Though Big Tech’s “Year of Efficiency” may have ended, recent layoffs at Amazon and Google suggest that the corporations will continue to reduce staff in 2024 as they spend heavily in generative artificial intelligence.
Analysts and industry experts anticipate that this year’s layoffs will be more focused and fewer in scope. Businesses who are trying to overtake their competitors in the race for the top spot in artificial intelligence are more likely to implement these kinds of adjustments to offset the billions of dollars they are investing in the technology.
They said that it intends to invest in its “biggest priorities” as the parent company of Google fired off around one thousand people across different divisions, including those working in its voice assistant unit and the team responsible for Pixel and Fitbit. This was implied in a statement that was made last week.
Even the advertising division of the company was not spared; according to a story that was published on Tuesday, hundreds of jobs were being eliminated at the establishment.
Last Monday, the company terminated the employment of several hundred staff across its streaming and studio divisions. According to allegations in the media, reportedly hundreds of jobs were eliminated from the company’s Twitch live-streaming network as well as its Audible audiobook division.
The tracking website Layoffs.fyi reports that companies in the technology sector have terminated the employment of more than 7,500 workers so far in the month of January.
“No company wants to get left behind by the AI revolution and they are all making sure they have these capabilities and are prioritising them, even when it is at the expense of other initiatives,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson and
Both Google and Amazon are doing a lot of work to improve their artificial intelligence capabilities. Google, which is attempting to catch up to Microsoft in the battle for artificial intelligence, just revealed its long-awaited Gemini model. Meanwhile, Amazon is working on a model that is being codenamed “Olympus” in order to compete with the GPT-4 model that is being developed by OpenAI, which is the manufacturer of ChatGPT.
