Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirms more job cuts for 2024 as company invests in "big priorities"

[midian182]

What just happened? Google employees who survived the company laying off thousands of workers this month might still not be safe. CEO Sundar Pichai has warned staff to brace themselves for more cuts as the search giant focuses on "ambitious goals" and investing in "big priorities" this year.

Googlers are having a tough time right now. It was reported earlier this month that the company had become the latest to let go of thousands of workers across multiple divisions, with big reductions in the core engineering, Google Assistant, and hardware teams. Google's sales, YouTube, search, policy, and shopping businesses have also been impacted.

In an internal email seen by The Verge, CEO Pichai reveals that more cuts are coming in 2024. "We have ambitious goals and will be investing in our big priorities this year," Pichai wrote. "The reality is that to create the capacity for this investment, we have to make tough choices."

Google parent Alphabet joined the massive number of companies laying off people early in 2023 as the overhiring during the pandemic and reduced consumer demand started hitting tech firms. It let go of 12,000 employees, and while that was more than most, the number was still less than half the 27,000 people that Amazon laid off.

"These role eliminations are not at the scale of last year's reductions, and will not touch every team," Pichai wrote, referencing the 6% of Alphabet workers that were let go in January 2023. "But I know it's very difficult to see colleagues and teams impacted."

Google is joining Duolingo, Amazon, Meta, Twitch, Unity and others in announcing job cuts this month. Several of these are undoubtedly related to AI, either pouring more resources into the area or using it to replace staff. Duolingo confirmed that one reason for laying off 10% of its contractors was its increased use of generative artificial intelligence.

credit: Layoffs.fyi

According to Layoffs.fyi, 58 tech companies have laid off 7,785 people in the first 18 days of 2024.

Pichai's mention of investing in big priorities and ambitious goals could also be a reference to artificial intelligence development. Google unveiled Gemini last month, a ChatGPT competitor that is its most advanced AI model to date.

The Alphabet/Google CEO never said exactly how many jobs will go in this year's rounds of cuts. It might not reach 12,000 people, but we can still expect a significant number of positions to be eliminated.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/101561-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-confirms-job-cuts-2024.html

 

[thelatestmodel]

"dOn'T bE eViL"

 

[Furriest]

Not a chance at trying to hide the "big priorities" and a (somewhat) shameless attempt at it as well. Its not like you can blame any one individual in the company [for taking the easiest route; generative machine learning models,] but that's the problem too, lack of accountability [somewhat the cause for the profit over practicability we see in so many online services hosted by Alphabet Inc. (e.g. YouTube) as well as the 'big five.']

This lack of accountability will only worsen as time progresses, and big tech is making the hastiest attempt at implementing and integrating these systems into general, daily tech products [e.g. Microsoft /w Copilot on HP Laptops] and every inch of our operating systems [e.g. Microsoft, still, /w Windows 11 super-bloat (I.e. Edge & Bing AI)] in hopes of outpacing legislation and regulation [Meta /w their implementation of Copyrighted Digitized Books into their LLM's, theoretically capable of regurgitating lines, paragraphs or pages from the book verbatim and/or functional pirated book links] [&] [OpenAI openly admitting to freebooting off the entire internet with no ethical regards or considerations to digital copyright]

This is a disaster, and its influence [on (generic) creative, tech, and/or cyclic jobs] will only continue to grow, and AI investing big-tech will always over-hype its influence to doomsday-like proportions to effectively "Syndrome" [watch 'The Incredibles'] itself into 'fixing' the "looming" AI usurping human intelligence hypothetical, and make trillions-billions in the process of haphazardly solving the issues they-themselves created. -.-

[note: this was a fair amount of typing, correct inconsistencies as needed]

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Unsurprising. Wonder how many zoomers are regretting posting tiktoks about how they spend 6 of their 8 hr work shift in the bean bag chairs or drinking $20 coffees instead of working? We are in a recession, there is no if ands or buts about it.

"dOn'T bE eViL"

/Is trimming fat "evil" now?

 

[JamesBlond]

Good bye people, hello AI

 

[toooooot]

"dOn'T bE eViL"

This is not about being good or evil.
It is just the state of our economy.
All IT companies firing thousands (maybe even hundred of thousands)
employees. It ain't good. I read about downsizing almost daily.
And widespread AI use could only push this further.

 

[RandomWAN]

"dOn'T bE eViL"

Of all of the arguably evil things Google does, this ain't it. They hired without foresight and now the realities are catching up with them.

If the people getting laid off have been approaching their career with foresight, then they get to have Google as a work reference and move onto something better. If they were filming TikToks about adult day care, then they're in for a rough ride.

 

[wiyosaya]

This is not about being good or evil.
It is just the state of our economy.
All IT companies firing thousands (maybe even hundred of thousands)
employees. It ain't good. I read about downsizing almost daily.
And widespread AI use could only push this further.

Wait until companies that are using AI instead of real people figure out that the AI is much worse at providing quality product than the people that were fired in favor of using AI.

 

[wiyosaya]

Of all of the arguably evil things Google does, this ain't it. They hired without foresight and now the realities are catching up with them.

If the people getting laid off have been approaching their career with foresight, then they get to have Google as a work reference and move onto something better. If they were filming TikToks about adult day care, then they're in for a rough ride.

IMO, a more important item than having "Google" on your resume is being able to do the job. If they were filming "TikToks" during their time at Google, then their skill likely suffered as well and they may not be capable of doing the job for which they are interviewing.

Admittedly, I am biased against Google.

 

[passwordistaco]

let go of thousands of workers across multiple divisions, with big reductions in the core engineering, Google Assistant, and hardware teams. Google's sales, YouTube, search, policy, and shopping businesses have also been impacted.

How many H1Bs is Google going to request this year because "there aren't enough skilled American workers"?

 

[BuckarooBonzaii]

Back to office work mandates (in some ways) are reloading their guns.

 

[Stan1ey]

Fack google. Let’s just stop using it lol