Platformer

Three months ago, we began our podcast miniseries by asking how likely artificial intelligence is to take large numbers of jobs. Our first guest, Box CEO Aaron Levie, argued that mass disruption would be highly unlikely. And several subsequent guests, from Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to labor economist Kathryn Ann Edwards, expressed similar skepticism about a labor wipeout.

The argument has significant emotional appeal — who doesn’t want to believe that technology will create more jobs than it eliminates?

For our final episode, I wanted to speak with someone who has considered the problem from all the major perspectives we’ve covered here from the start: operator, software builder, and civic leader. And that wish led me to Clara Shih.

In our conversation, she lays out a three-way taxonomy for how AI reshapes a job, borrowed from MIT economist David Autor; predicts that one in five corporate roles is "especially going to be challenged"; explains why she disagrees with her nonprofit advisor Andrew Yang about universal basic income; and offers a hot take about who will actually do the legal, marketing, and accounting work of the future.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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For our penultimate episode, I wanted to visit someone running a version of that experiment in a somewhat unexpected place: the media business. Dan Shipper runs a website that reviews new technology alongside a product lab that’s building it — and for some time now I’ve wondered what it’s like to work in a place like that.

Today Every is a publication about AI that draws attention across the industry. At the same time, Every is also a product studio. But AI is changing the way that the company writes. Every has tried to clone the taste of its editor in chief, Kate Lee, by collecting a dataset of 30,000 of her historical edits, using it to build a copy-editing agent, and back-testing it against her past work.

More controversially, Shipper told me that far more writers are integrating AI into their workflows than will admit it publicly. "I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it,” he said. “Just, most of them are not saying so."

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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And everything else I learned about productivity this year.

Read the newsletter here: https://www.platformer.news/karpathy-llm-wiki-journalism-productivity/

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Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that within three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents — with the agents using apps on our behalf. For the fifth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I talked to someone building one of those agents.

Jean-Denis Greze is the co-founder and CEO of Town — though his actual title there is mayor. Town's signature bet is that you will not have a relationship with a piece of software so much as with a character. Your assistant — Town calls it a townie — gets a name, a personality, and an animal avatar; Greze's is a silver fox named Ivy, a nod to his prematurely gray hair. (Mine is a cheerful finch named Rufus.)

Within about 90 seconds of connecting my email and calendar, it had produced a scary-good dossier about who I am, who I know, and what I'm working on; over the first two weeks, it builds a private wiki about your life that Greze told me costs the company about $100 per user to generate.

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

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Last week on the Platformer podcast, Granola's Chris Pedregal told me we are only 5 percent into the AI transformation of work. For the fourth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, we talk to someone who is trying to speed up the process — building an AI tool for writing software, and a company that can increasingly run itself.

Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, which he started in 2016 with his wife, the designer Haya Odeh. Last month, Replit published a claim that caught my attention: that its engineers nearly tripled the amount of code each person ships in just six months, while preserving the quality of its code, thanks to the rollout of agents throughout the company.

After spending 15 years making coding easier to learn, he now tells people not to bother learning it at all. "As an entrepreneur, you have to be honest with yourself," he told me. "Otherwise the company would die."

Plus, Platformer fellow Ella Markianos joins at the top of the show to discuss this week's news about AI and jobs.

Sponsored by Atlassian Jira | Try Today. Jira.dev
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.