Are tech layoffs related to developments in AI?

Are tech layoffs related to developments in AI?

I do not believe so, at least not to any significant degree. Rather I believe businesses are adjusting to global inflation and the global economic current and soon to be changes.

This will be a wildly unpopular opinion right now but I believe most of the talk around AI is just that. Machine Learning and Big Data have been rebranded with new window dressing. I suspect people will tire of it quickly once they realize it has no ability to show it's work and is just the next algorithmic evolution beyond the tools used in social media using tailored data-sets and easy to manipulate algorithms. What people are calling AI is impressive however until such a time this AI has truly open source code with completely open obfuscated data-sets and can be self hosted with easily reproducible outcomes then history has taught me to distrust the great and powerful Oz.

The layoffs are due to higher interest rates. Higher interest rates are due to higher inflation. Higher inflation is due to money printing. Money printing is due to covid and other central bank activities.

I mean you can read and listen in to most investor calls where majority of the knowledge is shared with the public shareholders.

For example take Microsoft last week:

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2023/01/24/mi...

Read through the comments on how they see the current AI shift.

> So, that's sort of fundamentally how we view it. And then the other aspect I'd also say is simultaneously investing in this new AI trend because I don't think any application start that happens next is going to look like the application starts of 2019 or 2020. They're all going to have considerations around how is my AI inference performance, cost model is going to look like. And that's where we are well positioned again.

> So, that's how I view it. The market, you all are better readers of, quite frankly, what's happening out there. We can tell you what we see. What we see is optimization and some cautious approach to new workloads and that will cycle through, but we do fundamentally believe on a long-term basis, as a percentage of GDP, tech spend is going to go up.

No.

What is called "AI" today is just brute force machine learning. There is no intelligence, as ChatGPT has amply demonstrated, just blind regurgitation of a black-box statistical analysis of data.

True AI, i.e., the kind of AI in movies, is still several decades away. It's actually further away now than it was 10 years ago, as the brute-force method has pushed AI research into a local maxima that will be difficult to get away from without starting over.

The industry has been blowing a bubble for a long time. The bubble is now popping. This is a normal (for this industry) correction that happens every generation or so.

This would be true if there were indeed tools developed , tested and deployed in production to do your job. But it’s a few years away so relax. Plus there are so many other things to take your job like H1Bs , pandemic , recessions and investors. BTW where is the labor condition approval notices for AI tools that will prove that there is no qualified American worker available to do its job?

If that was happening (and I don't think we're there yet, or will be there in the next six months), I don't think they would lay people off pre-emptively, and it takes a while for any company to shift their processes over to a new way of doing things significantly anyway. It would likely happen after it starts to actually make people redundant, not before.

No, correlation is not causation. It's due to heightened investor scrutiny so they want to be seen as frugal.

IMO it is quite possible, as anticipation of productivity to come. But, more likely caused by over-hiring in enterprise, by empire-building management.

It's related to developments in capitalistic greed more than anything.

Can the AI today really replace labor work of developers?