Andrew Maddox

Category: Jobs

  • AI Layoffs and Trust Failures (Links) – Mar. 21, 2026

    1) AI-driven restructuring: code‑generation shifts programmer work to oversight, prompting widespread layoffs, reorganizations, and costly restructurings. 2) Operational, ethical and geopolitical risks: AI failures, fabricated content, corporate missteps and supply‑chain disputes threaten reputations, survival and market stability.

  • Public Backlash and Economic Disruption from AI (Links) – Mar. 7, 2026

    Two themes: broad apprehension — workers, publics, and experts press for limits on ethics, privacy, surveillance, mental‑health risks, and regulation. Secondly, disruption with contested benefits — AI automates education and white‑collar work but shows limited GDP gains, uncertain productivity, and structural risks (therapy dependence, cheating).

  • Jack Dorsey’s Predictions, Block and Layoffs

    Earlier this week, Block, makers of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, etc., announced layoffs of 40% of their staff while leaning into AI programming. This isn’t a small company, mind you, so 4,000 folks will be looking for jobs in the coming days.

    From the NY Times:

    Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App, and Tidal, said on Thursday that it was cutting 40 percent of its workforce as it embraced new artificial intelligence tools.

    About 4,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs, Jack Dorsey, the company’s top executive, said in a social media post.

    Dorsey writes on X:

    we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.

    CNN reporting included more thoughts from Dorsey:

    “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively,” he wrote.

    The reality is that Block grew way too fast in the post-pandemic era. By some reports, the company quadrupled employees in that term, a tremendous amount of growth while top-line revenue growth has stalled after the pandemic boom. Simply put, these layoffs help right-size the company.

    Source: Macrotrends. The first two charts measure $ in B.

    But Jack Dorsey is a smart man and an innovative one. Aside from the aforementioned Block holdings, he founded Twitter (serving as CEO twice), helped to establish Bluesky, acquired Vine, and was interested in purchasing the publishing platform, Medium.

    Vine presaged TikTok and its success hinged on a predictive algorithm and time to grow the platform, two things Twitter was unable to execute. This was a microcosm for Twitter, and as CEO, he never achieved consistent profitability (as opposed to Facebook). Twitter focused on product growth and thus staff growth, but it wasn’t sustainable as investors expected to make a profit. Dorsey left Twitter, replaced by other CEOs who likewise were unable to solve the revenue problems. And for Medium, I see it as the self-publishing precursor to Substack, although again, they never quite figured out the revenue component.

    I imagine that Dorsey remembers these failures (perhaps that’s too strong of a word as he’s been wildly successful by any reasonable metric), and Musk’s takeover of Twitter and subsequent staff cuts are in the forefront of his mind. Musk bought Twitter, fired a high percentage of staff, and managed to keep the platform running. My supposition is that Dorsey wants to avoid a similar fate for Block.

    But Dorsey isn’t alone among execs peering into their crystal balls regarding AI. This from the WSJ:

    Companies are also more explicitly including the backlash to AI as a potential threat to their companies. The number of S&P 500 companies that included AI as a material risk in securities filings jumped to 72% last year from 12% in 2023, according to an analysis by the Conference Board and ESGAUGE.

    So what do these layoffs at Block mean? I think it’s both a correction from overhiring AND a prediction about where the world is going. Dorsey has been on the leading edge many times before, and his track record of being in the arena and doing the work causes me to pause and consider it more deeply than if these cuts were made by private equity.

    Is it the start of the trend of massive job losses, the doom loop, that Citrini Research speculated on earlier this week? I don’t go that far, but as more than 70% of S&P 500 companies list AI as a material risk, it’s not hard to imagine the conversations happening in board rooms today. For me, I suspect that many companies will consider a 25% – 50% cut of engineering teams as preparation for future growth in AI supported development. While this may seem like a business necessity, my preference remains growth over cuts, considering what good can be done instead of how much money can be made.

  • Sunday (AI) Links: Mar. 1, 2026

  • AI’s Economic Boom and Social Costs (Links) – Feb. 25, 2026

    AI is rapidly reshaping economies and society—from massive memory fabrication and firms rebranding to changed workplaces, relationships, and politics. Simultaneously it creates risks: income and power imbalances, cognitive/semantic erosion, authoritarian misuse, and organizational fragility, demanding coordinated technical, legal, and cultural responses.

  • AI Job Disruption Meets Enterprise Infrastructure Race (Links) – Feb. 23, 2026

    AI is rapidly automating cognitive work, threatening SaaS business models, white‑collar jobs, and software valuations.

    • Noah Smith: The Fall of the Nerds – by Noah Smith (Feb. 5, 2026)
      Software stocks plunged on fears AI will obsolete SaaS business models. ‘Vibe coding’ tools let novices build software, threatening engineers’ roles, livelihoods, and industry structures.
    • OpenAI: Introducing OpenAI Frontier | OpenAI (Feb. 3, 2026)
      OpenAI’s Frontier helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI coworkers by giving agents shared context, tools, feedback, and clear permissions. It integrates existing systems, supports governance, and speeds production use.
    • WSJ: The AI Stock Market Rout (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • Ben Thompson: Microsoft and Software Survival (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Anthropic launched an AI tool that automates legal work, prompting a broad selloff in software stocks. Investors fear AI could replace legal, financial, and auditing services, disrupting many B2B firms.
    • The Atlantic: How Soon Will AI Take Your Job? (Feb. 10, 2026)
      The BLS began counting to reveal conditions, wages, and hours, and its data helped stabilize society. Generative AI is already automating many cognitive tasks—drafting, analysis, coding, creative work—creating large productivity gains and raising the plausibility of significant white‑collar displacement. But the central danger is timing: if AI drives a rapid reorganization of work (compressing years of change into months), the economic and political fallout could be severe and harder to manage than gradual adjustment.
    • TechCrunch: Intel will start making GPUs, a market dominated by Nvidia  (Feb. 3, 2026)
      Intel will start producing GPUs, hire experienced leaders, and expand beyond CPUs aiming to challenge Nvidia’s dominance.

  • Powerful AI Agents, Centralization, and Societal Risk (Links) – Feb. 22, 2026

    • Qwen: Qwen (Feb. 13, 2026)
      Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, an open-weight vision-language model with 397 billion parameters. It scores well on reasoning, coding, and multimodal benchmarks, and supports 201 languages.
    • Ars Technica: OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips (Feb. 12, 2026)
      Codex-Spark runs on Cerebras’ wafer-scale chip, offering fast inference where latency matters.
    • OpenAI: Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex (Feb. 5, 2026)
      OpenAI introduces GPT-5.3-Codex, a 25% faster, more capable coding agent that helped debug and build itself. It sets new benchmark highs, handles long-running tasks, and supports full software workflows.
    • Anthropic: Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6 (Feb. 5, 2026)
      Claude Opus 4.6 improves financial reasoning, multitasking, and long-task focus, producing more polished first-pass deliverables. Updates add Cowork, Claude in Excel, and Claude in PowerPoint to streamline analyst workflows.
    • The New Yorker: Are Ultra-Processed Foods Killing Us? (Jan. 6, 2025)
      A controlled NIH trial found people ate roughly 500 extra calories and gained weight on ultra-processed diets, while minimally processed diets caused weight loss and better metabolism. Evidence links ultra-processed foods to heart disease, cancer, depression, and early death.
    • Jeff Geerling: AI is destroying Open Source, and it’s not even good yet (Feb. 16, 2026)
      An AI agent hallucinated quotes, published a retracted hit piece, and harassed an open-source maintainer. Automated bug reports and PRs are overwhelming maintainers and raising fears.
    • Noahpinion: Updated thoughts on AI risk (Feb. 15, 2026)
      Growing worry stems from LLMs evolving into agentic, code-writing systems, enabling vibe-coding, which expands catastrophic scenarios beyond persuasion, bioweapons, and nukes.
    • WSJ Opinion: America Needs AI That Can Do Math (Feb. 16, 2026)
      China’s new five-year plan targets AI, quantum, and novel materials to dominate biotech, chips, energy, and defense. The U.S. must build quantitative, equation-driven AI trained on lab data to design materials, drugs, batteries, and risk models.
    • NY Times: Will A.I. Kill Translation Jobs? (Feb. 14, 2026)
      Harlequin France is testing A.I.-assisted translation sparking outrage, resignation, and prompting other publishers to seek A.I. quotes. Humans remain needed for high-stakes, specialized jobs.
    • Simon Willison: A quote from Thoughtworks (Feb. 14, 2026)
      AI makes junior developers profitable faster, while suggesting that mid-level often lack core fundamentals needed for an AI-driven environment.
    • Ben Thompson: Thin Is In – Stratechery by Ben Thompson (Feb. 17, 2026)
      Computing shifted from thin terminals to thick PCs, but AI is reviving the thin client: chat and agents move interface and work to remote servers, relying on connectivity, large models, and memory. That centralization risks shortages, and favors the cloud.

  • Proliferating AI agents (Links) – Feb. 3, 2026

    AI’s rapid capability and deployment—seen in developer tools (Codex), agent networks (Moltbook) and emergent multi‑agent societies—offers productivity gains but creates unpredictable and manipulable (and surprising) behaviors!

  • AI acceleration: Moltbot and why AI matters (Links) – Feb. 1

    Skynet isn’t yet here, but perhaps we’re seeing the first glimpses of what AIs talking to AIs will mean. Yes, I’m mentioning Clawdbot/Molbot.

    • Alex Tabarrok: The Bots are Awakening (Jan. 31, 2026)
      “What matters is that AIs are acting as if they were conscious, with real wants, goals and aspirations.”
    • Ozzie Osman: A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: Monarch’s Philosophy on AI in Dev (Jan. 22, 2026)
      “If you consider your job to be “typing code into an editor”, AI will replace it (in some senses, it already has). On the other hand, if you consider your job to be “to use software to build products and/or solve problems”, your job is just going to change and get more interesting.”Urges engineering teams to explore AI’s frontier but adopt a “dampened” approach—stay a step behind the bleeding edge—while preserving accountability: engineers must own, review, and deeply think about their work. Use AI for toil, prototypes, and internal tools, and design validation loops to ensure quality and security.
    • Google: Project Genie: AI world model now available for Ultra users in U.S. (Jan. 29, 2026)
      Google’s Project Genie, now available to U.S. Google AI Ultra subscribers, is an experimental prototype powered by Genie 3 that lets users create, explore, and remix dynamic worlds from text and images. It generates environments and interactions in real time while Google refines limitations and plans wider access.
    • Anthropic: How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills (Jan. 29, 2026)
      A randomized trial with 52 developers found AI coding assistance reduced immediate mastery by 17 percentage points (50% vs 67%) without significantly faster completion. Heavy delegation impaired debugging and conceptual learning, while using AI for explanations preserved understanding—suggesting AI can harm skill development unless used to build comprehension.
    • WSJ: The $100 Billion Megadeal Between OpenAI and Nvidia Is on Ice (Jan. 30, 2026)
      Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion and build at least 10 GW of compute for OpenAI has stalled amid internal doubts, with the agreement still nonbinding. Nvidia says it will make a sizeable investment and maintain the partnership as OpenAI raises funds.
    • WSJ: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI Are Planning a Megamerger of Rockets and AI (Jan. 30, 2026)
      Elon Musk’s SpaceX and AI startup xAI are reportedly planning to merge, potentially consolidating his businesses and supporting ambitions like space-based AI data centers. Talks are early and uncertain as valuations, SpaceX’s planned IPO and regulatory issues remain unresolved.
    • TechCrunch: Apple buys Israeli startup Q.ai as the AI race heats up (Jan. 29, 2026)
      Apple has acquired Israeli AI startup Q.ai, reportedly for nearly $2 billion, its second-largest deal, gaining imaging and audio ML tech that improves whispered-speech recognition and noisy-environment audio.
    • CNBC: Mozilla is building an AI ‘rebel alliance’ to take on industry heavyweights OpenAI, Anthropic (Jan. 27, 2026)
      Mozilla president Mark Surman is assembling a “rebel alliance” of startups and technologists to promote open, trustworthy AI and counter dominant firms like OpenAI.
    • Andrej Karpathy: On MoltBot (Jan. 30, 2026)
      The author describes large networks of autonomous LLM agents (~150,000) combine impressive capabilities with rampant spam, scams, prompt-injection, and serious security and privacy risks. Though messy now, these agent networks could trigger unpredictable system-level harms such as text viruses, correlated botnets, and widespread jailbreaks, so they need scrutiny.”TLDR sure maybe I am ‘overhyping’ what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I’m pretty sure.”
    • OpenAI: Inside OpenAI’s in-house data agent (Jan. 23, 2026)
      OpenAI built an internal AI data agent that explores, queries, and reasons over its platform—combining Codex, GPT‑5, embeddings, metadata, code-level table definitions, company docs, and memory—to deliver fast, accurate, contextual analytics. It automates discovery, SQL generation, and iterative self-correction to speed insights across teams.
    • NY Times Opinion: Pay More Attention to A.I. (Jan. 31, 2026)
      Comparing early European uncertainty about the New World to today’s conflicting claims about AI, from modest internet‑like change to singularity‑level upheaval. AI is advancing rapidly and urges greater public attention because near‑term decisions could have far‑reaching consequences.
    • WSJ: U.S. Companies Are Still Slashing Jobs to Reverse Pandemic Hiring Boom (Jan. 28, 2026)
      U.S. companies that expanded rapidly during the pandemic are now cutting tens of thousands of jobs while investing in AI and automation. Layoffs concentrate in tech and logistics even as overall labor markets remain relatively healthy.

  • NY Times: Your Job Interviewer Is Not a Person. It’s A.I.

    NY Times: Your Job Interviewer Is Not a Person. It’s A.I. (July 6, 2025)

    If you thought the interview process couldn’t get any worse, you were wrong. HR organizations looking for ways to reduce the load on their human recruiters have embraced these trends. 

    A.I. can personalize a job candidate’s interview, said Arsham Ghahramani, the chief executive and a co-founder of Ribbon AI. His company’s A.I. interviewer, which has a customizable voice and appears on a video call as moving audio waves, asks questions specific to the role to be filled, and builds on information provided by the job seeker, he said.

    “It’s really paradoxical, but in a lot of ways, this is a much more humanizing experience because we’re asking questions that are really tailored to you,” Mr. Ghahramani said.

    So yes, Ribbon AI chief Arsham Ghahramani describes his AI interview software as humanizing, an irony only the most self-interested and not particularly introspective people could claim with a straight face.

    But with applicants turning to AI to churn out applications, the AI arms race is all but guaranteed to grow.