AI's Tidal Wave: 41% of Jobs at Risk & The Surprising Winners
From workforce reshaping to breakthrough medical screening: Your essential guide to AI's latest disruptions and opportunities.
Dear Friend,
You made it through the first week of 2025—hopefully, it was a good one! As you browse our "Headlines from the Future" section, you'll see that innovation is not slowing down this year. If this week is any indication, we're in for another exciting year.
Buckle up, grab your favorite beverage, and enjoy your weekly reading.
Headlines from the Future
WEF: 41% of Companies Worldwide Plan to Reduce Workforces by 2030 Due to AI ↗
It will not come as a surprise that the World Economic Forum, in its latest study, found that companies worldwide expect significant reductions in workforce:
“Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market — driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,” the WEF said in a press release ahead of its annual meeting in Davos later this month.
On the flip side, demand for “AI skills” keeps rising—note that this doesn’t necessarily mean people programming AIs, but rather people who are able to work alongside AIs in a human-machine augmented fashion.
Time to polish those computer skills…
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The End of StackOverflow as We Know It ↗
StackOverflow, the de facto standard when it comes to asking and looking up answers to coding questions (and one of the big reasons why AIs are so good at answering your coding questions), is faltering.
Since ChatGPT launced: Nov 2022 (108,563), it's had 82,997 less questions (3.25x less; -76.5%).
Questions are down by more than three-quarters – that’s bad news not just for StackOverflow, but for the makers of LLMs, as it means there is just no new material to train AIs on. Now, most public AI models like ChatGPT or Claude are continuously trained on their users' questions and the answers the AI gives, but StackOverflow provided something much more important: answers. And not just any answers, but answers ranked by their users based on how accurate and good they were.
I guess OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, et al. will have to get creative…
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AI-Supported Breast Cancer Screening: 17.6% Higher Detection Rate ↗
Wondering what AI could actually be useful for (other than creating funny images and spellchecking this blog post)?
In a large-scale study in Germany, researchers found that AI-assisted breast cancer screening yielded vastly better results than the non-AI control group:
[…] after taking into account factors such as age of the women and the radiologists involved, the researchers found this difference increased, with the rate 17.6% higher for the AI group at 6.70 per 1,000 women compared with 5.70 per 1,000 women for the standard group. In other words, one additional case of cancer was spotted per 1,000 women screened when AI was used.
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Klarna CEO Says He Feels 'Gloomy' Because AI Is Developing So Quickly It'll Soon Be Able to Do His Entire Job ↗
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of buy-now/pay-later company Klarna, throws some stones while sitting in a glasshouse:
While Siemiatkowski said AI is capable of performing his duties as CEO, he’s “not super excited” about the prospect of his job becoming obsolete. “My work to me is a super important part of who I am, and realizing it might become unnecessary is gloomy,” Siemiatkowski said in the X post.
You might remember that Klarna cheerfully fired 22% of their workforce to replace them with AI. It makes one wonder if those people felt a little “gloomy” about AI too? 🤔
That being said, he does raise an important point…
“But I also believe we need to be honest with what we think will happen. And I [would] rather learn and explore than pretend it does not exist.”
Link to article.
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AI-Enabled Spear Phishing Campaigns Are Here (And the Future) ↗
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that LLMs are incredibly good at tricking people into believing pretty much anything – including nefarious use cases such as spear phishing.
A recent study from Fred Heiding et al. shows that AI-powered spear phishing attacks yielded a >50% click-through rate (which, to be frank, is astronomical and scary as hell…).
TL;DR: We ran a human subject study on whether language models can successfully spear-phish people. We use AI agents built from GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to search the web for available information on a target and use this for highly personalized phishing messages. We achieved a click-through rate of above 50% for our AI-generated phishing emails.
(*) Spearfishing is a targeted attempt to steal sensitive information such as account credentials or financial information from a specific individual or organization. Attackers typically gather information about their targets to craft tailored emails or messages, increasing the likelihood of success.
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OpenAI Losing Money on a $200/Month Subscription… ↗
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, just posted on X that the company is losing money on their pricey $200/month/seat ChatGPT Pro subscription – apparently due to subscribers using the product more than anticipated.
This might come as a surprise to some or many – especially given that ChatGPT Pro is ten times as expensive as the standard subscription. We can safely assume that OpenAI is not making money on the standard plan – their losing money on the Pro plan is indicative of how expensive it is to run a frontier AI model and a good indicator of how unsustainable the current wave of frontier AI companies really is.
I guess “to be continued”…
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Timeline of AI Model Releases in 2024 ↗
I guess you feel similarly overwhelmed by the constant barrage of new AI models in the last twelve months. Have you ever wondered what the year actually looked like in terms of AI model progress? Wonder no more; Vaibhav Srivastav put together a neat visualization:
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3D-Printed Houses Become a Reality ↗
What sounded like science fiction a decade ago and looked like it was poised to become one of the technologies in the dreaded “well, it works in the lab, but doesn’t scale” category is now nearing reality: 3D printing whole houses is a thing now.
ICON, one of the pioneers in the field, is about to complete its first 100-home project in Austin, TX.
“It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market,” said ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins. “So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot.”
What We Are Reading
👶 Meet Gen Beta, Starting to Be Born in 2025 Beta will see its youngest members born roughly from 2025 through 2039 and will live to the 22nd century. @Jane
🎙️ How Spotify Is Turning Podcasting Into Social Media Spotify’s newly launched partner program offers new revenue and discovery opportunities for eligible creators, making it easier to transform their shows into sustainable businesses. @Mafe
🔄 The Great Decentralization The end of centralized governance and large communities on social media platforms brings us into (and reflects) a new era of online culture, as the future and the economics of social media are both being contested and reimagined. @Jeffrey
🚗 Self-Driving Cars Don’t Do Snow. Goodyear Says the Solution Is Smarter Tires Smarter cars need smarter tires. Regardless of their long-term prospects in places like San Francisco, autonomous cars have predominantly been tested in dry and warm climates. Tire manufacturer Goodyear wants to enable safe autonomous driving in wet and slippery conditions by taking the tire into consideration. @Julian
🌅 COMIC: Science-Backed Mood Boosters to (Almost Instantly) Snap You Out of a Funk Feeling like you’re in a funk is a real thing, and there’s no need to just stick it out. These strategies can help you snap out of it. @Pedro
👁️ The Psychological Implications of Big Brother’s Gaze Living in a surveillance society (as many of us increasingly are) has many negative implications. A new study found that it makes us hyper-aware of face stimuli – a behavior consistent with “mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.” @Pascal
Some Fun Stuff
🔮 This ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ professor made predictions for 2025 – and they’re spookily accurate.
👾 Experience the hilariously pretentious side of gallery openings in DOOM: The Gallery Experience, where you can explore fine art, sip wine, and enjoy hors d'oeuvres in a reimagined E1M1 from DOOM (1993).
🌌 Gorgeous: “For the 4th year in a row, my all-sky camera has been taking an image of the sky above the Netherlands every 15 seconds. Combining these images reveal the length of the night changing throughout the year, the passage of clouds and the motion of the Moon and the Sun through the sky.”