AI makes you work harder, says Passes CEO Lucy Guo, citing 26-hour day

Lucy Guo's career sits at the center of the AI boom. She cofounded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang in 2016, left in 2018, and kept equity that made her a billionaire after the company's sale to Meta. Since then she has invested through her venture firm Backend Capital, including in an unnamed company later acquired by Anthropic, which made her a "pretty large shareholder" of the AI company, and she started the creator monetization platform Passes in 2022. That background gives her firsthand experience with the always-on startup culture she describes.

Her comment about AI forcing harder work arrives as the tools are widely pitched as labor savers. The body points to a tension: some workers, including developers, complete tasks faster with AI, yet a UC Berkeley study of a 200-person U.S. technology company over eight months found employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked. The open question is whether faster completion equals quality output, which the body says remains uncertain.

Guo also stresses that people remain central, saying the people in a company make the company, and that she has the baseline knowledge to spot strong engineers despite calling herself average during two years studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. She also said losing the title of world's youngest self-made woman billionaire — surpassed by Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara last year — didn't bother her, calling it a good sign for women. How broadly Guo's experience reflects typical AI-assisted work, rather than founder-level intensity, is likely the key question as more teams adopt agents.