STARTUPS

At HumanX, AI’s frictions took center stage

CEOs, founders, and leaders across the AI industry gathered at the HumanX event in San Francisco this week. The buzziest topics will surprise you. 

The Deep View team was on the ground at the event all week, including senior reports Nat Rucio-Licht and Sabrina Ortiz, CEO/founder Faris Kojok, and yours truly. 

Here were the major topics that perked up our ears:

• Slow down to speed up: AxonIQ CEO Jessica Reeves was on my HumanX panel, "What do developers need to ship AI faster," and she emphasized that the smartest enterprises are learning to slow down and build a stronger foundation of data and security so that they can speed up. This sentiment was echoed by much of the enterprise contingent this week.

• The compute crisis has downstream effects: It's no secret that the entire AI industry is massively compute-constrained. The compute shortage is reportedly the reason OpenAI shut down Sora. It's why Anthropic just signed a key deal with Google and Broadcom. But Jennifer Li of a16z also told me at HumanX that it's having a big impact on startups as well. If they want to do anything involving models, they'll often need to raise $50-$100 million to secure the capital to access meaningful amounts of compute. That's some serious startup inflation. 

• Token costs are soaring: For months, I've been hearing enterprises complaining about the fact that inference/token costs are killing ROI on AI projects, and they need to find more sustainable alternatives (like this one I've written about). And it's not just affecting businesses. Howie Xu of Gen told me that he's constantly getting requests from his teenager to refill his token budget because he's using AI coding tools and agents and constantly burning through his budget. On the other hand, it’s never been a better time to be an inference provider. 

• Agents are out of control: So many of the executives running around HumanX were focused on the same problem: How to implement better security, governance, and controls for AI agents. Now that the torrent of agent announcements and momentum has captured the zeitgeist for 2026, organizations are scrambling to contain the fallout. OpenClaw, Manus, and Hermes have made it so easy for workers to spin up their own agents that, along with all the potential benefits, they can introduce all kinds of issues. If you want more context on the issue, see my latest podcast interview with Guild AI CEO James Everingham.

One of the hottest terms going around the AI industry right now is "AI psychosis," as coined by Andrej Karpathy, to describe the mania among coders working with agents to do 10x the work they used to do on their own. However, I got a good gut check on that at HumanX, where people said it's popular to say you have AI psychosis right now. The reality is that most of these folks aren't actually working 18-hour days and getting massive productivity gains using a swarm of agents. Nevertheless, "agents" has nearly replaced "AI" itself as the hottest topic in the industry, and that fact was on full display this week at HumanX.

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RESEARCH

Gen Z doesn’t want AI, but feels they can't resist

AI is threatening to upend the way we work, live and think entirely. And the kids are not alright. 

A recent Gallup poll of 1,500 people ages 14 to 29 found that excitement around AI is down 14 percentage points from 2025, sitting at 22% of respondents. Respondents reporting feeling hopeful about AI fell nine percentage points to 18%. Anger and anxiety related to the tech, meanwhile, are on the rise, with 31% and 42% of respondents reporting those sentiments, respectively. 

Though nearly half of respondents reported feeling curious about the tech, many are concerned about AI’s impact on things like creativity, critical thinking and the job market:

• Around 48% of respondents reported that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits, compared to just 15% who reported feeling the opposite.

• Confidence in the benefits of AI has also declined, with those who agree that AI will help us work faster down 10 percentage points. 

• Despite the anxiety, people are increasingly viewing AI skills as nonnegotiable: Around 52% of Gen Z students surveyed reported that they will need to know how to leverage AI in postsecondary education, up 5 percentage points from 2025. 48% reported that they believe AI skills will be a necessity in their careers. 

These sentiments may match up with broader anxieties about AI in the workforce. Of the 200 readers who responded to The Deep View’s daily poll on AI fueling job loss, 48% said they were concerned that the tech was causing economic displacement. 

It only makes sense that people are worried about AI job replacement. With executives under pressure to generate returns, many see cutting payroll as an adequate way to claw back some of their AI investment. A survey of executives from AI agent platform Writer published earlier this week found that 60% of enterprises intend to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI.

“There's going to be an opportunity to AI wash headcount reductions this year,” Chad Seiler, KPMG U.S. Industry Leader for Telecom, Media and Technology, told The Deep View. “The ones that are saying, ‘I'm going to reduce costs,’ that's a short-term dynamic. It probably isn't enduring.”

Though the increasing noise around scary projections for job loss and economic displacement are likely to strike fear into the hearts of young students and graduates, scaring people into using technology isn’t a winning strategy. AI is already losing the narrative among the public. If people feel like they need to use the technology in order to stay off the chopping block, they may grow to resent it, rather than appreciate it, only using it for the bare minimum. Instead, if enterprises and businesses want their workforces to use AI, they should address their concerns with openness, rather than hostility. That way, they may actually want to use it. 

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WORKFORCE

ChatGPT partners with Upwork on hiring

ChatGPT is adding another application, pushing it toward its goal of making the app an all-in-one hub.

On Thursday, Upwork launched an app for ChatGPT that allows businesses to find the talent they need directly from within the chatbot interface. For instance, a business can describe the project needs and then find and hire fitting talent, drawing from the 18 million professionals on the platform, according to the blog post. 

Users can also use the app to get help with creating a job post before they are ready to move on to the Upwork Marketplace to perform tasks such as posting the job, executing compliance, issuing payments, generating contracts and more. Once in the marketplace, users can also access Uma, Upwork’s AI agent, for further help completing the more tedious tasks. 

Notably, the blog post places strong emphasis on the ease this will provide users, as they can brainstorm ideas and meet their hiring needs all within ChatGPT. For example, the blog post says, “With teams turning to AI platforms as a primary place to brainstorm and initiate work, they can now find the right expertise and draft a job post in ChatGPT before moving to Upwork’s trusted platform to scope and execute projects, ensure compliance, and facilitate payments.” 

Chaya Nayak, head of jobs & certification product at OpenAI, echoed that same sentiment in the post, saying, “For many people, ChatGPT is where you can explore ideas, solve problems, and move work forward." 

Both statements underline the direction ChatGPT is clearly heading: becoming a single, unified hub for all users' needs. The applications already available through ChatGPT minimize context-switching by letting users do everything from booking trips and building apps to ordering groceries and creating designs, all in one place. That vision is reinforced by the potential launch of a super app that merges the web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex app into a single, consolidated desktop experience.

With over 900 million weekly users turning to ChatGPT for AI assistance, it's little surprise that software companies are eager to integrate within the platform, hoping to tap into that audience. In this case, however, the relationship appears genuinely mutually beneficial: OpenAI has every incentive to welcome more applications into its ecosystem, as each new integration makes it more of a one-stop shop. Upwork, in particular, feels like a natural fit, aligning seamlessly with OpenAI's deliberate push into the business space and its broader ambition to make ChatGPT the go-to hub for professional workflows.

LINKS

• Florida Attorney General launches investigation into OpenAI, ChatGPT

• OpenAI expects ad revenue to reach $102 billion by 2030

• Alibaba’s new video model beats ByteDance’s Seedance

• Meta will spend $21 billion on Coreweave, up from $14 billion 

• Anthropic reportedly considers designing its own chips 

• Meta is reassigning engineers to its applied AI engineering division

• Perplexity Personal Finance: Perplexity computer now gives users financial tools, including the ability to track spending, build budget tools, and visualize your net worth.

• Claude Cowork: Anthropic’s agentic tool is available beyond research preview, now on macOS. 

• ChatGPT Pro: OpenAI is now offering a $100 per month Pro tier that gives users five times more Codex usage than Plus for “longer, high-effort Codex sessions.”

• ElevenLabs: The voice AI startup can now deploy its models on-premise and on-device.

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