Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, July 19th.

Today on Forbes, you're not imagining it.

AI is already taking tech jobs.

Between meetings in April, Misha Kaufman, CEO of the freelance marketplace Fiverr,

fired off a memo to his 1,200 employees that didn't mince words, writing, quote,

AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job, too. This is a wake-up call.

The memo detailed Kaufman's thesis for AI, that it would elevate everyone's abilities.

Easy tasks would become no-brainers. Hard tasks would become easy. Impossible tasks would

become merely hard, he posited. And because AI tools are free to use, no one has an advantage.

In the shuffle, people who didn't adapt would be, quote, doomed. Kaufman tells Forbes now, quote,

I hear the conversation around the office.

I hear developers ask each other,

guys, are we going to have a job in two years?

I felt like this needed validation from me,

that they aren't imagining stuff.

Already, younger and more inexperienced programmers

are seeing a drop in employment rate.

Rui Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Economy Lab of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, said that the total number of employed entry-level developers from ages 18 to 25 has dropped,

quote, slightly, since 2022, after the launch of ChatGPT.

It isn't just lack of experience that could make getting a job extremely difficult going forward.

Chen notes, too, that the market may be tougher for those who are just average at their jobs.

In the age of AI, only exceptional employees have an edge.

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