It's not obvious to me that AI is the reason for the hiring slowdown.

ChatGPT was pretty useless when it first released. It was neat that you could talk to it but I don't think it actually became a tool you could depend on (and even then, in a very limited way) until sometime in 2024.

Basically:

- the junior hiring slowdown started in 2022.

- but LLM's have only really been useful in a work context starting around 2024.

As for this point:

> According to very recent research from Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less

The same point stands. The junior hiring slowdown existed before the AI spend.