Brian Barrett

They're employed by a Dublin-based firm called Kovalin, which handles various content moderation and labeling service jobs for Meta.

And their job is to check the material generated by Meta AI models against the company's rules that bar dangerous and illegal stuff.

It's tough work, right?

It's tough both for what it is and also the realization that while you're doing it, you're basically training AI to take over your job, right?

It is a job that is designed to be obsolete as soon as you do it well enough.

I think that's absolutely right.

I think a couple other things are happening, too.

One, yes, people are genuinely losing their jobs because it's more efficient to work with AI instead of coders and engineers, which is a shame.

But as I said, it's just the reality of it.

Two, which we talked about before, a lot of these companies way overhired in the COVID and post-COVID era.

And so a lot of this is kind of correcting, bringing employment levels back down closer to where they were before.

pre-COVID and using AI as kind of a blanket for that.

But then three, I also think, you know, a lot of these companies like Meta, like the big hyperscalers, have to spend so much money on data centers and other infrastructure.

In some ways, it's a little bit less that we're going to have AI efficiency is going to make these jobs obsolete as we need to use that money to buy compute.

Like, instead of salaries...

Not if Bernie Sanders wins them all.

But I think there's a certain, like, it's a trade-off.

Like, these companies, it feels like they have infinite money sometimes, but they don't.

And they have to make choices about where they spend and how they're going to allocate their resources.

And right now, it's in chips and data centers, not people.