Who Cares About Consumer AI

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:01)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, who cares about consumer AI?
Before that in the headlines, were Coinbase's layoffs really about AI?
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Earlier this week, as you well remember, I made a big deal about a bunch of fairly small signals suggested to me in aggregate that maybe, just maybe, the AI doom narrative was feeling a bit of narrative exhaustion, that maybe there was a opening for a more optimistic narrative surrounding AI.
The response to Coinbase's layoff announcement yesterday suggests that maybe I was overstating the case.
Yesterday, Brian Armstrong tweeted the email that he had sent to all employees at Coinbase, announcing a 14% reduction in the team. That means about 700 of 5,000 people will be laid off, and of course, AI was at the very center of the story.
In fact, if you just look at the news headlines about this, AI was the only part of the story. Reuters crypto exchange Coinbase to cut about 14% of workforce in AI-driven cuts. Fortune Coinbase didn't just lay off 14% of its staff due to AI, it replaced managers with player coaches and turned its blah blah blah blah.
SFGate formerly SF headquartered crypto giant to lay off 700 workers in AI shift. And of course, the New York Times, the paper of record, Coinbase lays off 14% of employees as AI changes work.
So what's the issue with this? Brian did say explicitly, AI is changing how we work. He wrote, Over the past year, I've watched engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks. Non-technical teams are now shipping production code, and many of our workflows are being automated. The pace of what's possible with a small focused team has changed dramatically and it's accelerating every day. All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company. The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast and AI native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding with AI at our core. The rest of the post is all about what that means. Fewer layers, faster decisions, no pure managers. Every leader at Coinbase, he says, must be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. He also announced what he called AI Native Pods. We'll be concentrating around AI Native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact. We'll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including one-person teams with engineers, designers, and product managers all in one role. In short, AI is bringing a profound shift in how companies operate and we're reshaping Coinbase to lead in this new era. This is a new way of working and we need to leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.
So first of all, I don't not believe any of what he's saying there. In fact, a lot of that is the type of stuff that we talk about on this show every day. What's more, Brian has a long history of making tough decisions with Coinbase that have helped it weather it and be a strong company across what is one of the most volatile industries in the world. So what's the issue? Well, the issue is, of course, with that volatile industry that Coinbase is in. As much as they are trying to move into other areas of finance, Coinbase is and remains at the moment a crypto company.