AI fuels tech job cuts despite efficiency questions among workers

The AI gold rush has come as job openings for software developers hit a five-year low, raising questions about AI’s responsibility for the slowdown.

With news swirling about multibillion-dollar deals for artificial intelligence startups and multimillion-dollar AI worker salaries, it was a study from a small research nonprofit group that turned some heads in the tech world last week.

Its findings were simple but surprising: AI made software engineers slower.

“When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues — a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts,” the nonprofit group, METR, which specializes in evaluating AI models, said in its report.

“This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%,” the METR authors added.

The results may simply reflect the limits of current technology, they said — but they still offer a reality check for what is arguably the buzziest part of the broadly euphoric AI rush: coding.