Vibes & Benchmarks Ep 04: Is anyone actually working less because of AI?

Episode 4 of Vibes & Benchmarks, Outset Capital's weekly AI news podcast, is up. Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht break down the week's AI news.

Topics this week:

• Bernie Sanders wants the public to own 50% of AI. The bill won't pass, but it forces a real question: if AI labs keep talking about UBI and redistribution, what would they actually support? Josh: "I want to see counter proposals."
• Is AI "token shock" actually product-market fit? Simon Willison's argument that expensive employees burning tokens on Claude Code and Codex is a bullish signal, not a failure.
• The cost-discipline phase. What changes when token spend stops being 1% of the budget and starts looking like headcount — and CFOs start asking which usage is worth paying for.
• "Why am I paying you to say make it good?" Josh on jobs becoming wrappers around a machine, and what AI unemployment actually looks like.
• Is AI making us stupider? And how young engineers can use coding agents to get better instead of avoiding the work.
• Jevons paradox with intellectual labor. Where token spend finally levels out.
• Is anyone actually working less because of AI? Josh's answer: the only people working less are the ones who got fired.

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