this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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I get that, but there are other articles saying the same if not pushing it worse... My point is they are investing large amounts in AI and not people, refocus if you like but for many people AI isn't what they want. Mind you neither is office or Windows....
Don't they lay this amount off every year?
Their workforce is upwards of 200,000. During COVID it was only 100,000. 2006 it was 60,000. But they lay off 9000 and it's because of AI?
Why is this AI and not just business as usual?
I've been saying for a bit that these AI headlines in Lemmy are similar to anti immigrant headlines in Republican social media groups. I feel like this is just more evidence of it. It's yellow journalism tactics
Another factor is Section 174 and the hiring of H1B workers. Although Microsoft's official AI website lists many job openings, you're right that it's changing its focus, it's strange that they're changing focus so quickly. First it was the metaverse, then video games, and now it's AI. What's next? Quantum computing in the coming years, and pouring tons of money into it as if there were no tomorrow.
It seems like tech companies are going through a midlife crisis, as are their shareholders, who want to be on the cutting edge and end up executing poorly. But they want to be on this trend because they don't want to be in the same situation as Apple, which wasn't on the cutting edge and its shareholders are suing it.
Apple is being sued because they announced and demonstrated all of these AI features and then never delivered. They are actually doing good work in the AI field, including a recent paper that demonstrates that AI/LLM technology is incapable of reasoning, and any apparent logic seen in current approaches is simply an illusion. It’s not that they “aren’t moving fast enough”, it’s that they intentionally lied about their capabilities and timelines.
Because a lot of the jobs are simply going as they have replaced people with AI. Here in the UK I know about 25000 jobs gone this year with businesses I've worked for as they are replaced with AI. Of course, I have about 90% less work this year as well because of AI
Exactly. Everyone likes to blame AI right now, but the actual reality is that everything has been getting more automated, centralized, efficient, etc. What used to be an entire office of people using typewriters and paper and pens and file cabinets is now a single SQL database with some code doing analysis and reports. What used to be an entire team of programmers and analysts can now be a handful of people using AI and pre built templates or software. AI is just the next evolution of an already existing story of evolving industries. Similarly 1 farmer in an ACed tractor can now sow and reap entire fields of food that used to be hundreds of people for days in the hot sun.
We don't need to be afraid of the technology, but we also don't want to move so fast that we lay off thousands of people all at once and they have no other job to go to.
We COULD, in theory demand that every worker that gets replaced by AI and laid off or fired in any way gets a retirement or UBI or something. Some small cut of their former paycheck, but we all know what is about to happen, the few executives at the top are going to fire more and more people and automate more and more things and collect all of the profits and wealth for themselves and leave the rest of us to starve. But that's what the Republicans want, it's the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" party, which in practice just means screw you, I got lucky and got mine.
The only good thing about AI is that, in theory, anyone could train up their own ML system and profit off what it does. That does give the command person the potential to enter industries they didn't before. Similar to the movable type printing press suddenly opening the way for more people to publish a book. Or the Internet opening the way for me to talk to you where we couldn't have like this 40 years ago.
All of that to say, in a long way, we create more and better technology and tools as a species, it's what we do. We need to embrace that, but also be mindful of what we are creating and for what purposes. Splitting the atom can provide power to entire cities or destroy them. So too could AI provide something good for mankind, but could also destroy.