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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all, and cites the MIT study without noting that it’s getting a ton of legitimate criticism. Is AI really a sideshow or an excuse for layoffs that big companies were hoping to do anyway, is it taking the blame for low confidence in the economy?

https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/why-we-dont-believe-m...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost...

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AWS is making more money, they are not making money running llms. The companies didn't want to reveal internal procedures and exact profit/loss statements, is that surprising to this article writer? Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy than this stonk pumper site.

> Sorry but MIT is more trust worthy that this stock pumper site.

Oh I totally agree with you, this was just the first thing that came up in a Google search. The criticism of MIT’s study has been going around widely, this site isn’t the only one saying that this study lacks objective metrics.

The problem isn't with the MIT study itself -- it's with all the media framing of it as if "AI has failed", when the study was about pilots rapidly generating significant revenue.

I don't necessarily believe this is the best explanation but: We know the economy is doing pretty poorly and tech companies are consolidating. Amazon is losing it's two main drivers of revenue: Irresponsible startups with huge AWS spend and no pressure to optimize their stack and consumers buying treats online. Regardless if people are spending on AI, the only thing businesses are investing on is AI and analysts at AWS are likely signaling that many AI companies are not seeing a large ROI and model developers will likely build their own versions of successful products (Claude Code). AWS doesn't want to scale up it's GPU fleet and be left holding the hardware bag. Amazon can't juice numbers for consumer purchases since the rest of the economy is contracting, most people are losing jobs, etc. So the easiest way to for Amazon to juice their metrics is to offshore office work that can be done anywhere. They can claim they are using AI - but from conversations with friends who are working at Amazon this does not sound very realistic - and ride the AI bubble with no liabilities.

Tbh AI and layoffs aren't direct consequences of each other imo. Just think back to the 19th century where automation started taking factory worker's jobs. Eventually society learned to deal with automation and even though by pre-industrial standards, 95% of the work that was done by humans to make goods is done by robots and machines, yet there are orders of magnitude more factory workers at least today than were back then.

The benefits to some far off unborn future generations we’ll never know are a poor argument in favour of harms happening to us now.

Large companies add and remove jobs all the time. It's just the the latter gets much more media coverage. Jobs are always being created and destroyed, for all sorts of reasons.

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