‘Like a bloodbath’: Clear cutbacks in Silicon Valley

More than 40,000 people are suddenly looking for work in Silicon Valley. Only Apple seems to be swimming against the tide at the moment. 25 years ago, there was the last wave of iPhone group layoffs.

The staff reduction was larger than was assumed or even announced: More than 80 percent of Twitter employees will continue to work after the acquisition. Elon Musk They lost their job. The horrible enfant in the tech world is by no means alone with these drastic job cuts. In 2023, all dams will be broken: Amazon, Google and Microsoft will announce massive discounts. It seems that Apple alone is not following this trend.

The internet giant, spoiled by success, has been in control since December The Google “red alert”. Driven by a small program with a big impact: GPT Chat. Even the panic surrounding OpenAI’s AI has gone so far that the company’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have come back again. The current AI strategy must be completely overturned. Apparently, AI functions will be integrated into search later this year. After all, it’s about Google’s core business, which brings in more than $150 billion a year.

More than 20 new AI projects are currently being examined by the founders of Google, who transferred the scepter to the Indian Sundar Pichai in 2019. In addition, extensive work will be done on a type of AI chatbot called “Sparrow”. The strange thing is that the artificial intelligence “lambda” was not mentioned at all in the reports. Things went eerily quiet around it after the ex-GoogleThe employee went to the audience with his opinion that the machine had developed consciousness.

“greater urgency, sharper focus”

Despite or precisely because of these challenges, Google is making savings elsewhere: 12,000 employees have been laid off, six percent of the total workforce. A move announced long ago. Pichai had already briefed his staff in the summer of the previous year: the group was to “be more entrepreneurial, work with greater urgency, sharper focus and more hunger than we showed on sunny days”.