The poster is kind of missing the point. If I see a tool that could make a lot of my employees 20% more efficient today, and maybe more than that in the future, I’m going to bet big on it.

Layoffs aren’t just to “fund AI” - layoffs (a) always happen and (b) likely genuinely make sense at some scale due to efficiency gain from AI.

It’s not “cut employees, send they money in circles to prop up stock prices” it’s “cut employees, like we always do (but more than usual since we have actual AI efficiency gains).” Separately, let’s yeet excess money in circles to prop up our stock price and AI is a great hype cycle vehicle for that.

Yeah layoffs always suck, especially big ones, but they literally always happen and IMO are not caused by AI circlejerking at the c level.

Also, for anyone curious about “AI gains”. In my role at bigtech company I need to have a high/medium level understanding of like 30 products and teams. LLM summaries of docs, tickets, slack, etc mean I can get a basic understanding and history of any topic in seconds, rather than spending hours reading all those sources. My role is not unique or special