{"id":311367,"date":"2026-02-22T11:41:17","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T11:41:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/311367\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T11:41:17","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T11:41:17","slug":"mark-cuban-says-ai-wont-take-your-job-anytime-soon-because-it-still-acts-like-a-hungover-college-intern-with-a-100k-price-tag-to-show-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/311367\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Cuban says AI won\u2019t take your job anytime soon because it still acts like a hungover college intern\u2014with a $100K price tag to show for it"},"content":{"rendered":"

The former Shark Tank star took to X to respond<\/a> to a viral clip<\/a> from the All-In podcast, in which investors Jason Calacanis<\/a> and Chamath Palihapitiya<\/a> revealed the real-world expense of deploying AI agents to enhance productivity: In some cases AI agents are costing more than $300 per day\u2014adding up to over $100,000 annually. For Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital, the price has forced him to rethink the budget he\u2019s willing to give top developers, warning that otherwise, \u201cI\u2019ll run out of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Cuban, that reality is the \u201csmartest counter\u201d he has seen so far to predictions that AI will replace large numbers of workers\u2014at least in the short term.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even if the technology is capable, he said, companies still need to prove the economics make sense, and he\u2019s not convinced the high price tag outweighs the value humans continue to bring.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans have a far greater capacity to know the outcomes of their actions,\u201d Cuban said<\/a>. \u201cAgents, and LLMs as well, never do.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI agents still don\u2019t know what happens after the \u2018sippy cup\u2019 falls from the high chair, Cuban says<\/p>\n

AI systems still lack real-world judgment in ways that make replacing workers risky, Cuban added. He pointed to a simple example: An 18-month-old who pushes a sippy cup off a high chair quickly learns the consequences from their parents\u2019 reaction. AI, on the other hand, lacks awareness.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgents can tell you the sippy cup will fall,\u201d Cuban said. \u201cBut they have no idea of the context and what will happen next.\u201d<\/p>\n

The technology also lacks consistency, often \u201cspac[ing] out\u201d and failing to recognize why and when mistakes occur, he said\u2014a level of competency on par with the youngest Gen Z talent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgents are still like college interns that come in hungover, make mistakes, and don\u2019t take responsibility for them,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Taken together, Cuban\u2019s argument suggests that the biggest obstacle to AI replacing workers may not be the technology itself\u2014but whether companies can trust it to perform consistently at a price that makes sense.<\/p>\n

Cuban declined to elaborate further after Fortune reached out for comment.<\/p>\n

Predictions of massive AI-driven layoffs haven\u2019t come to fruition\u2014yet<\/p>\n

Despite AI\u2019s current flaws, business leaders continue to warn that rapid technological advances could soon reshape the workforce.<\/p>\n

Dario Amodei<\/a>, CEO of Anthropic, has warned that AI could disrupt half of entry-level jobs within one to five years. More recently, he suggested<\/a> the technology could become capable of performing most jobs, if not all, in \u201cmuch less than five years.\u201d<\/p>\n

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> has echoed similar concerns. He said this week that the world may be only a \u201ccouple of years away\u201d from the kind of superintelligence that could replace CEOs\u2014including himself.<\/p>\n

So far, however, large-scale AI-driven layoffs have yet to materialize. Analysts at Oxford Economics said<\/a> companies \u201cdon\u2019t appear to be replacing workers with AI on a significant scale.\u201d Instead, companies may be overstating AI\u2019s role in workforce cuts<\/a>\u2014a phenomenon described as \u201cAI washing<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what the exact percentage is, but there\u2019s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there\u2019s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,\u201d Altman said<\/a> at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.<\/p>\n

In his view, Cuban said, companies still need to weigh factors beyond pure productivity metrics as they determine how far to push automation.<\/p>\n

He wrote<\/a> on X: \u201cAre there qualitative issues like morale, morality, whatever, that can\u2019t be quantified, that need to go into the decision?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former Shark Tank star took to X to respond to a viral clip from the All-In podcast,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,7688,2940,1823,2945,61,60,150,42028,216,57763,80,9246],"class_list":{"0":"post-311367","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-billionaires","12":"tag-careers","13":"tag-entrepreneurs","14":"tag-gen-z","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-jobs","18":"tag-mark-cuban","19":"tag-tech","20":"tag-tech-workers","21":"tag-technology","22":"tag-the-future-of-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}