AI’s beginning to have a significant effect on tech-sector employment.

Tech firms announced more than 33,000 job cuts in April, according to this week’s update from Challenger. The accompanying editorial noted that even if AI isn’t directly replacing tech workers, the money firms are throwing at the arms race is forcing management to trim payrolls.

In the BLS’s April jobs report, Information was among the only sectors to show a decline in payrolls. The sector’s shed nearly 350,000 positions since the cyclical peak in late 2022.

But for lucky engineers whose skill sets are such that the hyper-scalers and other bleeding-edge tech firms require their services, relegating humanity to jobless obscurity is lucrative work. A corollary is a second windfall for luxury homeowners in San Francisco.

The figure above, derived using Redfin data, shows home price growth by Bay Area zip code in the years leading up to ChatGPT’s launch and the years since.

As Redfin’s Lily Katz explained, “luxury zip codes saw a 13.4% average jump in home prices in the two years following the launch of ChatGPT, a significantly larger jump than any other price segment and more than double the 6.3% average increase in the segment immediately below luxury.”

In San Francisco’s “affordable” areas (and anyone who knows that market knows “affordable” is a ludicrous misnomer), home prices have actually fallen since ChatGPT launched.

In the linked article, Katz quotes Redfin’s senior economist, Yingqi Xu. “Luxury homeowners in Silicon Valley saw their housing wealth jump during the pandemic, and now it’s jumping again thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence and the high-paying jobs that come with it,” Yingqi said, calling that yet another manifestation of America’s “K-shaped economy.”