For the AI market. That is helping Nebius shares by about 9.2%. NVIDIA shares up by just $0.13.
Joining us right now is Andrew Yang. He is the founder and CEO of Noble Mobile, a former Democratic candidate for president and New York City's mayor. He's also the author of "Hey Yang, Where's My Thousand Bucks?", which debuted last month. Good morning to you. You've got the book right here. We've got about a million things to talk to you about — AI. We want to talk about New York. We want to talk about taxes. Where do you want to start this morning?
I just came from an AI conference out west, and holy cow! They said to me that what we're going to see in the next six months outstrips what we've seen in the last ten years, because the rate of change is on a hockey stick and heading up. And I got to say, I'm pretty up to date on this stuff. And it blew my mind, some of the stuff I was seeing.
In terms of what — what did you see?
Well, there was one company that is selling autonomous coding for enterprises to big businesses, and their revenue is up 100-fold in the last 12 months. So if that continues, it's going to eat a lot of the tech budgets from major corporates that used to go to humans. And so you're seeing the employment of recent computer science graduates fall off a cliff from a lot of programs. If you rewind, what, four years ago, what would we tell young people for a secure career? Learn to code. And now the opposite of that is true.
It's unbelievable. So where are you on jobs long term?
Look, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, laid it out very clearly. And he's been doing so repeatedly, saying we're going to automate away up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next several years. And I believe him. The easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet, which again is why you see the hiring of recent college graduates heading down and the underemployment rate over 50%. The unemployment rate among college graduates is now the same or higher than non-college graduates for the first time in history.
How do we fix that? I mean, what's your — a guy with big ideas? Universal basic income was one of yours. How do we fix this, this entire issue?
Check it out. Check it out. You tend to tax things that you want to discourage, that you want less of. And we're going to be in a position where we want to shore up labor in every quarter, in every organization and environment. We should actually try to stop taxing labor, because if...
Yes, exactly, Becky. And by the way, Dario Amodei, the second half of his statement, he said, we're going to automate away the white-collar jobs and you should tax us. And since when does the CEO of a major company raise his hand and say, hey, tax me and mine, because he sees the writing on the wall and he knows that there's this massive backlash coming their way.
And it's an interesting idea. How would you do it? And there's going to be an argument. Dario may be on one side, but I imagine some of the other big tech companies are going to say, please don't tax us. We need this to sort of reach some kind of escape velocity first. We don't want to — we're in this fight with China. We need to get ahead of everybody. This is a little bit of the argument made around, frankly, retail sales in the internet age, if you recall.
The argument I would make, Andrew, is that escape velocity has been achieved. I mean, these models are now going to be able to improve on their own. You know, like, we did it, we made it. And the competition with China is not going to be won or lost based on the last $10 spent, if you know what I mean. I mean, at this point, we're going to win or lose based upon the ability of these companies to improve on their models, which right now is not tied to... In my view, the biggest danger is this backlash that Dario is concerned about, and the backlash is going to get more and more pronounced as people wake up and have their kids coming back from college and living in the basement, and the implicit social contract of, like, the American way is being fractured.
When you hear someone say, oh, you know, every other disruption, it's always better. It always — there's more jobs after technological innovation. And I keep hearing that, and it just seems to be getting more and more difficult to believe that this time it's going to be like that. Are there so many jobs going to be created from AI that we're going to replace, what, 50% of...
White-collar jobs? White-collar — there are 70...
Is there any way that this is not a net negative for employment?
There is zero chance that this transition is not going to be rough for millions of people.
They're always rough. But then we get through it and, you know, buggy whips and then you're making carburetors. But this time I just don't see...
It like rough with a capital R, an exclamation point and a giant underline. I mean, some numbers, but people know some of this. There are still over 2 million Americans who work at call centers right now. And we know AI is going to decimate that job. The big one. And Jamie Dimon referenced this just the other day. If you get to truck driving, then all bets are off because this is the number one job in 28 states. You're talking about millions of middle-aged men for the most part, 10 to 15% of whom are military veterans. A lot of them are gun owners. So if you get to that occupation, then you're going to see, in my opinion, riots in the streets.
Forget about Uber drivers, people who are picking that up.
Uber drivers too, Becky. And by the way, that's a supplemental income for...
How far do you think this is out before it hits?
