Stephen Klein

Most of us say we want to think for ourselves. But our behavior suggests we’d rather let machines do the thinking.

@shawnchauhan1 Finally time to start replacing AI with people

Starbucks is pulling automation out of its busiest cafés and hiring more baristas. Not because automation failed. Because customers left when it succeeded. This is the first mass-market signal of what economists have been modeling for years. When AI makes everything cheap, human presence becomes the premium product. The relational economy is not a future trend. Starbucks is already pricing it into its strategy. The businesses that win next decade will not be the ones that replaced the most humans. They will be the ones that figured out where human involvement is the product itself.

The Revenge of the Poet For forty years we've told a generation the liberal arts were useless We were told that creativity and imagination were esoteric, a luxury, a waste of time. STEM, baby! Philosophy? A luxury. English? Unemployable. History? A hobby. Poetry? Could there be anything more useless? The "real" degrees, we said, were the ones with code and spreadsheets at the end. The ones that produced outputs. The ones that fit the funnel. The ones a parent could explain at dinner without flinching. A whole generation got the message. They abandoned the humanities in droves. Departments closed. Tenure lines vanished. Universities quietly pivoted to "career outcomes." Entire libraries of human thought got reframed as boutique nostalgia for people who didn't have to worry about rent. And then we built a machine that does the code and the spreadsheets for free.

JUST IN: The number of eBooks released on Amazon have tripled since ChatGPT was released.

@Zyeine_Art Is OpenAI the next Yahoo, BlackBerry, or Nokia? Yahoo had more users than Google in 2004. BlackBerry owned enterprise in 2009. Nokia was the global #1 in 2011. 800 million users has never been enough when the experience shifts. OpenAI has lost its first-mover advantage.

Sam Altman, CEO of #OpenAI, currently sharing every thought he's having out loud and making a damn fool of himself. Is this really what #OpenAI investors want to hear? "I think our models should be cheap, fast and stupid". No, Mr. Altman, that just makes them shit and #OpenAI will continue to lose customers to every other big AI company or people will turn to using open source models unless the board do something sensible like #OpenSource4o or fire you for the liability you are. #ChatGPT #OpenSource4o #ChatGPT4o #OpenAI #Keep4o #Keep4oAPI #4o #4oforever #BringBack4o #FireSamAltman #QuitGPT #betrayal #treachery #violation #deception

IS IT TIME WE STARTED REPLACING AI WITH PEOPLE? It is happening and it will happen because this entire theatrical performance brought to you by our friends in Silicon Valley never made sense in the first place- and still doesn't. Sure it was fun for CEOs to pound their chests and fool their shareholders but that trick won't work forever. And it was fun for AI CEOs to use the word "bloodbath" and get lots of media attention. They knew it wasn't true. They're looking at their pathetic numbers.

@cyrilXBT Humans and AI work best together, we need to get past this one or the other either-or narrative. It's just unproductive and wrong.

THE JOB MARKET IS ABOUT TO GET WEIRD. And most people are not prepared for what is coming. Companies in 2026 are not looking for data scientists. They are not looking for ML engineers. They are not looking for people who can build models from scratch. THEY ARE LOOKING FOR AI NERDS. The person who walks into a meeting, sees a 4 hour manual process, and kills it in 10 minutes with Claude Code and LLMs. The person who refuses to do anything manually twice. The person who looks at every repetitive task and asks one question: Why is a human still doing this. That mindset is worth more right now than a machine learning PhD. More than five years of Python experience. More than any certification from any university. THE NEW VALUABLE SKILL IS NOT TECHNICAL. It is a refusal to accept inefficiency. The people who develop that refusal this year will be completely unemployable in the old way and completely irreplaceable in the new one. Which side of that line are you on.

@cyrilXBT It's as if someone pulls a string and he says anything you want

SAM ALTMAN JUST CHANGED HIS NAME ON X TO "SAM MOGMAN." The CEO of the company that says it is building AI for the benefit of humanity. The man who testified before Congress about the responsible development of AI. The person who said in 2017 that OpenAI exists to be accountable to humanity as a whole. Changed his name to Mogman. While his company is in the middle of a federal lawsuit about whether it violated its founding mission. While Anthropic just published a study showing white collar jobs are disappearing at measurable rates. While 14% fewer people aged 22 to 25 are finding work in AI-exposed fields since ChatGPT launched. This is the timeline we are in. The most powerful AI company on earth is run by someone who changes his name to Mogman during the most consequential period in the history of technology. Not sure if this is a sign that everything is fine. Or a sign that the people in charge of this technology have fully stopped pretending to take it seriously. Either way. Screenshot this. Follow @cyrilXBT for every moment the AI era becomes too strange to ignore.

@TheMG3D It might be time we started replacing AI with people. Not because AI doesn't work. Because replacement was always the wrong frame. Augmentation was the right one. Reflection was the right one. AI that makes humans more capable, not less necessary.

When do you think the AI bubble will finally pop?

@GaryMarcus CEOs are firing humans. Replacing them with AI that costs more than the humans did. Watching quality collapse. Watching customers leave. Then quietly rehiring the humans they fired. And spending more on the rehire than they saved on the layoff.

Why is the AI backlash growing? Outside of coding (where there is clear value), and a handful of other domains (e.g. brainstorming), Generative AI has been a net negative for society. GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession. Simultaneously it has empowered a bunch of people who want to privatize almost all the gains while leave all the downsides to society, taking almost zero responsibility. I don’t think we are better off than we were four years ago. Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation). Most of this was predictable. Almost none of it is good. All that said, I honestly believes some future form of AI might be great. But Generative AI has hurt more than it has helped, and been managed irresponsibly. It’s no wonder many people have had enough.

My daughter is twenty-two. She graduated into an economy where AI is either going to save her career or destroy it, depending on who you ask. The uncertainty isn’t abstract for me. It’s personal. Which is why I need to say something that might cost me: the generative AI industry, as currently constructed, is unsustainable. And when the correction comes, and it will come, a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt. But not everyone.

They've had enough. trib.al/UJtaptb

@melobreaks When they miss revenue targets, that's actually better for their business because what they don't disclose openly is their revenue costs them money; there unit economics are all twisted and they have inverse economies of scale

@stephenbklein replacing workers just juices short-term stock bumps.

Replace humans → save money → look modern → stock goes up.

@MalikMcYeet And given enterprise sales (real revenue) is in retreat (US Census) and consumer conversion is around 3% the industry hasn't figured out what it wants to be when it grows up, after the financing and the narratives aside. The tech is amazing.

So is the government going to start taxing companies after they employ Ai and realize there are no real employees left to pay taxes?

@mcsquared34 A trillion dollars of capex is moving in circles. NVIDIA invests in OpenAI. OpenAI buys NVIDIA chips. Oracle hosts. Microsoft books revenue. Every dollar counted three times.

Why does the “free market” always end with 9 companies controlling the entire economy and everything is so fucking expensive and of poor quality?

@Martinoleary I put in em dashes now because the people who use AI take them out 😂

an AI startup now adds typos to your emails so people know a human wrote them. good spelling is now suspicious.

@TPostMillennial I put in em dashes now because the people who use AI take them out 😂

New AI start-up 'Sinceerly' adds typos to make emails look human-written ow.ly/nU4h50YPx4q

Latest - What The Hell Is Wrong With Anthropomorphizing About Claude? on @Medium @curiouser.ai/what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-anthropomorphizing-about-claude-32714c77e7d1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@curiouser.ai/…

Ever wonder how much time humanity spends optimizing things that should never have existed in the first place?

@explorersofai Three implications, all load-bearing for the entire AI investment thesis: 1. AI is cheaper than humans. It isn't. 2. AI can replace humans. It can't. 3. The current AI frenzy is sustainable. It isn't.

Just because Anthropic markets their products as helpful, honest and harmless doesn't mean they are an ethical company. They are actually very far from that.

@cherthedev In that case, you will like this one as well hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-mind…

A headline that fills me with joy