alt Hacker News"A company finds itself with surplus labor capacity due to the efficiencies in AI"
That is one possible interpretation, though I don't think it's supported by any facts.
A competing explanation: companies are spending a ton of money on AI in search of efficiency, and then laying people off in order to offset these investments. That's certainly what's been happening at Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, etc.
Replies
michelb • today at 8:58 AM
If you're not in leadership at Big Tech, you're only there for the stock price manipulations.
therealdrag0 • today at 5:55 AM
AI is a fraction of cost of an employee though right? I have an 1000$/mo AI budget which is a fraction of my salary, and most people don’t hit their limits.
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You can't really compare them to Microsoft, Oracle, or Meta. Those companies aren't cutting costs because AI replaced their own employees. They're pouring money into AI infrastructure and models because they want to sell that capacity to others.
Their thinking is more: instead of funding another internal product team, they can redirect that payroll spend into more AI compute and models they hope to monetize.
I don't believe CloudFlare is doing that, though they might, they could be needing to spend in Edge AI compute and what not, building out that infra isn't free, so they might need to find places the cash will come from.