"An AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer."

Meta Narrative

Meta-formerly-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he intends to start automating coding jobs with AI — this year. 

Zuckerberg announced these ambitions, which if realized would send shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley, on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, as spotted by Business Insider.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code," Zuckerberg said in the interview.

A midlevel engineer at Meta, per BI, earns a salary somewhere in the mid-six figures.

For the People

Though Zuckerberg doesn't explicitly say he'll replace his human grunts outright, putting two and two together as he explains how the AI technology will pan out — or looking at literally any company that has bragged about onboarding AI models — makes the implications for people's jobs pretty clear.

"In the beginning it'll be really expensive to run, and you can get it to be more efficient," the Meta CEO said. "And over time it'll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."

This, Zuckerberg argues, will actually "augment" workers.

"My view on this is like the future people are just going to be so much more creative and they're going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things."

Pressed about whether AI will eliminate jobs, Zuckerberg doesn't offer a direct answer; he just goes into a long spiel about industrialization and how we're not all farmers anymore.

Trend Follower

A model that does programming jobs fits with the latest fad in the AI industry, which is developing so-called AI agents that are autonomous enough to perform complex tasks without human intervention, thereby serving as a sort of "virtual employee."

And as Zuckerberg said, Meta is far from the only one that's pushing for AI automation in the industry. In December, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the software giant, which is among the most valuable companies in the world, would no longer be hiring software engineers in 2025. Benioff credited this hiring freeze to productivity gains made with AI technology, including its own Agentforce AI model.

Elsewhere, the CEO of the fintech company Klarna boasted that it had laid off 22 percent of its workforce as a result of embracing AI. And in the tech world at large, thousands of jobs have already been sacrificed amidst the AI arms race to develop the latest models.

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