Investor Says AI Is Already "Fully Replacing People"

The hype over artificial intelligence might be quieting as the US tech sector stresses over tariffs, but some investors are still knee-deep in the mud, panning for gold.

One of them, prominent venture capitalist and former gaming CEO Victor Lazarte, is so confident that he claims AI is already "fully replacing people." While some companies have pumped the breaks on hyped-up promises of a fully-automated future, Lazarte is charging full steam ahead.

"Big companies talk about, like, 'AI isn't replacing people, it's augmenting them,'" the tycoon said on the Twenty Minute VC podcast. "This is bullshit. It's fully replacing people."

As per Business Insider, Lazarte highlighted that lawyers and HR workers should be particularly nervous that AI is coming for their jobs, noting that law school students "should think about what they could do three years from now that AI could not."

It's a curious claim coming from a guy like Lazarte, whose firm, Benchmark, is heavily invested in startups like AI-based hiring platform Mercor and AI-powered research lab Decart.

The venture capitalist doesn't bother to provide receipts for his claim, instead insinuating: I have a lot of money riding in this, trust me. In order to dig into his claim, we'll have to look at examples of AI in law and recruiting today — and boy is it a disaster.

Starting with law, recent headlines aren't great. A New York Supreme Court judge recently slammed an entrepreneur for trying to pass an AI-generated video off as a stand-in for a human lawyer. The man was reportedly testing his legal-aid startup software, called Pro Se Pro, in the real world.

"You are not going to use this courtroom as a launch for your business," boomed the justice.

Other high profile incidents include one where Michael Cohen, Trump's former legal counsel and White House plumber, was caught filing AI generated briefs, which might have been fine if the software didn't completely make up the cases he was citing.

Though there are a lot of startup founders and investors who, like Lazarte, have a personal interest in passing off AI as "ready for the courtroom," actual legal pros aren't convinced.

"I think courts will clamp down before AI appearances can gain a foothold," law professor Mark Bartholomew told BI.

The reason, of course, is AI's deep-seated penchant to spit out an answer as fast as it can, accuracy be damned.

"If you type a legal question into the Google search function, then generative AI is all too ready to answer," wrote legal columnist Virginia Hammerle. "That is not a good thing."

And when it comes to hiring, well, that's a whole other fiasco.

Though today's AI models are chock full of racist and misogynist biases — courtesy of the real-life data they're trained on — companies are nonetheless blazing ahead by putting AI in charge of human resources. One study found that 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies were using AI to filter applicants, and there's a growing push to sell AI to do the actual interviewing as well.

That's creating a hellish environment for job seekers, as some candidates deploy their own AI to fight the hiring AI and spam job listings with applications. It's a vicious cycle that's boxing out non-AI savvy job seekers — especially disabled, elderly, and immigrant workers — while making AI spam a precondition for finding a job.

When it comes to playing fast and loose with AI, UC Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid sums it up best: "Just because something is inevitable, it doesn’t mean you deploy [it]."

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