AI Reading for Saturday May 10

AI and jobs

Druce Vertes

May 10, 2025

Altman grilled on his statement that AI could replace up to 70% of jobs - PYMNTS.com

The Fed's Barr on AI and the labor market - Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Department of Labor dropped its investigation into Scale AI after easing contractor rules, and after favor-currying campaign - TechCrunch

CrowdStrike says it will cut 5% of staff, citing AI efficiencies - the Guardian

Re-upping my blog post on economics of AI and labor. - Druce.ai

It's a fool's paradise to say, AI improves productivity so workers will inevitably get more wages. To say otherwise is not necessarily a fallacy, or assume there’s a fixed amount of labor so robots take it away from humans (as Barr recognizes). As a thought experiment, if you can rent a humanoid robot that is a perfect substitute for a human, workers can't demand more wages than the rent of the robot.

Economic theory and history doesn't say productivity gets perfectly passed through to wages. In simplistic classical models, labor share of national income varies depending on whether capital is complementary to labor (more square production isocurves at the macro level, diminishing returns to capital alone) or a substitute (more linear). And in the real world also on policy, organized labor, political power, etc.

Indeed postings for software developers. Started before AI, when rates went up and high-PE public companies were afraid their stock was about to crash and cut devs to prop up earnings.

Tough market out there. - The Register

The Giants of Silicon Valley Face a Midlife Crisis Over AI - WSJ

Apple has made smart glasses with and without AR a priority, designing chips - The Verge

What to expect at Google I/O in 2 weeks - Google

What you missed at Google's record-breaking GenAI Intensive course - Google

AI Is Not Your Friend: overfitting to human labelers can result in suboptimal chatbot responses. - The Atlantic

Sam Altman's lunch with the FT: "Do you think you’re smarter than o3 right now? I don’t . . . and I feel completely unbothered, and I bet you do too" - FT

Lazy Sam Altman Hires New OpenAI "CEO" to Do All the Work for Him Without Having to Resign - Futurism

Normally it's the COO's job to do all the stuff the CEO doesn't want to do.

OpenAI is rolling out a new GitHub connector for ChatGPT's deep research agent. Enterprise clients can connect their private repos and devs can ask it how to implement features. - THE DECODER

Yoshua Bengio wants to teach AI the scientific method, generate hypotheses and test them, to increase safety. - TIME

Using AI to accelerate fusion research - Microsoft

“I'm a filmmaker who used AI to make a sci-fi film for under $300. I'm deeply conflicted about it.” - Business Insider

Elton John and Dua Lipa urge UK PM Starmer to back UK artists in AI copyright row

Figma announces new AI tools, encroaches on Canva and Adobe - The Verge

Gamma aims to free you from ‘death by PowerPoint’—with help from AI - Fast Company

You need an AI to tell you when to use what OpenAI model these days. (really, you need good evals to pick best cost/performance for your specific task) - MUO

OpenAI has a whole doc - OpenAI

You can ground your prompts with lots of examples, but it uses a lot of tokens on each request. So you might fine-tune your model with lots of examples and not have to stuff them into each prompt. But even better, combine the two by fine-tuning on ideal examples created by the LLM. - VentureBeat

Character.AI argues its bots are entitled to free speech - Mashable

Jim Fan shows Nvidia robots trained in a virtual world and also learning from humans.

Cool demo but I dunno, took a long time for self-driving cars to be ready for the real world. You have to regularize/discount some of these demos/claims. Most real humanoid robots walk like they shit their pants, can't jog a half-marathon, then they have to plan and interact with the real world. I kind of think mass-produced robots with on-screen avatars and wheels will need to work in the real world for quite a few years before the humanoid robots arrive in force.