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Werk Week News Update - Meta Layoffs for AI, Government Education Reform, Musk's OpenAI Grab

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This episode dives into the evolving landscape of skill development, education, and employment as we explore the recent wave of tech layoffs, the implications of executive orders on education funding, and Elon Musk’s billion-dollar bid for OpenAI. The conversation emphasizes the need to adapt workforce skillsets and evaluate the impact of these shifts on marginalized communities while grappling with the ethical considerations of nonprofit and for-profit transitions. 
• Exploring the paradox of tech layoffs amid AI hiring 
• The implications of executive orders reshaping education funding 
• Examining the impact of school choice policies on marginalized communities 
• Elon Musk's billion-dollar bid for OpenAI and its consequences 

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Speaker 1:

Welcome back, architects. This is the work week news update. Today is Wednesday, february 12th 2025. Obviously, we're going to talk about three topics today. First, we have some tech layoffs, like we talk about a lot, but it's also followed up with some actual tech hiring as well, so we'll get into that. There's been a lot of executive orders that's been thrown around lately, and so we're definitely getting into a little bit of that, mostly around the education department, department of Education. And then, last but not least, we will get into this Elon Musk Sam Alton kind of back and forth that we've been talking about for a while now, but this one is a very creative move by Elon Musk to try to stop this transfer to a for-profit. So let's get started.

Speaker 1:

So, on this show, we've been talking a lot about layoffs. Again, I think that the impact of AI, the impact of this new workforce, the impact of a lot of these different changing things in our economy is going to result in, again, the way we work is going to change, and that will result in some layoffs, however. However, in the tech sector, we're seeing massive amounts of layoffs combined with some very particular hiring that is happening. Matter of fact, recently, meta, which again is. Facebook initiated another round of significant layoffs, literally impacting about 4,000 employees, almost 5% of its workforce laid off, gone, and the initial statement from Meta was that these were low performers. But if you kind of look back and look into the data, you're really seeing that these are just people that are being laid off because Meta believes that their skills will be out of date and so these cuts look like a part of a broader strategy to kind of streamline operations and focus on technological advances such as AI. So this shift towards AI, the company is starting to accelerate its recruitment of machine learning engineers, ai engineers, and it really indicates this pivot towards artificial intelligence, again not just for meta but for a lot of these companies. I mean, you're talking about workforce, you're talking about Oracle, microsoft, so on and so forth, and it really underscores the growing importance of AI in the future of tech products and services. And I think we're going to also see this in other sectors as well.

Speaker 1:

Folks kind of being laid off to make room for new people with new skill sets, and the reaction from some of these layoffs has been frustrating to, I'm sure, a lot of former employees mostly around this characterization of sorts that the layoffs were targeting low performers, suggesting that these reductions are more about getting bad workers out of the office space, and I can see how that would be frustrating. These are people that have been laid off. They would like to go and search for employment in other places, and if you've been laid off at Meta recently, a new employer is going to assume that it was because you were a low performer at Meta, and that might not necessarily be the case. You just were not in the new skill set that meta is requiring. And so these actions kind of again reflect a broader industry trend where companies are truly reducing roles in certain areas but at the same time, hiring and expanding roles in other areas, such as AI, and highlighting kind of the increased demand for these particular expertise, again not just in the tech sector, but all across the board.

Speaker 1:

So if you have been watching the news I don't care if you're watching MSNBC or CNN, fox News really doesn't matter your head's probably dizzy with all of the executive orders that are being flown around. We won't get into those on this particular podcast, but we are heavily focused on this show around education, around technology, around workforce, around business. This executive order regarding the Department of Education has really it's really going to have a big impact on a lot of different people in a lot of different ways issued an executive order directing federal agencies to identify and restrict funding for educational programs that promote concepts such as gender ideology or equity initiatives, and this order actually mandates the Department of Education to guide states on utilizing federal funds for K-12 scholarship programs. So this is now going to potentially increase support for all of these school choice initiatives, which include private schools and charter schools, and just open up the door for a new type of, I believe, education system and specifically, around just the collection of data and the monitoring of student success across all different demographics. I think is the most critical thing that's in danger right now with this particular executive order.

Speaker 1:

And again, redirect funds, redirect funds away from traditional public education. So when that happens and those funds go from traditional public education to private and charter schools, the group that's going to be impacted the most will be marginalized populations, students from marginalized communities. Those will ultimately be the ones left behind if nothing is done to prevent that. And so, as these dollars are being redirected away from some of these equity-based programs and education system, going to fund private schools and charter schools to supposedly educate students all students and teach them. We have to be very, very careful on what our kids are learning.

Speaker 1:

And last thing I'll add to educating students is a business. If I open up a school, most of the time the parent is not the one that's necessarily paying for that education. Right, that is going to come from the government some way somehow. And when we're talking about private schools and charter schools and public schools for that matter, if a public middle school or public elementary school has opened up or is running in your neighborhood, they are going to get a certain amount per student to run that school, depending on the state, could be $8,000 a year, could be $10,000 a year, but they're getting a certain amount per student to run that school. And so when you talk about redirecting these funds, that now allows for anybody, for that matter, institution or person. I'm going to open up Ronnie King's elementary school. How does that school get funded? Well, you know, I opened up a school, I enrolled a hundred kids and I'm going to get $8,000 per student. Right, I'm going to get $800,000 for each school year for running that particular school if I can recruit a hundred students.

Speaker 1:

And so what we're seeing, what I believe we're seeing is, hey, these marginalized communities, these kids in these marginalized communities, a lot of them are going to public school. A lot of them are not performing how they need to be in public school, they're not getting the education that they need in public school. But, more importantly, nobody, particularly no business, is getting that money. Nobody's getting that $8,000 per kid. That's kind of just washed in the system in their mind. So what ends up happening is, hey, instead of those 100 kids, those 100 marginalized students, going to your neighborhood school, public school, going to your neighborhood school public school, let's put those kids in some private school ran by somebody or some organization or some charter school. And what we're seeing is that, yeah, that kid goes from public school, they go to the charter school, the private school. Ultimately, the education is no better. But instead of the public getting that $800,000 for those students, that's some private institution who ultimately could be making a profit off of that and again, the kids are no better off. So this, this is a money move. Again, we got to monitor it. But ultimately we have to really be thinking about how we are are going to be educating students, moving forward with some of these new executive orders.

Speaker 1:

And then, last but not least, we have Elon Musk's bid to purchase the nonprofit OpenAI. If you are a follower of the show, we've talked about this before OpenAI. They are the creators of ChatGPT and other technologies. They ultimately are a nonprofit technologies. They ultimately are a nonprofit Now. They are a nonprofit with a product that has been selling off the shelves. A lot of people have been using that.

Speaker 1:

But the nonprofit that was originally started by Sam Altman, the current CEO and president, and Elon Musk, and so those two have really went their separate ways. Elon Musk has left OpenAI, but since then they have been at each other constantly about the future of not only OpenAI, but just who's going to own this new frontier right, this new LLM, large language model, ai generation type frontier? Who's going to run that? And OpenAI again has been trying to literally convert their nonprofit to a for-profit. Seeing all the opportunity, all the money-making opportunity, they have been trying to convert their nonprofit into a for-profit so that a lot of folks can again get paid. And so Elon Musk and again these are billionaires going at billionaires having billionaire issues.

Speaker 1:

But it trickles down, it impacts us ultimately, but Elon Musk, along with some other investors, have made a $97.4 billion offer to acquire the nonprofit entity now the nonprofit, openai. So they pretty much put in an unsolicited bid. They just said hey look, we want to buy OpenAI, the nonprofit, for $97.4 billion. As a matter of fact, I know we got a lot of nonprofit listeners. Can you imagine somebody offering you money to buy your nonprofit and not only offering your money, offering you $97 billion to take your nonprofit from you? And I think when he made this offer, clearly it was unsolicited, clearly it was going to get denied. But what it did do was kind of complicate things a little bit for OpenAI as they are trying to become a for-profit.

Speaker 1:

One of the things if you are in the nonprofit space, you can't just take the money from the nonprofit and, let's say, transfer it over to a for-profit, right? I mean, if your nonprofit all of a sudden starts making billions of dollars, you can't just turn around and say, oh, actually this is going to be a for-profit and I'm going to convert it to that and then you take all the money. Right, they won't let you do that, and so up until now, how much OpenAI is worth is kind of debatable. They obviously have a product, a lot of people use it, but in a lot of ways they're losing money. They're still losing money, and so you can make the argument, if you're open AI, that hey, there is no, we're not in the black here. We want to change this thing to a for-profit entity and just kind of wipe our hands of the nonprofit. But the moment somebody makes a $97 billion offer, now it gets a little trickier to claim that your nonprofit isn't worth at least $97.4 billion, and if that's the case, can you convert it then to a for-profit entity? So you got all these little again billion-dollar games that's being played with the products that we use. So Must aims to kind of put a halt to OpenAI's efforts to become a for-profit entity.

Speaker 1:

And again, sam Alton has dismissed this offer very, very quickly, kind of suggesting that it's clearly a tactic to disrupt those plans for OpenAI. But again, the board has the authority, the OpenAI board has the authority to accept the offer. Does Elon Musk then own Twitter and own ChatGPT? I don't know. I think it's unlikely, but I don't know. And again, when you talk about policy combined with technology, you get very scalable social engineering, very scalable disruption, very scalable impact that can come as a result of that, and hopefully it's the impact that we all need. And that is it for today's Workweek News Update. Please don't forget to follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts wherever you happen to listen to your podcasts. And until next time, keep building. Bye.