Peter Thiel warned AI is coming for ‘math people before word people.’ Banks have already said smaller headcounts are possible
The latest string of layoff announcements has stoked fears of an AI-powered jobs apocalypse, though the sectors seeing big losses echo a previous warning from tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
“It seems much worse for the math people than the word people,” he said in a recently resurfaced clip from a 2024 interview.
He added that even in STEM fields currently untouched by AI automation, such as medical care, math skills will be less relevant as a barrier to entry.
“If you want to go to medical school, we weed people out through physics and calculus,” he said, adding that “I don’t really want someone operating on my brain to be doing prime number factorizations in their head while they’re operating on my brain.”
Fast forward to last month, when fintech firm Block announced a 40% cut to its headcount, or about 4,000 jobs, and cited AI models as a top reason.
Meanwhile, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has said AI allows the company to “do more with the same amount of people or less people.”
In an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in January, he suggested the bank isn’t cutting jobs but can still reduce overall payroll.
“We can just make decisions not to hire and let the headcount drift down,” Moynihan explained.
Similarly, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said in December that the bank is doing a lot more because of AI. Though there haven’t been any job cuts yet, he indicated it’s possible.
“There are other places out there where we’re gonna be able to look at and figure out, how are we able to do more with less people,” he said. “It’s not going to totally replace humans, but does create an opportunity to do things significantly different.”
And in October, JPMorgan’s CFO said managers have been told to avoid hiring people as the bank implements AI.
In fact, JPMorgan has already deployed a large language model used by 150,000 employees weekly, and CEO Jamie Dimon acknowledged that productivity gains from AI could mean the bank will employ fewer people in the coming years.
Also in October, Goldman Sachs told employees in a memo that it would “constrain headcount growth” and lay off a limited number of employees.
“To fully benefit from the promise of AI, we need greater speed and agility in all facets of our operations,” CEO David Solomon wrote. “This doesn’t just mean re-tooling our platforms. It means taking a front-to-back view of how we organize our people, make decisions, and think about productivity and efficiency.”
In recent weeks, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley have made payroll cuts, though they didn’t cite AI. Outside the finance sector, Salesforce slashed 4,000 customer-support roles last year due to AI, and Pinterest laid off nearly 15% of its workforce to focus on AI-related roles.
To be sure, Wall Street is growing more skeptical about layoff announcements tied to AI, with some analysts saying the technology is being used as a cover to correct for massive over-hiring that was done during the pandemic.
But skills mastered by “word people” are in demand. LinkedIn released a study recently that found rising need for communications and creative thinking skills.
“Companies are increasingly looking for great communicators, because strong writing, clarity, and judgment still matter,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Fortune. “On LinkedIn, we’ve seen job postings mentioning ‘storytellers’ double over the last year.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com