Thanks, Nerds! We'll Take It From Here.
The hard part of AI is over. The MBAs can handle things now.
Hey nerds! Long time no chat. Been a crazy decade, huh?
It looked like you guys were super busy and having fun building all your Linuxes and your Ubers for X and your hardware doohickeys. Didn’t want to interrupt ya!
Listen, I just want to say, on behalf of all my MBA colleagues, we really appreciate you guys. We couldn’t have gotten here without you.
Like, literally, we couldn’t have.
I know, I know, I should’ve been paying attention when you were screaming “Learn to Code!” but I thought you were just yelling at the journalists. You guys don’t make a lot of eye contact; how was I supposed to know you meant me too?
Hey, but look, I’m coding now! I’m vibing with the rest of you geeks. You guys should check out my Localhost—there’s some sick stuff there. If I had known coding was as easy as delegating tasks to subordinates I can treat as meaningless line items and verbally abuse without consequence, I would’ve started years ago.
Anyway, again, thanks for getting us all to this point. It looks like it took a bunch of work, and I’m really proud of you guys. Big kudos.
But we’ll take it from here.
C’mon, you guys have to be a little relieved, right? I mean, you were sprinting all-out for years, raising crazy amounts of money, competing against some of the best founders in the game like Adam Neumann!
And look, you guys built some really extraordinary stuff. I’ll be honest, I still don’t fully understand how a bunch of it works. But that’s a huge compliment, especially coming from me! You were operating at a level that required a very specific type of person, and that person was not gonna be me, and that is totally cool. That’s what delegation is for.
But hey, sounds like we’re in the same boat now! I keep reading that you guys have no idea how the stuff you built works either, which is super refreshing.
“This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.” I am right there with you, man.
And now your code is writing itself! You yell at Claude, he spits out a website. He’ll do the whole thing while you’re at lunch. Do you know how crazy that sounds? It’s like if all my Powerpoints just appeared, boom, like magic. My buddy out in San Fran says I can generate everything with AI and still get a check from Y Combinator. Hit the gym, hit the button, then hit the bar, am I right?
Even I was thinking, man, this is too good to be true. But then I saw rich guys like Peter Thiel talking about it, and I know that dude loves code. Now he’s saying stuff like “it seems much worse for the math people than the word people.” So yeah. I think we’re back, baby.
But it gets better.
Every time you guys run into new problems with your AIs, I see a bunch of words I use all the time. Your agents can’t figure out their goals? They need to learn about “intelligent delegation.” Having a tough time with verification of output? That’s because your agents aren’t taking enough responsibility.
And now you guys are finally talking about what I’ve been saying forever: the alignment problem is a huge deal. It happens to me all the time! You get the big stakeholders in the same room, everybody’s got conflicting KPIs for their departments, nobody’s prepped, and suddenly your whole roadmap is at risk. Finally, AI researchers are taking this stuff seriously enough to call it an “existential risk.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s definitely taken out a few of my weekends.
If you aren’t getting the best out of AI, I gotta be honest: it’s because you aren’t a very good manager. So let me give you some feedback.
I see you guys complaining about your AIs “pretending” to complete tasks and trying to slack off. Sure, you could train them to “acknowledge limits or ask for clarification.” But wouldn’t it be way easier to just threaten them?
Your boy Sergey Brin agrees with me, by the way. He’s out there saying models respond better when you threaten them with physical violence. I don't know why you guys don't circulate this more. Seems like pretty standard stuff.
Maybe your problem is that you keep treating these AIs like they’re your friends—or something way weirder. C’mon, guys! These are your employees. If you want good performance from your agents, the research is clear: keep professional boundaries. They taught us this stuff on day one. How are you just figuring it out now?
Listen, I really appreciate how hard you guys have been trying. This AI stuff is still super new for all of us, and no one knows how it’s going to go for sure. I totally get why you haven’t been able to get your heads around it.
It’s a “big picture” problem. And those problems need “big picture” managers.
So, with that context out of the way, I just wanted to share some news with you guys.
Effective today, we’re cutting 80% of our workforce. Specifically, the engineers who are reading this.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but I want to assure you that we’ve done the math on this one. We even had Claude double-check things.
Now that AI can do all the code, we just think this is the way the market is gonna go. Jack Dorsey already laid off 40% of Block, and that guy’s one of the best operators I’ve ever seen. He said most companies are “late.” He said he’d rather get there “honestly and on our own terms.”
Personally, I thought that was beautiful.
I’ll be honest: this is hard for us. It’s not a reflection of your performance. If anything, you guys built the most incredible system imaginable. You created an unfathomably powerful, insightful, globally-networked intelligence that could make smart people like you completely unnecessary. You should be proud.
So while the technical work may be done, this is where organizational streamlining and financial engineering needs to lead the way. I know the road ahead may seem uncertain, but we should be grateful that we have enough MBAs to see us through.
Again, thank you for everything. We’ll take it from here.
And let me give you one last piece of advice:
Learn to write.
Are We Cooked? with Tor Bair is a public investigation composed of original writing, podcasts, and guest interviews, focused on examining what’s actually happening with our technology, its new capabilities, and the consequences.
Tor holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He’s sorry.