed to certain ChatGPT users.
In a blog post published Friday, OpenAI said that it will begin testing ads in the U.S. for both its free and Go tiers. (Go accounts, which cost $8 a month, were introduced globally on Friday.) The company frames this as a way to sustain free access while generating revenue from people who aren’t ready to commit to a paid subscription. For the time being, the company’s more expensive paid tiers — Pro, Plus, Business, and Enterprise — will not be getting any ads. — Read More
Junior Developers in the Age of AI
For a long time, we were all hand-wringing over the shortage of software developers. School districts rolled out coding curriculums. Colleges debuted software “labs”. “Bootcamps” became a $700m industry.
Today, we have the opposite problem. Thousands of trained, entry-level engineers that no one wants to hire. — Read More
AI’s Way Cooler Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Vibe Graphs
The last generation of enterprise software became trillion-dollar platforms by owning what happened. Salesforce owns the customer record. Workday owns the employee record. SAP owns the operational record.
The next trillion-dollar opportunity? Owning what the vibe was when it happened.
We call this the vibes graph: a living record of ambient organizational sentiment, stitched across entities and time, so that vibe becomes queryable. — Read More
1X unveils 1XWM world model for NEO robot platform
1X Technologies has announced the integration of its new video-pretrained world model, 1XWM, into its NEO robot platform. This development targets robotics researchers, developers, and early adopters interested in advanced home robots that navigate and act with human-like understanding. The initial release is for a limited group, primarily for research and internal evaluation, with broader commercial deployment expected following further validation.
he 1XWM model represents a technical shift from conventional vision-language-action (VLA) models by using internet-scale video pretraining combined with egocentric human and robot data. This model predicts robot actions by generating text-conditioned video rollouts, which are then translated into motion commands through an Inverse Dynamics Model. Unlike prior approaches, this method does not require tens of thousands of robot demonstration hours, enabling faster adaptation to new tasks. — Read More
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