The haves and have nots of the AI gold rush; Also, if you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI
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Why are the current vibes around the AI boom feeling so negative?
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The vibes around the current AI boom are not great, even in the tech industry, according to a lengthy social media post from Minlo Ventures partner Didi Doss.
How big is the wealth gap between AI‑industry insiders and the rest of the workforce?
Doss described San Francisco as pretty frenetic right now, as the divide in outcomes is the worst that he's ever seen. Using a back of the envelope AI calculation, He projected that there are around 10,000 people, founders and employees at companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, that have hit retirement wealth of well above twenty million dollars, while everyone else worries well, they can work their well paying but sub five hundred K a year job for their whole life and never get there. Plus, layoffs are in full swing, and many software engineers feel that their life's skill is no longer useful, leading to confusion about the best career paths and a deep malaise about work and its future. This prompted some eye rolling on X, while entrepreneur Deva Hazarika argued that most of the people in the post are incredibly fortunate and can simply make a choice to be happy.
They Another user suggested it's pretty damn novel and also kind of nasty that in the current cycle the same technology is both the lottery ticket and the thing eating your fallback. Well, commencement season has come around again, and this year a couple of speakers have discovered that it's tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence. Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company,
What are tech workers saying about layoffs and the relevance of their skills?
gave a speech at the University of Central Florida, acknowledging that we're living in a time of profound change, which can be both exciting and daunting. She said, The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution, which prompted the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder, until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, What happened? She said, Okay, I struck a chord. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives, only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.
In Schmidt's case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. He has denied the allegations. According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage. But he got louder boos when he told students, you will help shape artificial intelligence.
Why are graduation speakers struggling to get students excited about AI?
The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, you can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. Now to be fair, AI isn't becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Wang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon's commencement, and he didn't seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has reinvented computing. Still, it's not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only forty-three percent of Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four said it's a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from seventy-five percent in twenty twenty two.
That pessimism is not solely a response to the rise of AI, a shift that even some software engineers are worried about, but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that for many students, AI has become the cruel new face of hyperscaling capitalism.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why are the current vibes around the AI boom feeling so negative?
0:02–0:50
2
How big is the wealth gap between AI‑industry insiders and the rest of the workforce?
0:50–2:21
3
What are tech workers saying about layoffs and the relevance of their skills?
2:21–3:36
4
Why are graduation speakers struggling to get students excited about AI?
3:36–4:58
5
How are students reacting when AI is mentioned in commencement speeches?
4:58–5:59
6
What does recent polling reveal about young Americans’ outlook on jobs and AI?
5:59–6:30
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from TechCrunch Industry News
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