The hed here is a bit misleading … 40% of total staff is not 40% of an individual job.
Jack Dorsey cited AI as the driving force behind cutting 40% of his company’s employees, but other factors such as a weak crypto market, overstaffing and a declining stock price may also have motivated the move.
Last week, the financial technology company Block announced that it would lay off 4,000 of its 10,000 workers. Dorsey, Block’s CEO, said in a letter to shareholders that advances in AI “have changed what it means to build and run a company”.
“We’re already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better. And intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week,” he wrote. He also said that Block’s business remained strong and that these cuts weren’t an austerity measure.
Can AI operate 40% of a business? Perhaps, but other specters haunt Dorsey’s company.
I’d be surprised if LLMs can handle 40% of anyone’s job. You know what often can? Good, old-fashioned automation. It handles tedious tasks no one wanted to do in the first place and produces improved, predictable and testable results.
AI could replace CEOs. As soon as you throw that out there, all the CEOs are like “woah now, hold on, you’re taking it a bit too far…”
AI is a rich asshole’s wet dream. An employee that will work 24/7, doesn’t require benefits or PTO, and can complete a task faster? They’re all in.
I’m really not sure what kind of world they want but I see patterns:
🤔 Seems like they want the poor class to either be enslaved or dead. They’re going to turn the US into Gaza. A captured audience that either works for peanuts and owns nothing, or dies off and is no longer a burden on the rich.
I mean… Yeah, woah. Imagine an AI CEO taking decisions while being even more immune to accountability than a human CEO.