It’s become a common pattern over the past few months: A business leader makes an ominous claim about the impact of AI on the labor market, sparking weeks of discourse and sending U.S. workers reeling. Now, a “godfather” of AI is pushing back on those claims—and warning about the dangers they spur.
In an interview with Axios, Yann LeCun, former Meta AI chief who invented many of the fundamental components of AI like deep learning, said those doom narratives are wrong—and “extremely destructive.”
“Don’t listen to CEOs,” he said. “They have a vested interest in propping up the power of the products they sell.” He said to instead listen to the economists, many of whom doubt the position that AI will wipe out large swaths of the entry-level white-collar workforce.
LeCun, winner of the Turing Award (an annual prize for making lasting contributions to computer science) added that the sum of those warnings is “extremely destructive.”
“A small proportion of high school students are actually kind of depressed because they’ve read that AI is not only going to take a job, but basically cause human extinction,” he said. “They take that seriously and it has a profound effect on their psychology.”
LeCun warned, instead, that the danger doesn’t lie with AI and the claims associated with it, but with making grand, life-altering decisions as a result of those claims. He advocated for high school students to still go to college, and not let the fears of a lack of an entry-level job sway them from going into the field they enjoy.
Though some tech companies have laid off workers this year thanks to AI-related efficiencies, the massive AI job apocalypse has yet to materialize. Some are skeptical that job cuts were actually a corporate fiction where companies cut headcount due to a disparate reason though pin it on AI out of convenience: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even gave that practice a name.
Despite this, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei still says AI will wipe out half of entry-level white-collar work. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said that the warning will be realized in just 18 months.
Gen Z fears an AI job apocalypse. The data tells a different story
While there’s no research available to map out how exactly AI job apocalypse warnings impact high school students, a recent Gallup poll found that Gen Zers are growing more skeptical of the technology. Thirty-one percent of the 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed said they are anxious or angry about AI’s development, up from 22% a year ago.
That’s in part because most of the heeded warnings target the critical on-ramp to a career: the entry-level role. For some, it seems the promise of white-collar work, a role with all the stable furnishings of what many of their parents had achieved—health insurance, a 401K, paid-time off—is increasingly out of reach.
Because of that perception, the majority of Gen Zers are reconsidering the climb up the corporate ladder. A recent study from ZipRecruiter found that instead of considering a full-time job, fresh college grads are considering starting their own business, looking into gig work or freelance work, and pursuing the trades.
But the vibe is detached from what the data says. Seventy-seven percent of the class of 2025 found a role within three months of graduation, up from 63.3% a year ago, according to ZipRecruiter. Moreover, unemployment for 20- to 24-year-olds is down to 6.4% in March from a high of 9.2% last September, according to Federal Reserve data, suggesting those of college, and recent post-grad age are landing roles faster than what the doomers would have you believing.
But there is some research suggesting that the labor market could soon end up where the CEOs say it could be going. Research from AI lab Anthropic found that its AI is already theoretically capable of performing the tasks associated with roles in law, business, finance, management, and other white-collar roles.
Still, LeCun doesn’t see that downturn playing out anytime soon. Rather, he sees parallels between AI and past technological revolutions, a similarity that other economists have spelled out to make the same case against the job apocalypse argument.
“There is nothing qualitatively different between the previous technological revolutions and this one,” he said. “It’s just another set of tools that makes us more efficient.”
