✨ The AI economy is here

Just take a look at what's happening with job changes at Amazon and the Meta vs. OpenAI talent battle

Jun 18, 2025

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Excited talk about the impending arrival — and science-fictional promise — of artificial general intelligence may suggest anything short of superintelligence is no biggie. The Singularity or bust.

But whatever the AGI timeline, two headlines show that the Age of (Generative) AI has started reshaping corporate strategy and the job market. Amazon is warning that white-collar jobs will soon go, while OpenAI and Meta are locked in a talent arms-race offering nine-figure paydays. These happenings aren’t signals from a speculative future. They’re happening now. And they're pretty informative.

Start with Amazon. CEO Andy Jassy tells staff that AI adoption would likely shrink the company’s corporate workforce. That’s not a trial balloon, it’s part of a $100 billion capital-expenditure push, much of it aimed at AI infrastructure. The e-commerce giant is already using AI "in virtually every corner of the company,” according to Jassy, with more than a thousand AI services and applications already deployed or in progress of being built.

Jassy: “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

Amazon’s actions here reflect a classic pattern in technological disruption. Productivity improvements often mean fewer workers doing the same work — or more work — while creating new things to do. Amazon has long specialized in removing human friction from its operations, from one-click ordering to automated warehouses. Yet that same efficiency may generate second-order job growth. Cheaper logistics help sellers expand, lower AWS prices enable startups, and reduced costs boost household consumption. In other words, fewer Amazon jobs — at least jobs involving a set of current tasks — may coincide with more economic activity elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the OpenAI-Meta saga plays out at the opposite end of the labor market. Meta, lagging in the AI race, is reportedly offering compensation packages up to $100 million to lure top researchers. OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims his team hasn’t budged, but the aggressive recruitment underscores how tight the market for frontier AI talent has become. Zuckerberg himself is said to be leading the effort

Unlike Amazon’s story of automation, this one is about leverage. The best AI researchers are now effectively force multipliers: a handful of minds with the know-how to design systems with huge productivity upside and that can scale across millions of users. That rarity — combining judgment, creativity, and deep technical domain expertise — is hard to replicate (at least until superintelligence) and commands a premium.

Both stories point to a broader truth. AI isn’t just a lab experiment. It’s becoming a general-purpose technology, like electricity or the internet, that transforms work and productivity across the economies. But just as those earlier revolutions took decades to play out, the AI shift is happening unevenly by specific sector and jobs — but it is happening.

That means the labor market won’t follow a single path, such as one where robots soon take all the jobs. There will be displacement, as repetitive or codifiable tasks vanish. There will be amplification, where skilled workers using AI become dramatically more productive. And there will also be creation, as new tasks and jobs emerge.

The companies mentioned above have varying views about AI, but they do share a belief that AI is the future, and that the future has already begun. Investors, executives, and policymakers should take note.

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