I don’t know if this bit of news has leaked into your world yet, but one of the Nvidia VPs just said AI is just too expensive to replace labor at scale.

And that horrible sound you’re hearing is the panicked screams of every single tech company that conducted mass employee layoffs in the name of replacing labor with AI. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

In all seriousness, last week, two major AI-related shifts came together like gasoline and lit matches. I’m gonna recap the gasoline and throw the first match. Then I’ll show you what the landscape will look like when the blaze burns out. And then I’ll show you how to build on the surprisingly fertile new ground.

It Would Have Been Good To Know The AI Costs Before All the Human Firings

One. As I wrote last week, it has become abundantly clear now that almost every single tech company that has conducted mass layoffs over the last few years has done so to accelerate the clearing of human overstock from the Great Labor Arms Race of the early 2020s to make financial shelf space for the Great AI Arms Race of the mid 2020s.

A ton of business leaders read those posts; they wrote in and almost universally agreed.

Two. The loss-leading economics of the Great AI Arms Race started to become much less opaque. And people who know better – like Nvidia guys who are financially incentivized to say the opposite – are starting to warn that AI-as-labor-replacement isn’t nearly as robust or inexpensive as it looks.

A ton of tech leaders keep telling me this isn’t getting nearly enough attention.

Well, now it is.

The AI-related mass layoffs in tech will end soon, if for no other reason than there’s just gonna be no one left to fire. CEOs pointing at empty desks and screaming “What about that guy? Can we fire that guy?”

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