AI is making for a fraught future, with problems that DeepSeek senior researcher Chen Deli believes tech companies are best suited to solve. DeepSeek is one of China's hottest AI upstarts, albeit one facing some political and technical headwinds, but for a startup that jolted global markets with a low-cost AI model that spurred a wave of open-sourcing from competitors like OpenAI, DeepSeek has been unusually quiet. So when one of its leaders warns that AI could eliminate most jobs over the next two decades and cause major disruptions that society is not ready for, people pay attention.
The “honeymoon phase” we are in now will end, and people will face a wave of layoffs vast enough to reshape social contracts and institutions. He made it sound like a less immediately deadly Black Plague for its rewriting of people's lives. It's certainly not the most outlandish claim. But Chen’s proposal for corporate saviors sounds as nonsensical as any AI hallucination.
