Because humans are smelly and moan about fair pay and health benefits and PTO and…
they arent laying off humans because of ai
they arent laying off humans bevause of ai
they have been laying off people in cycles for over 40 years
this last uear they tell investors its because of ai and investors are happy.
To hire them back cheaper, later, while making line go up now, same as always.
AI is just today’s excuse, plus hype that crap for stupid investors and profit.
Bean counters too stupid to understand Assumed Intelligence bought into the hype and thought that they’d save money. Just like with drugs, the first one is free, now that they’ve fired all the expensive experienced employees, they’re in for a serious amount of hurt, which they’ll pass on to us as “increased operating costs”, which they did to themselves.
Because they can’t afford the AI subscriptions AND the humans. Something has to give, and AI doesn’t unionize, take holidays, have centuries of regulations or sue.
At least, not this financial quarter.
Why? To spend less money. Then the CEOs look good for a year and get replaced.
Tokens are now costing more than human workers…
But this is only because of execs’ stupidity.
For a simple task that AI can actually do, say a boring text processing task, the API calls don’t just cost less than my salary, they typically cost less than keeping the monitor on during the time it would take me to do it.
However when companies are stupid and decide to do things such as “tokenmaxxing” or leaderboards for who can waste more AI compute, you end up with things like calling multi-trillion models to do number calculations, or passing a 300k token context into every turn of the chat and giving it your entire codebase to change two lines of code.
This one I blame squarely on stupid CEOs and execs. The smaller version of Gemma 4 is low-powered enough that can run on phones, and can output usable results for many use cases.
This was discussed here recently, with many people directly affected and working in tech weighing in. The impression I took away:
“We’re using more AI” is a guarantee to make the stock go up. So on some shareholder meeting they decided that company policy is to use more AI. Whatever you do, just use more AI. And that gets handed down to the actual coders - those that didn’t get fired.
I heard ridiculous shit like using one of the big LLMs to make web searches or read your mail, just to fill the quota.
Next question: why is “more AI” a guaranteed stock raiser even though there’s no usable product? Because the US government is in cahoots with Big Tech to the point they become indistinguishible.
Reporter are hyper focused on AI replacing workers, but they forget that AI is also upending businesses that rely on search, create eduction tools, create creative tools, make analytics tools, etc.
A lot of tech workers are being laid off because they work for a company that is bleeding customers to AI products.
Honestly, this is what I see on the ground more than anything.
It’s not solely AI.
It’s AI + Contract workers who don’t know anything.
