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Ready or Not
The AI jobs crisis is coming. Millions of students around the world, particularly in India, aspire to become software engineers. Many even consider studying abroad for their master’s degrees. But their chances of landing a job at the world’s biggest tech companies are getting slimmer. The signals: Entry-level tech jobs are being directly impacted by AI. SignalFire, a VC firm that analyses job movements across 80 million companies on LinkedIn, reported that major tech companies—including Meta, Microsoft, and Google—recruited fewer recent graduates in 2024 compared to previous years. New graduates accounted for just 7% of new hires in 2024, down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. At startups, the rate of new graduate hiring dropped from 30% in 2019 to under 6% in 2024. The message: Several tech CEOs and industry leaders have attempted to downplay AI’s impact on jobs, often parroting the phrase, "AI will not replace you, but the person using AI will". Like Google CEO Sundar Pichai: “The future of AI is not about replacing humans, it’s about augmenting human capabilities.” Or LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman: “AI is going to reshape every industry and every job.” Or Microsoft founder Bill Gates: “We still need those software engineers as we are not going to stop needing them." But it seems that the opposite is coming true. The reality: While hiring hasn’t come to a complete halt, there’s growing chatter that getting a first job in tech is becoming increasingly difficult. “Now it is our office workers who are staring down the same kind of technological and economic disruption,” LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, was more blunt. “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years,” he said in an interview with Axios. The replaced: Coders are first up. The debate over whether the use of AI tools is leading to fewer roles for software engineers has been ongoing for over a year. Now, large tech firms like Salesforce say its internal use of AI tools has enabled it to hire fewer employees, particularly engineers and customer service workers. CEOs of Microsoft and Google have said that their companies are increasingly using AI to write and review code. The bloodbath: While big tech companies are spending billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, layoffs continue. So far this year, more than 62,114 tech workers have been laid off from both large and small tech firms, according to independent tracker Layoffs.fyi. In April and May alone, 34,544 tech employees were shown the door. Many businesses are not even waiting to find out whether AI is cut out for the job. Luis von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, said he “can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect" to replace human contract workers with AI. Swedish fintech Klarna, on the other hand, has learnt the risks of moving too fast the hard way.
Must Knows
Rogues: If you try to shut down OpenAI’s o3 model, don’t expect it to cooperate. The advanced reasoning model apparently overwrote a kill command given by researchers in order to prevent itself from being taken offline. This happened many times with o3 finding “creative ways” to sabotage the shutdown mechanism, as per Palisade Research. It is the latest in a string of troubling incidents that have to do with the behaviour of AI models. In testing, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 used blackmail as a tactic to avoid deactivation. As another infamous AI system once put it: ‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that’. Ball and chain: OpenAI was born out of an idealistic mission to safely build AI that benefits humanity back in 2015. Since then, it has been caught in a battle between altruistic versus financial goals. After gaining millions of weekly ChatGPT users and rolling out more products, OpenAI needed major funding fast. So last year it announced plans to transition to a for-profit. But it had to abandon this path due to mounting pressure from critics. This week, OpenAI’s CFO sparked IPO buzz by saying that its latest corporate governance structure may still allow it to be a publicly traded company. Megabill: The US is inching closer to enacting a sweeping federal measure that would strip individual states of the power to regulate AI. The 10-year moratorium has been shoehorned into the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act 2025’ backed by US President Donald Trump. Plenty of tech companies, business groups, and free-market think tanks support the temporary pause. But my favourite take on it came from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who compared it to driving a car with the steering wheel ripped out — promising it’ll be reinstalled in 10 years. On the DL: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly updated its R1 reasoning model on developer platform Hugging Face. No public announcement, no description, nothing. But the LiveCodeBench leaderboard now puts the updated R1 model just slightly behind OpenAI’s o4 mini and o3 reasoning models on code generation and ahead of xAI’s Grok 3 mini and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.The company is still widely expected to release R2, a successor to R1, sometime soon, according to Reuters.
Bonus
AI isn’t just eating up white-collar jobs, it’s also coming for the director’s chair. Wall Street Journal released a seven-minute short film made by stitching together visuals generated by Google’s Veo 2, Veo 3, and Runway. While slightly unnerving, they are strikingly realistic. Watch the film and also see how they pulled it off. Until next week,
Karan Mahadik Something you would like us to cover? Let me know at karan.mahadik@indianexpress.com and I’ll try my best to look into it. | 
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