It’s a low risk bet. If AI works, they’re in early and reap the benefits. If it doesn’t, they just hire from the pool of folks that lost their jobs to AI and carry on.

It SUCKS, but if you excise all humanity, it’s the right bet. And if you don’t make the right bet you get punished by the shareholders, who know squat about your business, so maybe there’s the root cause.

Google, for example, credited AI for 50% of its code in its latest earnings report. Block’s head of engineering, at the company’s November investor day, said 90% of the company’s code submission was authored “partially or fully with AI support”.

What could possibly go wrong?

This article is wrong. The layoffs over the last years are not due to AI, but rather fall somewhere between the regular layoffs they do and the cleanup after over hiring around 2020-2021.

Oracle fired a lot of people to pay for their AI over investment. They’re not replacing these people with AI. They’re just expecting their employees to simply pick up the slack, as usual.

Claims of “x % of code was written by AI” are falling into the time honoured fallacy of believing LOC = productivity.

Giving credence to the idea that jobs are being actively lost to AI is poor journalism. The AI companies need headlines about jobs lost to AI to keep funding their lost cause.

The recent layoffs have nothing to do with “AI” (or to be more specific, generative models) and are almost entirely due to an excess of deregulation coupled with a credit crunch due to high interest rates.

Companies are just claiming “AI” because it looks innovative to investors looking for buzzwords.