A diagnosis: the real motive behind AI layoffs is raising money for investment

Instead of the common belief that AI replaced jobs, the diagnosis offered for job cuts at US tech companies is that they cut labor costs, the easiest thing to touch, and redirected the money into investment to cover spending that did not exist before, such as data center construction, power and tokens. It also points to a pattern of moving eliminated positions to local subsidiaries in low-wage regions such as India and putting the difference into investment, along with tallies showing that about 54% of laid-off workers are rehired at a lower level and 31% leave the country because of visa problems. Among observations from the field: as output has grown, so has the burden of reviewing and fixing low-quality work, to the point that guidelines have appeared telling people, regardless of rank, to run multiple agents and work like managers. There is also the observation that at large Korean companies, discontent has built up over a setup that blocks outside models for security reasons and makes staff use lower-quality in-house AI. However, a clear limitation is that figures such as 67%, 54% and 31% are mostly an anonymous online community's own tallies, with the sample and calculation method undisclosed.

This is a note: my own write-up after reading several sources. It has no source link; events checked against a source are kept as records.