Human Reserved Jobs vs a $30 Trillion Market - Same Week, Opposite Ends.

Ah, yet another big week in AI. This is The AI Exhale, hosted by Vibe CFO with Jez and Cam. Five minutes, one thing that matters, or maybe two. We ignore the rest so you can too.

Jez: Welcome to this week's episode of the AI Exhale. This is episode 11. Gosh, we've already come 10 episodes. If you haven't listened to them, you can get them done in under an hour, as we are five minutes an episode.

This week we're going to talk about Bill Gates. Good old Bill Gates came out of the woodwork. He's got a manifesto. It is called A Turbulent AI Era and Critical Choices to Make, where essentially he's not so much saying where AI could go, it's actually where it should go. And he talks about human-reserved jobs, with examples like childcare and jury service. Cam, have you ever done jury service?

Cam: I haven't. Have you?

Jez: No. We're waiting to be picked. Maybe they don't want us.

Cam: Bill Gates, we've seen this recently with a lot of different players coming in and making these comments about pausing AI, and these big philosophical arguments about how we as humans shouldn't do this. But the challenge is humans have a terrible history of collectively agreeing not to take economic or strategic advantage. Like, if we look at all the main points that this aligns with, it's like climate and fossil fuels and nuclear weapons and global tax havens. Now it's AI. Like, literally, it's the same story.

We're not going to be able to collectively come together. There's going to be people who cheat the system, for sure. They go, oh yeah, we've been hiring humans, and they've just been running AI. So I just think it's an abstract, delusional comment by Gates to say this, because it just doesn't make any sense that it's going to work.

Jez: All right. Beautifully intersecting AI and accounting here. So Gates also talks about the fact that we should be taxing tokens, just like we tax payroll. Otherwise we're just encouraging even more the move to AI taking the jobs, right? If there's no tax involved with the token usage.

Cam: Yeah, again, I think we're in a world with so much geopolitical uncertainty. Like, this is what I just mentioned before. We've already historically had problems with tax havens and things like that. So you start giving people who want to use AI an unfair advantage in the country they're in. And they'll literally be choosing spaces where they can get the advantages they need for the margins they need.

So I mean, I guess there's some upside to what he's saying. I don't mind it, but don't you think it still seems like it can easily be fraught with being broken? And how are you going to control it? I don't know. What do you think?

Jez: I mean, I question Gates a bit anyway. I think he's pushing the humanitarian, philanthropic piece a little too much in his later years. His actual birthday is coming up on the 25th of October. He turned 71, so good on him. 71. Good boy. Still going.

All right. Well, then throwing to an opposite end of the spectrum here, we've got Anthropic pitching readiness for their IPO with a $30 trillion TAM. $30 trillion. That's more than SpaceX. And if I can also contrast it, the top 150 companies of corporate tech America last year made $2.4 trillion together. It's leaning towards a sales pitch. What are your thoughts there? I can't get my head around it.

Cam: Dario is the guy who's founded this company. And he comes across to me like he's running a cult. He presents as this mission first guy, you know, he's pledging all this money. And he says, oh, none of us working at Anthropic care about money. It's about the mission. And then the IPO story is like, our market is basically all human work.

Jez: So it's an estimation of all the corners of the world we work in that AI could creep into and replace, essentially. So legal work, accounting work, engineering work. And as I said, it beats SpaceX, who claimed 28 and a half trillion back in May. So it's just crazy numbers.

Cam: Yeah, I just worry. I don't know if you remember the cult guy who put together all those people out in the outback and got them all to drink poison. Everyone drank the poison and then he didn't, and he walked off. Like, oh, gosh. This is the mission. His name was Jim Jones. And I just can't see it. Like, there's just too many competitors, and AI at open source level and access. I feel like AI is becoming commoditised.

Jez: Yeah. So I guess as we land this a little bit more for the accountants in the audience, you know, you don't file this under future problems. Accounting got specifically named.

I mean, we have heard it before. So the question stops being, will AI change my job?

And that's your five-ish minutes back. Vibe CFO, Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium businesses, out of the box, governed and secure. vibecfo.ai. Now you know.