alt Hacker News3 and a half ways AI takes jobs:
1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else.
3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway.
Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
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Meta basically "pivoted."
The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.
That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work.
Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.
In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept".
The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
Why is #1 hypothetical?
If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.
In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.
Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
> 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.
They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.
It's #3 - it's always #3.
All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:
1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.
So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.