Meta and Microsoft announced thousands of layoffs on the same week they reaffirmed plans to spend close to $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. The juxtaposition is not coincidental - it is the central logic of this moment in the industry.
Employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations has fallen 16 percent since ChatGPT's release, while older workers in the same fields have held steady or grown. The entry-level job is disappearing not through mass layoffs but through a quiet failure to hire - and the long-run consequences for the talent pipeline have not yet been priced in.
A Harvard Business School working paper analyzing nearly all U.S. job postings from 2019 to 2025 is the most rigorous accounting yet of generative AI's labor market impact. The headline numbers are striking - but three separate research teams find reasons for both alarm and restraint.
A study published in Science finds that AI now generates nearly 30% of new Python code on GitHub in the United States, up from just 5% in 2022. The gains are real - but they flow almost entirely to experienced developers, not junior ones.