The Block layoffs are just the beginning

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In late 2022, when ChatGPT was first blowing everyone's minds, Kenji didn't really get it. Sure, it did some pretty cool things. But so had plenty of other generative AI models he'd tinkered with over the years. What so many outsiders thought was a world-changing breakthrough seemed to him, a machine learning engineer, much closer to an incremental improvement. All the fear that AI would swallow up everyone's jobs felt overblown. He certainly didn't think it could do his job anytime soon.