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

The AI jobs panic is here. Meta cut 8,000. Intuit cut 3,000. CapEx went up. Nobody can agree if anyone has actually lost a job to AI, or just to the promise of it. We dug into the GPU squeeze, the new craft of "reward engineering," Pope Leo's call to disarm AI, and why Chinese open-source models just blew past American ones in token usage.This week's roundtable: Erik Bernhardsson (CEO of Modal Labs, the serverless GPU cloud), Tanay Kothari (CEO of Wispr Flow, the voice dictation app every VC in the valley uses), and Richard Socher (CEO of Recursive Superintelligence and You.com).Thank you to our exclusive sponsor:PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: http://paypalopen.com/Timestamps:0:00 Cold open0:53 Welcome to Episode 155:53 Recursive's plan to build a self-improving "Eureka machine"8:10 Token spend now exceeds headcount at the frontier9:56 GPU crunch, Hopper prices, and the Anthropic-Colossus shockwave12:23 Wispr Flow's 90% gross margin playbook14:30 Running $100M in marketing with two humans and a swarm of agents18:29 Reward hacking, paperclips, and the rise of the "reward engineer"24:39 Why CEOs put one person in charge: multi-objective AI28:17 Meta's 8,000 layoffs, $145B CapEx, Goldman vs. Stanford33:23 "Nobody lost their job to AI, just the promise of AI"37:57 Jevons paradox: software demand is infinite, illustrations aren't39:48 Meta's keystroke monitoring and the back-channel reaction42:55 Equity, Trump accounts, and rooting for your old employer44:06 The Bloomberg/Indeed dev jobs chart47:34 Jason's pitch: hiring a 22-year-old AI-native "software valet"50:29 Pope Leo: "AI needs to be disarmed"57:41 Chris Olah on AI displacement and the global poor1:00:46 Chinese models hit 9 trillion tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash goes #11:03:04 Strange biases, Tiananmen Square, and the US open-source vacuum1:05:07 Who they're hiring🔗 Guests:Erik Bernhardsson, Modal Labs: https://modal.com | https://x.com/bernhardssonTanay Kothari, Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai | https://x.com/tankotsRichard Socher, Recursive Superintelligence / You.com: https://recursive.com | https://x.com/RichardSocher🔗 Referenced in this episode:Modal Labs: https://modal.comWispr Flow: https://wisprflow.aiRecursive Superintelligence launch: https://recursive.comYou.com: https://you.comAnthropic / SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-spacexTechCrunch on the $1.25B/month Anthropic-xAI compute deal: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/Meta's 8,000 layoffs and 2026 AI CapEx of $145B: https://www.reuters.comIntuit cuts 3,000 jobs to fund AI integration: https://www.reuters.comGoldman Sachs CEO David Solomon NYT op-ed on AI job loss: https://www.nytimes.comStanford study on entry-level AI-exposed jobs (-16%): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.eduPope Leo XIV: "AI needs to be disarmed": https://www.vatican.vaChris Olah (Anthropic) on AI and the global poor: https://www.anthropic.comOpenRouter token usage leaderboard: https://openrouter.ai/rankingsDeepSeek V4 Flash: https://www.deepseek.comQwen 3 Max (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.ai🔗 Subscribe and follow:Newsletter and all platforms: https://thisweekinai.ai#ThisWeekInAI #AI #ModalLabs #WisprFlow #Recursive #YouCom #DeepSeek #Qwen #MetaLayoffs #Anthropic #Colossus #PopeLeo #RewardHacking #AIJobs #OpenSource