Almost three years since the release of OpenAI's explosively popular ChatGPT, it's clear that artificial intelligence isn't exactly taking the job market by storm.
Sure, AI makes a convenient cover for business executives who were already looking to downsize or outsource their labor force, but the tech's myriad hallucination issues, legal risks, and security baggage make it ill-suited to automate human jobs. That's to say nothing of the fact that 95 percent of businesses gunning for an AI overhaul see their efforts end in failure.
Yet as far as investors seem to be concerned, that’s just background noise. Despite the software's many shortcomings, even the mere mention of an "AI strategy" on a businesses' quarterly earnings report can send its stock to the Moon, which is probably one reason why cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase fired employees who didn't join the bandwagon with its own rush into AI.
Some wild reporting by Fortune detailed the company-wide purge initiated by Coinbase's billionaire CEO, Brian Armstrong. The campaign began when Coinbase — the biggest crypto platform in the US by trading volume — inked deals for Anysphere Cursor and GitHub Copilot, a pair of AI coding assistants.
After nabbing the software, Armstrong conceded on a recent episode of the "Cheeky Pint" podcast that "I went rogue," giving software engineers just one week to get on board or join the breadline. For perspective, Harvard Business Review suggests that effective corporate AI initiatives will take years, if not decades, to come to fruition.
"I was like, 'AI's important," the 42-year-old CEO said. "We need you to all learn it and at least [be] on board. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least on board by the end of the week. And if not, I'm hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it, and I'd like to meet with you to understand why."
In that Saturday meeting, anyone without a decent enough excuse was unceremoniously sacked, Fortune reports.
"Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something," Armstrong nonchalantly explained. "Some of them didn't, and they got fired."
In an inordinately cheery blog post by GitHub about its Coinbase partnership, the AI platform lauds the crypto corporation as a "company where every employee is empowered to directly contribute to its core product and policies, without compromising security or compliance."
While it's not known what kind of deal Coinbase reached with Cursor on enterprise pricing, the software can cost anywhere from $20 to over $200 per user, per month, according to the AI platform's website. GitHub Enterprise, meanwhile, charges $39 per user.
Given that Coinbase has a net revenue of nearly $1.5 billion in the last three months, those kind of expenses are really a drop in the bucket. In other words, Armstrong's purge seems to be motivated by ideology first and foremost, rather than corporate penny-pinching alone; the usual motivation behind similar AI firing-sprees.
Armstrong is far from the only CEO forcing AI on his workers under threat of termination. Last week, it was reported that Eric Vaughan, CEO of the $26 million software firm IgniteTech, had culled 80 percent of his staff for not showing sufficient enthusiasm for the glitchy tech.
Notably, Vaughan highlighted that the bulk of pushback on AI adoption came from programmers and software engineers — the ones whose jobs it would be to clean up the software's notoriously sloppy code, if only they hadn't been shown the door.
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