"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).

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Timestamps:

0:00 Cold open

0:53 Welcome to Episode 15

5:53 Recursive's plan to build a self-improving "Eureka machine"

8:10 Token spend now exceeds headcount at the frontier

9:56 GPU crunch, Hopper prices, and the Anthropic-Colossus shockwave

12:23 Wispr Flow's 90% gross margin playbook

14:30 Running $100M in marketing with two humans and a swarm of agents

18:29 Reward hacking, paperclips, and the rise of the "reward engineer"

24:39 Why CEOs put one person in charge: multi-objective AI

28:17 Meta's 8,000 layoffs, $145B CapEx, Goldman vs. Stanford

33:23 "Nobody lost their job to AI, just the promise of AI"

37:57 Jevons paradox: software demand is infinite, illustrations aren't

39:48 Meta's keystroke monitoring and the back-channel reaction

42:55 Equity, Trump accounts, and rooting for your old employer

44:06 The Bloomberg/Indeed dev jobs chart

47:34 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 poor

1:00:46 Chinese models hit 9 trillion tokens, DeepSeek V4 Flash goes #1

1:03:04 Strange biases, Tiananmen Square, and the US open-source vacuum

1:05:07 Who they're hiring

🔗 Guests:

Erik Bernhardsson, Modal Labs: https://modal.com | https://x.com/bernhardsson

Tanay Kothari, Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai | https://x.com/tankots

Richard Socher, Recursive Superintelligence / You.com: https://recursive.com | https://x.com/RichardSocher

🔗 Referenced in this episode:

Modal Labs: https://modal.com

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai

Recursive Superintelligence launch: https://recursive.com

You.com: https://you.com

Anthropic / SpaceX Colossus 1 compute deal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-spacex

TechCrunch 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.com

Intuit cuts 3,000 jobs to fund AI integration: https://www.reuters.com

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon NYT op-ed on AI job loss: https://www.nytimes.com

Stanford study on entry-level AI-exposed jobs (-16%): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu

Pope Leo XIV: "AI needs to be disarmed": https://www.vatican.va

Chris Olah (Anthropic) on AI and the global poor: https://www.anthropic.com

OpenRouter token usage leaderboard: https://openrouter.ai/rankings

DeepSeek V4 Flash: https://www.deepseek.com

Qwen 3 Max (Alibaba): https://qwenlm.ai

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