Tech CEO Aravind Srinivas slammed after saying AI – Business News
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas is coming below fire for arguing people ought to embrace being changed by artificial intelligence since they don’t like their jobs, anyway.
The co-founder of the San Francisco-based company even mentioned on the All-In podcast that the jarring shift in how work will get carried out will result in a “glorious future” everybody must be glad about.
“The reality is most people don’t enjoy their jobs,” the exec mentioned on the episode revealed Monday.
Aravind Srinivas, co-founder of the San Francisco-based conversational AI company Perplexity. REUTERS
“There’s suddenly a new possibility, a new opportunity, to use these tools, learn them, and start your own mini business,” he opined. “Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to.”
Listeners had been fast to show to voice outrage, with some saying Srinivas was out of contact with on a regular basis people who’re struggling to make ends meet after getting laid off.
“A man worth millions just told the single mother who lost her job that she should be grateful because now she can start a business using his product and called her unemployment a glorious future,” one commenter wrote on X. “This is what happens when you’ve never needed a paycheck to keep the lights on.”
Asked for remark Tuesday, a Perplexity spokesperson instructed The Post: “Since Perplexity launched in December 2022, Americans have filed 16 million new business applications, contributing to the reversal of a 40-year decline and proving yet again that breakthrough technologies don’t eliminate opportunity, they create it.”Recent months have seen a quantity of giant corporations announce brutal layoffs — with some corporations, like Amazon and Block, blaming AI for at the very least half of the trend.
“His view treats job loss as a temporary shock that opens a path toward one-person or very small firms that produce real revenue without the payroll that older companies needed,” one commenter wrote.
“But the problem with this scenario is that losing a stable paycheck is painful for most, and many workers cannot instantly become founders. Economists still disagree on whether AI is replacing labor at large scale or merely giving companies a new excuse for cuts.”
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Nevertheless, Srinivas had his supporters.
“He is kinda right though,” a consumer wrote. “A few years ago, one person couldn’t realistically run ops, marketing, support, and product all alone, but now they can – and some of them are making real numbers.”
Another added: “This shift could indeed democratize entrepreneurship by lowering business creation costs.”
Goldman Sachs economists mentioned in February that AI was answerable for up to 10,000 month-to-month web job losses final 12 months in some home industries.
Executive teaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas mentioned AI precipitated 11,039 job cuts in February within the tech sector for a whole of 33,330 in 2026. That’s an increase of 51% from the 22,042 tech job cuts during the identical period final 12 months.
