Why is Gen Z hates AI?

What It Covers

Gen Z graduates are booing AI at commencement addresses, with Eric Schmidt getting audibly jeered at University of Arizona. The episode examines why young people feel betrayed rather than scared, covers a data showing AI startup revenue concentrating in OpenAI and Anthropic, and discusses Flock Safety's license plate surveillance technology following Austin shootings.

Key Questions Answered

• •Gen Z AI Resentment: Recent graduates aren't afraid of AI — they feel betrayed by it. Having used ChatGPT throughout their degrees, they understand the technology well enough to recognize that tech leaders promising "optional work" and "abundance" are simultaneously eliminating entry-level positions. Big tech has cut over 100,000 jobs in 2024 alone, and graduates see peers struggling to find employment in fields they trained for.
• •AI Job Math: A University of Utah study projects US data center construction and operations will create roughly 65,000 jobs by 2030. That number is smaller than the tech layoffs already recorded in the first four-plus months of this year alone. This data point concretely undermines the standard industry argument that AI infrastructure investment will generate sufficient replacement employment for displaced workers.
• •AI Revenue Duopoly: OpenAI and Anthropic now capture 89% of all AI startup revenue across 32 tracked private companies, generating approximately $6.6 billion monthly combined. Six months prior, their combined share was 4.5 percentage points lower, meaning they are actively gaining ground on application-layer startups even as companies like Cursor, Eleven Labs, and Harvey grow rapidly.
• •Startup Survival Strategy: Founders building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic models face a structural risk: the foundational model providers can observe usage patterns and build competing vertical products directly. OpenAI's Codex competing with coding tools is the clearest example. Startups should evaluate whether their market is large enough to warrant a dedicated vertical product from a lab with trillion-dollar valuation and infrastructure advantages.
• •Entrepreneurship as Layoff Defense: Owning a company of any size — even one generating $500K to $5M annually — provides a structural buffer against AI-driven layoffs that employment cannot. Workers are cost centers; owners control their own destiny. Media professionals who dismissed this advice after Gawker, Vice, and BuzzFeed collapsed ultimately launched independent Substacks and podcasts anyway, proving necessity drives the transition.
• •Surveillance Technology Tradeoff: Flock Safety license plate readers, deployed in 155 locations in Providence alone, helped Austin police capture shooting suspects within hours after the city had previously removed the cameras on privacy grounds. The practical framework for acceptable deployment involves three elements: mandatory audit trails with logged access, defined data retention limits capped at 36 months maximum, and community-level opt-in decisions rather than top-down state mandates.