I don't care about the drama and calls to boycott the company. But I find it interesting what top managers think about AI. And while I am in no way an expert, I am pretty certain that the above quote reveals a number of very important misunderstandings about the use of AI to replace employees.

First of all, there is the question how useful AI is and will be as an employee. A research institute on AI tried to test that, by creating a Remote Labor Index benchmark. It takes real world examples of jobs that have been posted on freelance platforms like Fiverr. It then compares how various LLM AI models perform in those jobs, compared to humans. In the paper the AI succeeds in only 2.5% of the time to do as well as a human freelancer, while in a later update with the latest LLM models it still doesn't get better than 3.75%, failing to complete over 96% of projects at a level that would be accepted as commissioned work in a realistic freelancing environment.

Will there be further progress in these LLM AI models? Most certainly! But there is already a lot of indicators saying that the progress is slowing down. If a future generation of LLM model with the help of even more data centers and computing power then manages to do 10% of tasks as good as a human freelancer, that is still not going to be good enough for companies to really replace employees by AI. And that is just for the type of work that is already identified as being very possible to do remotely, just with a computer. The "robo plumber" that comes to your house, identifies the problem with your faucet, and fixes it is still very much science fiction, and will be for at least decades to come.

The other big issue with the statement about the future of AI employees is the "few dollars a day" part. The current cost for users to use LLM models is not in any way even covering the cost to run them. And the cost to run them is increasing fast. AI is still very much in the honeymoon phase of the enshittification business process, where it is sold below cost to attract and bind users. Once the "winning" AI models have been identified and established a monopoly or oligopoly, the companies will substantially increase prices to get their trillion dollar investment back.

Will AI change the economy? Absolutely it will! But we aren't heading for a future where all of us are unemployed. We are heading for a future where most work that requires any manual part will be still done by humans, because even if an AI controlled robot can do it, that won't be cost efficient. And the type of office work that doesn't require a robot will be done by AI supervised by human handlers. While a LLM AI is not actually "intelligent", there are some tasks that it clearly can do faster and cheaper than a human, especially in the generation of text and images. But it has been shown that hallucinations are a fundamental part of the technology, and won't be fixed by future versions. So for any type of work output that somebody else then has to rely on, a human needs to verify the AI work, which often takes longer than the AI needed to produce it.

And now we come to the part nobody talks about: So-called bullshit jobs. In any large company, a significant percentage of the employees is doing work that isn't actually essential or useful to the companies bottom line. You don't want AI designing a bridge and rely on that bridge not crashing. You might want to use AI to make Powerpoint slides for internal company use, or to write long boring documents for some compliance paperwork task. The less actually useful your current job is now, the more likely you are to be replaced by AI in the future. And even then you might be promoted to AI handler, with an increased output of Powerpoint slides and paperwork that isn't essential. The future of AI is us working with cheap idiots that nobody trusts to do the real work, because for the real work the cost of verification is higher than letting the work be done by a human in the first place.