More and more AI experts seem to believe that AI will cause job losses — at least in the short run.
Recently, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, appeared on the Nikhil Kamath podcast . During the conversation, Srinivas shared a somewhat bleak, though realistic, perspective on the short-term impacts of artificial intelligence on the labor market. He predicted significant job displacement, a shrinking need for large workforces even in highly valued companies, and the resulting challenges for new graduates and existing employees alike. His insights, while potentially unsettling, offer a crucial glimpse into the evolving dynamics of the modern workplace.
“A dystopian part of AI,” Srinivas began, “is unfortunately, in the short term, that there’s going to be a lot of labor displacement. Not as many people are needed to get work done anymore.” This stark observation underscores the growing efficiency of AI-powered tools and their potential to automate tasks previously performed by humans.
“You don’t need to build 10,000 people companies to be a trillion-dollar company anymore,” Srinivas said. “Definitely, the next generation of graduates getting jobs, existing big tech laying off people, or like not hiring more—all that stuff is definitely going to impact the market,” he added.
But Srinivas said that that it was up to people to make themselves valuable in these uncertain times. “So how people have to skill themselves and adapt — those who are using AIs are definitely going to be well-positioned,” he predicted.
“It’s very interesting that simultaneously it’s creating new value and making software creation easier, and we’re also displacing existing labor and value. So how people deal with all this is going to be interesting to watch, and I don’t think anyone really knows how it will play,” he said.
Aravind Srinivas isn’t the only AI leader who believes AI-created job losses are on the horizon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will disrupt white-collar and creative jobs first. Some companies have already cut back their hiring requirements — Klarna says it has stopped hiring humans because of AI, and Salesforce has said that it won’t hire hire any more software engineers this year because of gains they’re seeing from AI. Inmobi CEO Naveen Tewari has bluntly said that 80 percent of coding at the company will be automated, and engineers will lose jobs. Amid all this, Perplexity’s CEO has also said that AI will lead to job losses in the short term. It remains to be seen if these jobs are ever created again in the long term — and if they are, in which form — but for now, it’s likely that AI-related job cuts are fast approaching.