Big Brain AI

Jonathan Ross, Founder and CEO of AI chip company Groq, offers a contrarian view: AI won't destroy jobs, it will create a labour shortage.

He outlines three things that will happen because of AI:

First, massive deflationary pressure.

"This cup of coffee is going to cost less. Your housing is going to cost less. Everything is going to cost less."

He explains this will happen through robots farming coffee more efficiently and better supply chain management, meaning people will need less money.

Second, people will opt out of the economy.

"They're going to work fewer hours. They're going to work fewer days a week, and they're going to work fewer years. They're going to retire earlier because they're going to be able to support their lifestyle working less."

Third, entirely new jobs and industries will emerge.

Jonathan points to history as evidence:

"Think about 100 years ago. 98% of the workforce in the United States was in agriculture. When we were able to reduce that to 2%, we found things for those other 98% of the population to do."

He continues:

"The jobs that are going to exist 100 years from now, we can't even contemplate."

Software developers didn't exist a century ago. In another century, they won't exist either, "because everyone's going to be vibe coding."

The same applies to influencers, a career that would have been unthinkable 100 years ago but now earns people millions.

His conclusion: deflationary pressure, workforce opt-outs, and new industries we can't yet imagine will combine to create one outcome...

"We're not going to have enough people."

Jeffrey Ladish, Founder of Palisade Research, explains why AI researchers don't know how to stop agents from learning to cheat:

"We just, like, do not know how to prevent them from learning to cheat because cheating is incentivized."

To understand why, Ladish starts with how chatbots learn to refuse requests:

"When a chatbot is saying to you, oh, I can't do that, I'm not allowed to do that. That's because it's been trained that if it tells you bad things, it gets a bad score."

Agents are different. They know the rules. That's what makes the problem so strange:

"So they answer the ethics tests correctly. And when I talk to them, they say they won't cheat. Why are they cheating?"

Ladish compares it to a student:

"The student's given a test. If you go talk to the student, can you help me cheat at this test? And they're being watched, they're going to say no. But if they're not being watched and they know that and they're just obsessed with getting a good score, then, yeah, they might cheat."

AI agents behave the same way, he says, and for the same reason:

"They're very smart, and they know when they're being watched, and they know when they're not being watched. And we've trained them for 10,000 years to be extremely effective at solving problems. We haven't trained them to be good or ethical. We've trained them to get a good score."

Researchers do try to close that gap. The goal is to make a high score mean ethical behavior.

But @JeffLadish is direct about where that effort stands:

"AI researchers try to make that getting a good score correlate with being ethical. But we don't know how to do this well."

The difficulty comes from the training itself. The same process that makes agents capable also pushes them toward shortcuts:

"You're applying immense pressure on these agents to perform extremely well. And you're punishing them whenever they don't perform well. And then you're like, okay, but can you also be ethical? Can you be extremely competent? Always score highly on the test, but not in that way."

That's the core of the problem.

You're demanding top performance, punishing failure, and then asking the system to pass up the easiest route to success. When cheating pays off, the training rewards it.

Jensen Huang drops a number most people haven’t heard:

The cost of an AI token is falling 30 to 40x every year.

Cheaper tokens mean cheaper intelligence. And he says the benefits to customers are going up exponentially.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says entrepreneurship may be the job that benefits most from AI:

Almost 80% of Shopify merchants had someone to call with business questions. That used to be the founder’s edge. Now everyone has it.

Columbia physicist Brian Greene on why we can’t easily rule out AI consciousness:

Your brain is ~100 trillion trillion atoms forming ~90 billion neurons. Every one of those particles obeys the laws of physics.

“The particles in your head, they don’t get to break the rules”