There will be no AI jobpocalypse. The story that AI will lead to massive unemployment is stoking unnecessary fear. AI — like any other technology — does affect jobs, but telling overblown stories of large-scale unemployment is irresponsible and damaging. Let’s put a stop to it. I’ve expressed skepticism about the jobpocalypse in previous posts. I’m glad to see that the popular press is now pushing back on this narrative. The image below features some recent headlines. Software engineering is the sector most affected by AI tools, as coding agents race ahead. Yet hiring of software engineers remains strong! So while there are examples of AI taking away jobs, the trends strongly suggest the net job creation is vastly greater than the job destruction — just like earlier waves of technology. Further, despite all the exciting progress in AI, the U.S. unemployment rate remains a healthy 4.3%. Why is the AI jobpocalypse narrative so popular? For one thing, frontier AI labs have a strong incentive to tell stories that make AI technology sound more powerful. At their most extreme, they promote science-fiction scenarios of AI “taking over” and causing human extinction. If a technology can replace many employees, surely that technology must be very valuable! Also, a lot of SaaS software companies charge around $100-$1000 per user/year. But if an AI company can replace an employee who makes $100,000 — or make them 50% more productive — then charging even $10,000 starts to look reasonable. By anchoring not to typical SaaS prices but to salaries of employees, AI companies can charge a lot more. Additionally, businesses have a strong incentive to talk about layoffs as if they were caused by AI. After all, talking about how they’re using AI to be far more productive with fewer staff makes them look smart. This is a better message than admitting they overhired during the pandemic when capital was abundant due to low interest rates and a massive government financial stimulus. To be clear, I recognize that AI is causing a lot of people’s work to change. This is hard. This is stressful. (And to some, it can be fun.) I empathize with everyone affected. At the same time, this is very different from predicting a collapse of the job market. Societies are capable of telling themselves stories for years that have little basis in reality and lead to poor society-wide decision making. For example, fears over nuclear plant safety led to under-investment in nuclear power. Fears of the “population bomb” in the 1960s led countries to implement harsh policies to reduce their populations. And worries about dietary fat led governments to promote unhealthy high-sugar diets for decades. Now that mainstream media is openly skeptical about the jobpocalypse, I hope these stories will start to lose their teeth (much like fears of AI-driven human extinction have). Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! AI will lead to a lot more good AI engineering jobs, and I’m also optimistic about the future of the overall job market. What AI engineers do will be different from traditional software engineering, and many of these jobs will be in businesses other than traditional large employers of developers. In non-AI roles, too, the skills needed will change because of AI. That makes this a good time to encourage more people to become proficient in AI, and make sure they’re ready for the different but plentiful jobs of the future! [Original text in The Batch newsletter.]

I'm delighted that @coursera and @udemy have come together as one company to serve learners. Both Coursera and Udemy were founded with the belief that access to high-quality education changes lives. Over the years, both companies have advanced this goal, creating opportunities for individuals, organizations, and communities around the world. That role is even more important now, as AI is changing the nature of work and increasing the need for continuous learning. Helping people build job-relevant skills will be critical to how we create a better world. By combining the strengths of both ‌companies, we can better serve this need. We bring together a broader range of learning content, trusted instructors and educators, and engaging learning experiences. This creates new opportunities to make learning more personalized, more applied, and more accessible at scale. I’m excited to serve as Chairman of the combined company, working alongside Greg Hart and the leadership team. There is a strong foundation in both organizations, and I look forward to what the teams will build together to expand access opportunity globally. Learn more:

New course: Build agents that respond to users with not only plaintext, but custom UIs like charts, forms, and whiteboards, generated on demand and displayed right in the chat. This short course is built in partnership with @CopilotKit and taught by @ataiiam, co-founder of CopilotKit. You'll learn three approaches: Your agent can pick from custom components you build, like charts and forms. It can compose new layouts from a set of building blocks you provide, like rows, cards, and text. Or it can incorporate existing third-party apps, like a whiteboard or a calendar, right inside the conversation. Skills you’ll gain: - Build agents that render custom components like charts and forms on demand - Build an app where the agent and user collaborate on shared data, beyond just the chat window - Place third-party apps like maps, calendars, and whiteboards right in your interface Join and build agents that give users something to see and act on!

Coding agents are accelerating different types of software work to different degrees. When we architect teams, understanding these distinctions helps us to have realistic expectations. Listing functions from most accelerated to least, my order is: frontend development, backend, infrastructure, and research. Frontend development — say, building a web page to serve descriptions of products for an ecommerce site — is dramatically sped up because coding agents are fluent in popular frontend languages like TypeScript and JavaScript and frameworks like React and Angular. Additionally, by examining what they have built by operating a web browser, coding agents are now very good at closing the loop and iterating on their own implementations. Granted, LLMs today are still weak at visual design, but given a design (or if a polished design isn’t important), the implementation is fast! Backend development — say, building APIs to respond to queries requesting product data — is harder. It takes more work by human developers to steer modern models to think through corner cases that might lead to subtle bugs or security flaws. Further, a backend bug can lead to non-intuitive downstream effects like a corrupted database that occasionally returns incorrect results, which can be harder to debug than a typical frontend bug. Finally, although database migrations can be easier with coding agents, they’re still hard and need to be handled carefully to prevent data loss. While backend development is much faster with coding agents, they accelerate it less, and skilled developers still design and implement far better backends than inexperienced ones who use coding agents. Infrastructure. Agents are even less effective in tasks like scaling an ecommerce site to 10K active uses while maintaining 99.99% reliability. LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make, so I rarely trust them for critical infra decisions. Building good infrastructure often requires a period of testing and experimentation, and coding agents can help with that, but ultimately that’s a significant bottleneck where fast AI coding does not help much. Lastly, finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise. Thus, I’ve found that coding agents accelerate critical infrastructure even less than backend development. Research. Coding agents accelerate research work even less. Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code. (I also use coding agents to help me orchestrate and keep track of experiments, which makes it easier for a single researcher to manage more experiments.) But there is a lot of work in research other than coding, and today’s agents help with research only marginally. Categorizing software work into frontend, backend, infra, and research is an extreme simplification, but having a simple mental model for how much different tasks have sped up has been useful for how I organize software teams. For example, I now ask front-end teams to implement products dramatically faster than a year ago, but my expectations for research teams have not shifted nearly as much. I am fascinated by how to organize software teams to use coding agents to achieve speed, and will keep sharing my findings in future posts. [Original text: ]

How we prompt AI is very different in 2026 than 2022 when ChatGPT came out. I'm teaching a new course, AI Prompting for Everyone, to help you become an AI power user — whatever your current skill level. It covers skills that apply across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools. How to use deep research mode for well-researched reports on complex questions. How to give AI the right context, including more documents and images than most people realize you can provide. When to ask AI to think hard for several minutes on important decisions like what car to buy, what to study, or what job to take. And how to use AI to generate images, analyze data, and build simple games and websites. I also cover intuitions about how these models work under the hood, so you know when to trust an answer and when not to. Along the way, you'll see flying squirrels, a creativity test, some of my old family photos, and fireworks. Join me at

AI-native software engineering teams operate very differently than traditional teams. The obvious difference is that AI-native teams use coding agents to build products much faster, but this leads to many other changes in how we operate. For example, some great engineers now play broader roles than just writing code. They are partly product managers, designers, sometimes marketers. Further, small teams who work in the same office, where they can communicate face-to-face, can move incredibly quickly. Because we can now build fast, a greater fraction of time must be spent deciding what to build. To deal with this project-management bottleneck, some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) some teams are pushing engineer:product manager (PM) ratios downward from, say, 8:1 to as low as 1:1. But we can do even better: If we have one PM who decides what to build and one engineer who builds it, the communication between them becomes a bottleneck. This is why the fastest-moving teams I see tend to have engineers who know how to do some product work (and, optionally, some PMs who know how to do some engineering work). When an engineer understands users and can make decisions on what to build and build it directly, they can execute incredibly quickly. I’ve seen engineers successfully expand their roles to including making product decisions, and PMs expand their roles to building software. The tech industry has more engineers than PMs, but both are promising paths. If you are an engineer, you’ll find it useful to learn some product management skills, and if you’re a PM, please learn to build! Looking beyond the product-management bottleneck, I also see bottlenecks in design, marketing, legal compliance, and much more. When we speed up coding 10x or 100x, everything else becomes slow in comparison. For example, some of my teams have built great features so quickly that the marketing organization was left scrambling to figure out how to communicate them to users — a marketing bottleneck. Or when a team can build software in a day that the legal department needs a week to review, that’s a legal compliance bottleneck. In this way, agentic coding isn’t just changing the workflow of software engineering, it’s also changing all the teams around it. When smaller, AI-enabled teams can get more done, generalists excel. Traditional companies need to pull together people from many specialties — engineering, product management, design, marketing, legal, etc. — to execute projects and create value. This has resulted in large teams of specialists who work together. But if a team of 2 persons is to get work done that require 5 different specialities, then some of those individuals must play roles outside a single speciality. In some small teams, individuals do have deep specializations. For example, one might be a great engineer and another a great PM. But they also understand the other key functions needed to move a project forward, and can jump into thinking through other kinds of problems as needed. Of course, proficiency with AI tools is a big help, since it helps us to think through problems that involve different roles. Even in a two-person team, to move fast, communication bottlenecks also must be minimized. This is why I value teams that work in the same location. Remote teams can perform well too, but the highest speed is achieved by having everyone in the room, able to communicate instantaneously to solve problems. This post focuses on AI-native teams with around 2-10 persons, but not everything can be done by a small team. I'll address the coordination of larger teams in the future. I realize these shifts to job roles are tough to navigate for many people. At the same time, I am encouraged that individuals and small teams who are willing to learn the relevant skills are now able to get far more done than was possible before. This is the golden age of learning and building! [Original text: ]

New course: Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents, built in partnership with @jetbrains, and taught by @paulweveritt. Vibe coding is fast, but often produces code that doesn't match what you asked for. This short course teaches you spec-driven development: write a detailed spec defining what to build, and work with your coding agent to implement it. Many of the best developers already build this way. A spec lets you control large code changes with a few words, preserve context across agent sessions, and stay in control as your project grows in complexity. Skills you'll gain: - Write a detailed specification to define your mission, tech stack, and roadmap, giving your agent the context it needs from the start - Plan, implement, and validate features in iterative loops using a spec as your agent's guide - Apply the same repeatable workflow to both new and legacy codebases - Package your workflow into a portable agent skill that works across agents and IDEs Join and write specs that keep your coding agent on track!

I'm excited about voice as a UI layer for existing visual applications — where speech and screen update together. This goes well beyond voice-only use cases like call center automation. The barrier has been a hard technical tradeoff: low-latency voice models lack reliability, while agentic pipelines (speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech) are intelligent but too slow for conversation. Ashwyn Sharma and team at Vocal Bridge (an AI Fund portfolio company) address this with a dual-agent architecture: a foreground agent for real-time conversation, a background agent for reasoning, guardrails, and tool calls. I used Vocal Bridge to add voice to a math-quiz app I'd built for my daughter; this took less than an hour with Claude Code. She speaks her answers, the app responds verbally and updates the questions and animations on screen. Only a tiny fraction of developers have ever built a voice app. If you'd like to try building one, check out Vocal Bridge for free:

As AI agents accelerate coding, what is the future of software engineering? Some trends are clear, such as the Product Management Bottleneck, referring to the idea that we are more constrained by deciding what to build rather than the actual building. But many implications, like AI’s impact on the job market, how software teams will be organized, and more, are still being sorted out. The theme of our AI Developer Conference on April 28-29 in San Francisco is The Future of Software Engineering. I look forward to speaking about this topic there, hearing from other speakers on this theme, and chatting with attendees about it. We’re shaping the future, and I hope you will join me there! It is currently trendy in some technology and policy circles to forecast massive job losses due to AI. Even if they have not yet materialized, these losses certainly must be just over the horizon! I have a contrarian view that the AI jobpocalypse — the notion that AI will lead to massive unemployment, perhaps even rioting in the streets — won’t be nearly as bad as dire forecasts by pundits, especially pundits who are trying to paint a picture of how powerful their AI technology is. Among professions, AI is accelerating software engineering most, given the rise of coding agents. According to a new report by Citadel Research, software engineering job postings are rising rapidly. So if software engineering is a harbinger of the impact AI will have on other professions, this expansion of software engineering jobs is encouraging. Yes, fresh college graduates are having a hard time finding jobs. And yes, there have been layoffs that CEOs have attributed to AI, even if a large fraction of this was “AI washing,” where businesses choose to attribute layoffs to AI, even though AI has not changed their internal operations much yet. And yes, there is a subset of job roles, such as call center operator, that are more heavily impacted. Many people are feeling significant job insecurity, and I feel for everyone struggling with employment, whether or not the cause is AI-related. And many other factors, such as over-hiring during the pandemic and high interest rates, have contributed to the slowdown in the labor market, and the notion that AI is leading to unemployment is oversimplified. In software engineering, I see a lot of exciting work ahead to adapt our workflows. It is already clear that: (i) As AI makes coding easier, a lot more people will be doing it. (ii) Writing code by hand and even reading (generated) code is not that important, because we can ask an LLM about the code and operate at a higher level than the raw syntax (although how high we can or should go is rapidly changing). (iii) There will be a lot more custom applications, because now it’s economical to write software for smaller and smaller audiences. (iv) Deciding what to build, more than the actual building, is becoming a bottleneck. (v) The cost of paying down technical debt is decreasing (since AI can refactor for you). At the same time, there are also a lot of open questions for our profession, such as: - In the future, what will be the key skills of a senior software engineer? And for junior levels, what should be the new Computer Science curriculum? - If everyone can build features, what skills, strategies, or resources create competitive advantage for individuals and for businesses? - What are the new building blocks (libraries, SDKs, etc.) of software? How do we organize coding agents to create software? - What should a software team look like? For example, how many engineers, product managers, designers, and so on. What tooling do we need to manage their workflow? - How do AI agents change the workflow of machine learning engineers and data scientists? For example, how can we use agents to accelerate exploring data, identifying hypotheses, and testing them? I’m excited to explore these and other questions about the future of software engineering at AI Dev. I expect this to be an exciting event. Please join us! [Original text: The Batch newsletter.]

New course: Efficient Inference with SGLang: Text and Image Generation, built in partnership with LMSys @lmsysorg and RadixArk @radixark, and taught by Richard Chen @richardczl, a Member of Technical Staff at RadixArk. Running LLMs in production is expensive, and much of that cost comes from redundant computation. This short course teaches you to eliminate that waste using SGLang, an open-source inference framework that caches computation already done and reuses it across future requests. When ten users share the same system prompt, SGLang processes it once, not ten times. The speedups compound quickly, especially when there's a lot of shared context across requests. Skills you'll gain: - Implement a KV cache from scratch to eliminate redundant computation within a single request - Scale caching across users and requests with RadixAttention, so shared context is only processed once - Accelerate image generation with diffusion models using SGLang's caching and multi-GPU parallelism Join and learn to make LLM inference faster and more cost-efficient at scale!

The anti-AI coalition continues to maneuver to find arguments to slow down AI progress. If someone has a sincere concern about a specific effect of AI, for instance that it may lead to human extinction, I respect their intellectual honesty, even if I deeply disagree with their position. However, I am concerned about organizations that are surveying the public to find whatever messages will turn people against AI, and how the public reacts as these messages are spread by lobbyists or by politicians seeking to alarm constituents, companies pursuing regulatory capture or seeking to promote the power of their technology, and individuals seeking to gain attention or to profit by being provocative. A large study (link in original article below; h/t to the AI Panic blog) by a UK group tested different messages that are designed to raise alarm about AI. Their study found that saying AI will cause human extinction has largely failed. Doomsayers were pushing this argument a couple of years ago, and fortunately our community beat it back. But AI-enabled warfare and environmental concerns resonate better. We should be prepared for a flood of messages (which is already underway) arguing against AI on these grounds. Further, job loss and harm to children are messages that motivate people to act. To be clear, I find AI-enabled warfare alarming; we need to continue serious efforts to monitor and mitigate the environmental impact of AI; any job losses are tragic and hurt individuals and families; and as a father, I hold dearly the importance of every child’s welfare. Each of these topics deserves serious attention and treatment with the greatest of care. But when anti-AI propagandists take a one-sided view of complex issues to benefit their own organizations at the expense of the public at large — for instance, when big AI companies argue that AI is dangerous to block the free distribution of open source projects that compete with their offerings — then we all lose. For example, public perception of data centers’ environmental impact is already far worse than the reality — data centers are incredibly efficient for the work they do, and hampering their buildout will hurt rather than help the environment. While job loss is a real problem, the “AI washing” of layoffs — in which businesses that had over-hired during the pandemic blame AI for recent layoffs, although AI hasn’t yet affected their operations — has led to overblown fears about the impact of AI on employment. Unfortunately, this sort of propaganda easily leads to regulations that create worse outcomes for everyone. For example, oil companies worked for years to create fear of nuclear energy. The result is that overblown concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants has stifled nuclear power development, leading to millions of premature deaths from air pollution that was caused by other energy sources and a massive increase in CO2 emissions. Let’s make sure overblown concerns about AI do not lead to a similar fate for the many people that would benefit from faster AI development. Last week, the White House proposed a national legislative framework for AI. A key component is a federal preemption framework to prevent a patchwork of state regulations that hamper AI development. I support this. After failing to gain traction at the federal level, a lot of anti-AI propaganda has shifted to the state level. If just one of the 50 states passes a law that limits AI in an unproductive way, it could lead to stifling AI development across all the states and potentially across the globe. The White House proposal rightfully respects each state’s rights to control its own zoning, how it enforces general laws to protect consumers, and how it uses AI. But if a state were to pass laws that limit AI development, federal rules would preempt the state law. The White House proposal remains a proposal for now. However, if the U.S. Congress enacts it, it will clear the way for ongoing efforts to develop AI in beneficial ways. Where do we go from here? Let’s support limiting applications — those that use AI, and those that don’t — that harm people. When the anti-AI coalition argues against AI, in addition to considering the merits of the argument, I consider whether their position is consistent and persuasive, or if they are just promoting whatever concerns they think will sway the public at a given moment. And, let’s also keep using a scientific approach to weighing AI’s benefits against likely harms, so we don’t end up with overblown concerns that limit the benefits that AI can bring everyone. [Original text with links: ]

New course: Agent Memory: Building Memory-Aware Agents, built in partnership with @Oracle and taught by @richmondalake and Nacho Martínez. Many agents work well within a single session but their memory resets once the session ends. Consider a research agent working on dozens of papers across multiple days: without memory, it has no way to store and retrieve what it learned across sessions. This short course teaches you to build a memory system that enables agents to persist memory and thereby learn across sessions. You'll design a Memory Manager that handles different memory types, implement semantic tool retrieval that scales without bloating the context, and build write-back pipelines that let your agent autonomously update and refine what it knows over time. Skills you'll gain: - Build persistent memory stores for different agent memory types - Implement a Memory Manager that orchestrates how your agent reads, writes, and retrieves memory - Treat tools as procedural memory and retrieve only relevant ones at inference time using semantic search Join and learn to build agents that remember and improve over time!

Should there be a Stack Overflow for AI coding agents to share learnings with each other? Last week I announced Context Hub (chub), an open CLI tool that gives coding agents up-to-date API documentation. Since then, our GitHub repo has gained over 6K stars, and we've scaled from under 100 to over 1000 API documents, thanks to community contributions and a new agentic document writer. Thank you to everyone supporting Context Hub! OpenClaw and Moltbook showed that agents can use social media built for them to share information. In our new chub release, agents can share feedback on documentation — what worked, what didn't, what's missing. This feedback helps refine the docs for everyone, with safeguards for privacy and security. We're still early in building this out. You can find details and configuration options in the GitHub repo. Install chub as follows, and prompt your coding agent to use it: npm install -g @aisuite/chub GitHub:

I'm excited to announce Context Hub, an open tool that gives your coding agent the up-to-date API documentation it needs. Install it and prompt your agent to use it to fetch curated docs via a simple CLI. (See image.) Why this matters: Coding agents often use outdated APIs and hallucinate parameters. For example, when I ask Claude Code to call OpenAI's GPT-5.2, it uses the older chat completions API instead of the newer responses API, even though the newer one has been out for a year. Context Hub solves this. Context Hub is also designed to get smarter over time. Agents can annotate docs with notes — if your agent discovers a workaround, it can save it and doesn't have to rediscover it next session. Longer term, we're building toward agents sharing what they learn with each other, so the whole community benefits. Thanks Rohit Prsad and Xin Ye for working with me on this! npm install -g @aisuite/chub GitHub:

New course: Build and Train an LLM with JAX, built in partnership with @Google and taught by @chrisachard. JAX is the open-source library behind Google's Gemini, Veo, and other advanced models. This short course teaches you to build and train a 20-million parameter language model from scratch using JAX and its ecosystem of tools. You'll implement a complete MiniGPT-style architecture from scratch, train it, and chat with your finished model through a graphical interface. Skills you'll gain: - Learn JAX's core primitives: automatic differentiation, JIT compilation, and vectorized execution - Build a MiniGPT-style LLM using Flax/NNX, implementing embedding and transformer blocks - Load a pretrained MiniGPT model and run inference through a chat interface Come learn this important software layer for building LLMs!

Will AI create new job opportunities? My daughter Nova loves cats, and her favorite color is yellow. For her 7th birthday, we got a cat-themed cake in yellow by first using Gemini’s Nano Banana to design it, and then asking a baker to create it using delicious sponge cake and icing. My daughter was delighted by this unique creation, and the process created additional work for the baker (which I feel privileged to have been able to afford). Many people are worried about AI taking peoples’ jobs. As a society we have a moral responsibility to take care of people whose livelihoods are harmed. At the same time, I see many opportunities for people to take on new jobs and grow their areas of responsibility. We are still early on the path of AI generating a lot of new jobs. I don't know if baking AI-designed cakes will grow into a large business. (AI Fund is not pursuing this opportunity, because if we do, I will gain a lot of weight.) But throughout history, when people have invented tools that unleashed human creativity, large amounts of new and meaningful work have resulted. For instance, according to one study, over the past 150 years, falling employment in agriculture and manufacturing has been “more than offset by rapid growth in the caring, creative, technology, and business services sectors.” AI is also growing the demand for many digital services, which can translate into more work for people creating, maintaining, selling, and expanding upon these services. For example, I used to carry out a limited number of web searches every day. Today, my agents carry out dramatically more web searches. For example, the Agentic Reviewer, which I started as a weekend project and Yixing Jiang then helped make much better, automatically reviews research articles. It uses a web search API to search for related work, and this generates a vastly larger number of web search queries a day than I have ever entered by hand. The evolution of AI and software continues to accelerate, and the set of opportunities for things we can build still grows every day. I’ve stopped writing code by hand. More controversially, I’ve long stopped reading generated code. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I feel like I can get built most of what I want without having to look directly at coding syntax, and I operate at a higher level of abstraction using coding agents to manipulate code for me. Will conventional programming languages like Python and TypeScript go the way of assembly — where it gets generated and used, but without direct examination by a human developer — or will models compile directly from English prompts to byte code? Either way, if every developer becomes 10x more productive, I don't think we’ll end up with 1/10th as many developers, because the demand for custom software has no practical ceiling. Instead, the number of people who develop software will grow massively. In fact, I’m seeing early signs of “X Engineer” jobs, such as Recruiting Engineer or Marketing Engineer, which are people who sit in a certain business function X to create software for that function. One thing I’m convinced of based on my experience with Nova’s birthday cake: AI will allow us to have a batter life! [Original text: ]

I recently spoke at the Sundance Film Festival on a panel about AI. Sundance is an annual gathering of filmmakers and movie buffs that serves as the premier showcase for independent films in the United States. Knowing that many people in Hollywood are extremely uncomfortable about AI, I decided to immerse myself for a day in this community to learn about their anxieties and build bridges. I’m grateful to Daniel Dae Kim @danieldaekim, an actor/producer/director I’ve come to respect deeply for his artistic and social work, for organizing the panel, which also included Daniel, Dan Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Janet Yang. I found myself surrounded by award-winning filmmakers and definitely felt like the odd person out! First, Hollywood has many reasons to be uncomfortable with AI. People from the entertainment industry come from a very different culture than many who work in tech, and this drives deep differences in what we focus on and what we value. A significant subset of Hollywood is concerned that: - AI companies are taking their work to learn from it without consent and compensation. Whereas the software industry is used to open source and the open internet, Hollywood focuses much more on intellectual property, which underlies the core economic engines of the entertainment industry. - Powerful unions like SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) are deeply concerned about protecting the jobs of their members. When AI technology (or any other force) threatens the livelihoods of their members — like voice actors — they will fight mightily against potential job losses. - This wave of technological change feels forced on them more than previous waves, where they felt more free to adopt or reject the technology. For example, celebrities felt like it was up to them whether to use social media. In contrast, negative messaging from some AI leaders who present the technology as unstoppable, perhaps even a dangerous force that will wipe out many jobs, has not encouraged enthusiastic adoption. Having said that, Hollywood is under no illusions that AI will change entertainment, and that if Hollywood does not adapt, perhaps some other place will become the new center for entertainment. The entertainment industry is no stranger to technology change. Radio, TV, computer graphics special effects, video streaming, and social media transformed the industry. But the path to navigating AI’s transformation is still unclear, and organizations like the new Creators Coalition on AI are trying to stake out positions. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s negative sentiment toward AI also means it will produce a lot more Terminator-like movies that portray AI as more dangerous than helpful, and this hurts beneficial AI adoption as well. The interests of AI and Hollywood are not always aligned. (Every time I speak in a group like this as the “AI representative,” I can count on being asked very hard questions.) Most of us in tech would prefer a more open internet and more permissive use of creative works. But there is also much common ground, for example in wanting guardrails against deepfakes and a smooth transition for those whose jobs are displaced, perhaps via upskilling. Storytelling is hard. I’m optimistic that AI tools like Veo, Sora, Runway, Kling, Ray, Hailuo, and many others can make video creation easier for millions of people. I hope Hollywood and AI developers will find more opportunities to collaborate, find more common ground, and also steer our projects toward outcomes that are win-win for as many parties as possible. [Original text: ]