Was just talking to a friend at a US technology company, they’ve had their budget reduced by 50% as the company says it wants to announce “the largest layoffs in US corporate history” to prove GenAI can replace jobs.

There’s no plan to actually replace the jobs with GenAI.. they just have to decimate their area.

Not naming company as the staff don’t know they’re about to fed to the line going up.

The vibe I'm getting from lots of people at lots of orgs now is, you know during Fyre Festival, that marketing dude was like "Let's just do it and be legends, man!" when challenged about issues.

That's the GenAI plan fundamentally. Lots of people are making decisions without really knowing what they're doing, because everybody else is doing it. FOMO marketing.

I suspect a lot of large companies are going to look like this in a few years:

@GossiTheDog This may be remembered as the era when things barrelled heedlessly over cliffs and no one seemed to know how to stop them. Is this how 1929 felt?
@CassandraVert @GossiTheDog No idea, but this is definitely how the real estate bubble felt in 2006-07.