Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates

Leah Feiger: Every week was their Super Bowl. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I loved how you framed it in the article of like, "We both have a baby to take care of. Mine is our literal human child and his is an AI tool, but we're both passionate about it." Let me tell you. Alessandra Ram: And I noticed because it was happening to myself but also friends. And then friends of friends culminating in really—when I spoke to my therapist, she had to interrupt me during the session because she was like, "Oh, what does your partner do again?" And I was like, "Well, he's in AI. He's building an AI tool for his company." And she was like, "Oh, this is a phenomenon, actually." She used the word phenomenon. She's based here in the Bay Area. She has a very specific clientele. It's a postpartum therapist, so she works with women that are pregnant or postpartum. And of course, they're going through this emotional rollercoaster themselves, but the majority of them are partnered with people in tech, particularly that work in AI or adjacent to AI is how she explained it to me. And she's just said it's causing them to be emotionally, mentally unavailable because they're totally consumed by what they're doing at work. Brian Barrett: One thing you mentioned, Alessandra, in the story that I hadn't thought through all the way, it's not just people who are being obsessed with this AI world and getting caught up in it. It's also people who've kind of washed out or not been able to get in and who are disappointed and feel like they've failed in some way. So there's emotional labor that goes with that along with the actual literal labor that goes along with when they're working long hours. How endemic does that feel at this point, the many ways that people have to deal with this? Alessandra Ram: That's a good point. I've seen some comments that this is maybe told from a more privileged perspective, but really, if you're living here in the Bay Area, I can see that this is affecting people across the economic spectrum, even students that are graduating or trying to get a job. And it's a very terrible job market, it's very volatile. So is AI. Actually, the AI industry is very volatile. So people are losing their jobs or they're trying to get these jobs and it's very competitive because there's supposed to be high salaries and it's supposed to be the unlock to economic success. So that's causing a lot of stress on people, on marriages, on families when one person, say, for example, loses their job or is desperately trying to get a job in AI because they think that that's going to help them financially or make them rich, to be honest. That's also another component here. Zoë Schiffer: Right. That was the two-part thing that I was thinking about when I was reading it, which is on one level there are people who are just so excited about the technological innovations and just really nerd out on the releases, like you said. There's a new model. It's so cool. We can do all these things. You feel like you're using agents and suddenly you have superpowers. But then there's also this factor, and I also live in the Bay Area, so I see this a lot, where a not small number of people have made generational wealth in the last six years. And I think the idea that someone who just happened to get in early to one of the labs, obviously, it may be very smart, whatever, but is now a multi, multimillionaire and that could be me. I think that idea feels pretty pervasive, particularly if you're an engineer of any sort.