Emad Mostaque

“We have 900 days left — within roughly 900 days AI's economic and social impact becomes irreversible, with most screen-based economic work replaced.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder of Intelligent Internet; co-founder and former CEO of Stability AI; author of 'The Last Economy'

Deadline is roughly May 2028 (900 days from the November 21, 2025 interview); resolution will turn on whether most remote/screen-based work has in fact been automated by then.

“By mid-2028, cognitive labor becomes economically worthless — actually negative value: humans become the dumbest entity on the team and there is no market for negative-value labor.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder of Intelligent Internet; former CEO of Stability AI

Deadline is mid-2028; Mostaque has made the same ~1,000-day argument in his book 'The Last Economy' and in late-2025 podcast appearances, framing agentic 'digital twins' plus collapsing token costs as driving human cognitive labor to negative value.

“There will be no [human] programmers in five years.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder and then-CEO of Stability AI

Five-year horizon from August 2023 resolves at the end of 2028; as of 2026 software development employment remains substantial, so the claim is heavily on track to fail but is not yet due.

“My P(Doom) is fifty percent — humanity has roughly a 50/50 chance of getting through the transition to superintelligent AI, and less than 1,000 days to get our act together.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder of Intelligent Internet; co-founder and former CEO of Stability AI

An open-ended probability estimate; the accompanying 'less than 1,000 days' framing points at roughly 2028-2029 as the decision window.

“No models used today will be used in a year — the current crop of AI models will be obsolete within twelve months given the pace of advancement.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Co-founder and CEO of Stability AI

A year later the May-2023 models were still in heavy production use: GPT-4/GPT-4 Turbo still powered ChatGPT and most enterprise deployments in May 2024, and Stable Diffusion 1.5/SDXL remained the workhorses of the open-source image ecosystem.

“I believe you will see a chatGPT level language model (on at least some metrics) on a mobile phone next year.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder and CEO of Stability AI

By mid-2024 phone-sized models met the bar on the stated 'at least some metrics' basis: Microsoft's Phi-3-mini (3.8B, April 2024) was demonstrated running locally on an iPhone and scored at or above GPT-3.5/ChatGPT level on benchmarks such as MMLU, followed by Llama 3.2 1B/3B and Gemma 2 on-device releases before the end of 2024.

“I believe you will see a chatGPT level language model (on at least some metrics) on a mobile phone next year and GPT-4 level year after. These models are barely optimised, you would be very surprised.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder and CEO of Stability AI

By the end of 2025 small models that run on flagship phones — e.g. Qwen3-4B-2507, Gemma 3n and Phi-4-mini — matched or exceeded the original March-2023 GPT-4 on many standard benchmarks (reasoning, math, coding), though they still lag GPT-4 in breadth of world knowledge, so the claim holds on the 'at least some metrics' standard Mostaque set in the same tweet.

“In India, outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you'll never fire a developer.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder and CEO of Stability AI

Two years on, India's IT and outsourcing sector had not shed its junior outsourced programmers: industry revenue and total headcount both continued to grow through FY2025, with hiring slowing rather than the workforce disappearing.

“AI is better than any Indian programmer that's outsourced right now... 2025 will witness the complete destruction of the BPO market, which will reverberate out.”

Emad MostaqueCEO

Founder of Intelligent Internet; former CEO of Stability AI

The BPO market was not destroyed in 2025: India's IT-BPM industry recorded revenue growth and net hiring over the year, with AI compressing pricing and headcount growth in some seat-based contracts rather than collapsing the sector.