Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram-parent Meta started alerting thousands of employees across the globe about layoffs. The company began notifying employees from Wednesday morning (may 20), starting reportedly with employees in Singapore who got the email at 4 am. Meta is not the only company to have announced AI-driven layoffs, other tech giants too have announced job cuts amid the AI boom, with Cisco recently saying that it would fire 4,000 employees. Software giant Intuit too is cutting 3,000 jobs. The thousands of layoffs at companies across industries has led to a debate on AI wiping out millions of jobs. There are CEOs who are predicting AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently told Axios that he believed AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, a move he said could cause unemployment to spike to between 10% and 20%.Joining the raging debate, American billionaire Mark Cuban wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that he does not agree with all the gloom and doom related to AI. The billionaire entrepreneur and former “Shark Tank” investor Cuban wrote, “I’m not a doomer or an AI at all. I think the nature of work, particularly entry level jobs will change. Ai will make business more complicated and competitive. Not less. Which means more layers where humans have to make decisions before the next process can happen. And there will be millions, if not more, local models. We will modify and train them for our lives and the businesses we create. Just leveraging the foundational models for things we don’t have access to. Maybe the new gig economy will be the models that represent our lives and the knowledge and experiences each one of us train those models on, and we get hired by companies for access to those models?”
Companies still have the AI Maths wrong
Interestingly, this is not the first time that Mark Cuban has challenged the narrative of AI taking away jobs. Cuban believes that artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed who gets to innovate. Earlier this year, Cuban took to X to respond to a viral clip from the All-In podcast, in which investors Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya shared the real-world expense of deploying AI agents to enhance productivity. In some cases AI agents are costing more than $300 per day—adding up to over $100,000 annually. For Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital, the price has forced him to rethink the budget he’s willing to give top developers, warning that otherwise, “I’ll run out of money.”Cuban said that these numbers are the “smartest counter” he has seen so far to predictions that AI will replace large numbers of employees – at least in the short term. He said that even if the technology is capable, companies still need to prove that economics make sense, and he’s not convinced the high price tag outweighs the value humans continue to bring. “Humans have a far greater capacity to know the outcomes of their actions,” Cuban said. “Agents, and LLMs as well, never do.”
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