The Danger of Imminent Generative AI

By now, most people are acquainted with doomsday predictions of what AI is going to accomplish in the near future.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently made waves for predicting as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs would be replaced in the next one to five years.

Mark Zuckerberg, on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience back in January, made bold claims about AI replacing mid-level engineers as soon as later in the year, amidst a bizarre diatribe about a “lack of masculine energy.”

In March of 2024, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, stated that AI as intelligent as humans could arrive in five to ten years.

Needless to say, these predictions, and many more like them, have caused plenty of panic. “Chicken Littles” are all over social media telling the world the sky is falling.

All of these audacious predictions are reminiscent of similar CEO clairvoyance from the past, such as “cyber cabs will be deployed by 2020” and “humanity will reach Mars by 2030,” uttered by the recently dismissed bro-in-chief of the United States. The former is demonstrably false, and the latter is laughably optimistic.

Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, CEOs and “visionaries” with some skin in the AI game might make public statements as a barely veiled marketing ploy to continue to drum up public interest and investment for their aspirations?

What happens behind the scenes paints a more honest picture of the current and near-future state of AI. Tech leaders will, of course, try to keep their behind-the-scenes private, but a quarter of the way through the 21st century, it’s almost impossible to keep everything under wraps.

Today’s state of affairs at Meta is very telling. Mark Zuckerberg has endeavored to hire a new brain trust of AI researchers and engineers to accelerate Meta’s intended achievement of creating the world’s first generative AI.

On the surface, this seems very ordinary. Meta has been investing heavily in AI development recently, so it should come as no surprise they’re upping the ante.

But the reason why is the unexpected part. Apparently, Zuck is very frustrated by the pace at which its AI is evolving. He fears he won’t win the coveted blue ribbon of AGI advancement in spite of his earlier assurances.

At the same time, an investment from Meta, rumored to be as much as $10 billion, is pending in a startup the company has backed in several previous funding rounds: Scale AI, one of the most talked-about companies providing data services for AI companies to train their models. If the amount is accurate and the funding round closes, this will be one of the largest, if not the largest, private investments ever made.

What’s interesting is that as of last week, beginning Monday, June 2nd, 2025, IBM announced it was letting go of 8,000 employees it intends to replace with AI. It seems incongruous with the widespread fear of AI that hardly anyone is talking about this.

Maybe it’s because it’s IBM, a company that has long been viewed as dinosauric while also struggling to grow alongside leading tech companies such as Google and Apple. Long gone are the halcyon days of tech innovation IBM was known for; instead, today’s reputation is one of frustratingly late entrances into areas of technological growth such as SaaS.

It appears to the discerning eye that IBM is conducting mass layoffs for the same reason they’re usually conducted: to diminish operating costs in the face of stagnant growth and pad margins. Of course, telling the truth about such a maneuver does not instill confidence in consumers, employees, and investors, so inventing a narrative about being at the forefront of the latest technological wave is more prudent.

Perhaps no one buys into the idea that IBM is innovating anywhere because they remember just how well the company capitalized on other tech breakthroughs, such as Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in chess (the second time) or Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.

Maybe we all remember Klarna, whose CEO had the temerity to say his company would pause hiring indefinitely and fill future roles with AI, only to later backtrack and admit the initiative wasn’t proceeding according to plan. Even something as uninspiring as yet another buy-now-pay-later startup needs humans to continue doing the kind of work they’ve been doing because only humans can do it.

Or could it be the downfall of prominent AI startup Builder.ai after the company’s AI assistant “Natasha,” which supposedly automated app development, was exposed as really being a bunch of underpaid developers in India?

Interestingly, this is not the first time a company has tried to disguise slave-wage-earning Indians as AI. It’s not just startups who engage in this fraud; Amazon revealed they did the same thing because their AI for their “Just Walk Out” checkout technology failed to function properly.

So, let’s all breathe a collective sigh of relief. It turns out AI isn’t coming to forcefully plug us into the Matrix in the foreseeable future. Rather, the fear is generated by CEOs with a vested interest in ensuring AI remains the tech talk of the day, out of their own concern it could be a fad in danger of irrelevance if it doesn’t keep social media chattering, just like Web3 and VR. The takeaway is that attention grabbing statements about the inexorable obsolescence of humanity due to AGI is likely grossly exaggerated.