1. CNBC "TechCheck": AI Climbing The Corporate Ladder

👤 u/AssociationNo6504  |  2 upvotes  |  2025-09-01  |  🏷️ News

🔗 View Original Post on Reddit

💡 Summary

Mackenzie Sigalos: Hey, Courtney. So this disruption of entry level jobs is already here. And I spoke to the team at Stanford. And they say there's been a 13% drop in employment for workers under 25, in roles most exposed to AI.

• At the same time, we're seeing a reckoning for mid-level managers across the Mag-7, as CEOs make it clear that builders are worth more than bureaucrats.
• Now, Google cutting 35% of its small team managers.
• Microsoft shedding 15,000 roles this summer alone as it thins out, management ranks
• Amazon's Andy Jassy ordering a 15% boost in the ratio of individual contributors to managers, while also vowing that gen AI tools and agents will shrink the corporate workforce.
• And of course, it was Mark Zuckerberg who made this idea popular in the first place with his year of efficiency.

I've been speaking to experts in workplace behavioral science, and they say that this shift is also fueled by AI itself. One manager with these tools can now do the work of three giving companies cover to flatten org charts and pile more onto fewer people. And here in Silicon Valley, Laszlo Bock, Eric Schmidt's former HR chief, tells me that it's also about freeing up cash for these hyperscalers to spend on the ongoing AI talent wars and their custom silicon designed to compete with Blackwell's. So the bigger picture here is that this isn't just margin cutting. It is a rewiring of how the modern workforce operates. Courtney.

Courtney: I mean, is this expected to only accelerate going forward? I mean, what what inning are we in, to use that sports metaphor, that that it comes up so often when we're talking about seismic changes?

Mackenzie Sigalos: Well, the names that we're looking at in terms of this paring back of the of that middle manager level are also competing across the AI spectrum, if you will. So they're hyperscalers and we're looking at record CapEx spend with Microsoft and Amazon at roughly $120 billion committed this year. Google not that far behind. At the same time, they're building the large language models they're trying to deploy with enterprises and with consumer facing chat bots working on all this proprietary tech to compete with Nvidia. And these are expensive endeavors, which just speaks to the fact that you have to perhaps save in other areas as you recruit talent, pay for these hundreds of millions of dollar comp packages to bring people in house. But also, these are the people inventing these new enterprise models. And so rather than, you know, a third party software company that has to have open AI, embed with them, with their engineers to figure out how to augment their workflow, we've got the people who actually built the tech, building this into what they're doing in-house, which is why there's greater efficiencies here. And that's really I went back to, you know, the team at Stanford, and they

📝 Key Insight: This post offers a unique perspective on how AI is affecting real jobs and creativity.

2. A Different Perspective For People Who think AI Progress is Slowing Down:

👤 u/jiweep  |  6 upvotes  |  2025-09-01  |  🏷️ Discussion

🔗 View Original Post on Reddit

💡 Summary

3 years ago LLMs could barely do 2 digit multiplication and weren't very useful other than as a novelty.

A few weeks ago, both Google and OpenAI's experimental LLMs achieved gold medals in the 2025 national math Olympiad under the same constraints as the contestants. This occurred faster than even many optimists in the field predicted would happen.

I think many people in this sub need to take a step back and see how far AI progress has come in such a short period of time.

💬 Top Community Comments

• “And now you can run LLMs locally and do work with them and get good results with a small box computer (Apple Studio) 10 years from now will be insane at what the tech will offer. This machine below is a Cray T932 system that in today's dollars cost …”
• “I question the Olympiad stuff and maybe I just need to do more research on how it is prompted but when I ask it questions from my CFA studies (a finance exam that, while hard, should be light work compared to math Olympiad) it rarely gets the math po…”
• “The field of AI as a whole isn't slowing down, but it is going to have to progress in a different direction. Making smarter general models isn't cost-effective - there hasn't been any real progress in that direction since GPT-4.5 failed - so the next…”

📝 Key Insight: This post offers a unique perspective on how AI is affecting real jobs and creativity.

📌 Final Takeaway

From practical prompts to philosophical debates, Reddit continues to be a space where the future of AI is shaped through community conversations. Stay tuned each week for more insights curated from the minds of builders, thinkers, and everyday users in the world of AI.