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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

EDITORS: THIS HAS BEEN PRODUCED BY SOFTWARE UNDER DEVELOPMENT - THE CONTENT MAY REQUIRE EXTENSIVE EDITING

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tech-industry-lays-off-nearly-80-000-employees-in-the-first-quarter-of-2026-almost-50-percent-of-affected-positions-cut-due-to-ai [tomshardware.com]

“I don’t know if they are directly related to actual productivity gains,” Hodjat told Nikkei in reference to the job cuts. “Sometimes, you know, AI becomes the scapegoat from a financial perspective, like when a company hired too many, or they want to resize, and it gets blamed on AI.” Despite that, he said that AI-driven layoffs could still happen, but that it would take another six months to a year “before companies start seeing real productivity gains from AI,” and that “it will be painful for all of us as we’re going through it, and simply because it’s a transition.”

Despite all these analyses, some experts are pushing back against this narrative, pointing out that AI-driven layoffs were just being used as an excuse for poor business performance [tomshardware.com]. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the India AI Impact Summit [tomshardware.com], “I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.” While they say that some of these layoffs would still happen with or without AI, there’s still a consensus that the technology would have an impact on jobs and that we should be ready for a disruption.

"There's going to be a ton of people that are coming out of school that can't find a job and don't have the domain expertise,” Hodjat told Nikkei. “You have to bring them in. You have to have them learn on the job, on how to use AI within the various domains.”

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