Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg)

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:

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: