Last month, Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, suggested that AI use isn’t actually saving companies from labor costs, and could cost them more than the humans they currently employ.
“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he told Axios.
Microsoft, too, has raised concerns about the costs of AI. The company has reportedly begun canceling licenses for its engineers to use Anthropic’s Claude due to high costs, raising questions about the costs of adoption.
Economists differ widely in their beliefs about whether AI will actually lead to a “job apocalypse.”
“Forecasting economic impacts from AI is inherently speculative and uncertain, and the economists I’ve talked to disagree on how much it will reshape the labor market,” Peter Wildeford, Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network, tells TIME.
“One of the most uncertain aspects,” he says, “is ‘reallocation’: if you imagine AI completely automates away some categories of work, do those workers stay unemployed, or do they find new professions?”