Why Amazon is hiring 11,000 junior employees

**Casey Newton** (0:00)
Matt Garman runs AWS, and he says replacing junior workers with AI is one of the dumbest ideas he's ever heard. So why did his own company cut 30,000 jobs over the past year? That's this week on Platformer.
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Welcome to Platformer, I'm Casey Newton, and today we have the final episode of this first little mini-series we've been doing on AI and jobs. But good news, after a couple weeks away, we're going to be back with a new mini-series. So stay tuned for more on that later. This week on the show, AWS CEO Matt Garman joins us. Matt, I think, has one of the best seats in the world to watch what is happening with AI and work. AWS runs the infrastructure behind much of the AI economy, sells the agents that are starting to do white collar work, and sits inside a company whose CEO has said he thinks AI will shrink its corporate workforce over time. But Matt is one of the most outspoken optimists on AI and jobs, and we are going to test that optimism. First though, as always, we begin on checking in on recent news about AI and jobs. That means it's time to bring in Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent, Ella Markianos. Ella, how are you this week?

**Ella Markianos** (1:40)
Well, as of like an hour ago, I'm furious.

**Casey Newton** (1:44)
Okay.

**Ella Markianos** (1:45)
Because I was researching for the segment I'm about to present to you, and I saw this ad on Corsical, an app that is a personal enemy of mine, which said, make TikToks for Corsical. We're paying $500 a month to make videos about Corsical, an app that actually helps students. Tap here to apply.

**Casey Newton** (2:12)
First of all, what is Corsical?

**Ella Markianos** (2:14)
Okay.
Corsical is a course management software that you use to like, in particular, at Columbia, which used it when I was there, you can use it to plan the courses you're going to sign up for, and then do sign up for those courses. The thing about it is there are hundreds, thousands of courses you might want to take, and the interface for searching them makes absolutely no sense, and has been overall negative helpful for finding the course I was looking for. I literally would search three keywords for the title of a course I knew existed, and knew no other courses contained those keywords, and that course would not show up.

**Casey Newton** (3:10)
That sounds infuriating, but what was it about seeing this ad for making TikToks about them that sort of pushed you over the edge?

**Ella Markianos** (3:19)
Well, also, this is near and dear to my heart because I graduated college a year and a half ago. So in some sense, I feel I never left. I still have dreams about finishing my problem sets last minute.
I think to say to college students who are stressed about finding an internship, here's a great opportunity for you. Shill for this platform that is making your life worse on TikTok for $6,000 a year. That's money for a college student. But is it worth what it does to your soul?

**Casey Newton** (4:04)
It sounds like the answer is no.
Well, shame on Tiktok. We'll be interested to see what happens to that company. In the meantime, what have you learned this week about AI and jobs?

**Ella Markianos** (4:19)
Yeah, so there's been some recent reporting, partially from the New York Times, about how colleges are increasingly offering not just CS majors, but majors that are specifically AI majors. And so in 2021, there were only like five schools that offered a major that was like called an AI major. Now, like a report from Northeastern University Center for Inclusive Computing says that there are 74 AI specific degrees in the US.
And now, like, that's a five-year period. In academia, this is lightning speed. You have no idea how fast they're creating these degree programs, like.

**Casey Newton** (5:02)
And we assume that is because there is now just suddenly a lot of demand in the marketplace for pieces of paper that say AI on them that come from top universities.

**Ella Markianos** (5:12)
Yeah, and it's also not just top universities. I would say the percentage of top universities and also the percentage of, like, small private universities and state schools that are starting to offer these degrees is, like, pretty similar. Like, there's demand, like, from students on, like, all sides of higher education for an AI degree. Because AI is, like, very hot right now and people are, like, what will keep me employed? The only thing booming right now, apparently, AI.