Just to point out, this particular article does make the claim these are connected.
E.g., "...tech firms have explicitly cited AI as a reason for rethinking head counts" (There are a few fuzzy details later as well.)
yeah, only for one paragraph:
> Last year, companies including Chegg, IBM and Dropbox cited the onset of AI as a reason to rethink staffing. More recently, Duolingo and even Google have suggested the same as they seek to mobilize resources to capitalize on the AI boom.
And everything before and after that is either fluff or does not make the claim that they're connected. For instance layoffs at Amazon was brought up early in the article, but it's unclear how that has to do with AI. Google is brought up as well, but if you click through the source, the layoffs has less to do with "AI replacing workers" (as the article suggests) and more "google is laying off in the hardware part of the business because they want to focus on the AI part".
The article is pretty clear that it isn't just talking about AI directly replacing workers. From the second sentence of the article: "...not all the recent layoffs in the tech industry are directly linked to AI tools simply replacing workers" and goes on to explain from there that they are talking about companies changing what they are spending money on.
Sounds reasonable to me.
The article doesn't really try to argue "the obvious connection across these companies" aside from a couple of sentences. Most of the article is spent discussing off layoffs and AI investments without attempting to link the two.