zero of those jobs have been replaced by AI though. We're seeing layoffs because of a one-two punch of insane overhiring during/after covid followed immediately by an economic pullback and return to "lean" operating strategies.
Chegg and StackOverflow certainly beg to differ with your hypothesis. And they're only the first to fall.
Technically yes
But the difference is not really meaningful to the people who are out of work, is it?
Hard disagree on "zero", and I've read articles about businesses laying off people specifically to replace them with AI (Washington Post had an article about people getting let go shortly after ChatGPT first came out, e.g. copywriters), so this is just demonstrably false.
That said, I agree the larger reason for the current layoffs are (a) massive Covid overhiring, (b) end of the ~decade long ZIRP era, (c) at least in the US, much more outsourcing now that video conf tech is good and everyone is used to remote work. Long term, though, I think we've reached a state where, for a ton of jobs, technology is destroying jobs a lot faster than it's creating new ones. Lots has been written about how many startups can now execute quickly with a team half the size or less than what was required just a couple years ago. Many forms of labor have just become devalued in an incredibly short time span.
Out of curiosity, were these announcements by AI companies or companies with an interest in AI companies?
At lot of articles you read are effectively advertising, especially if it’s a CEO talking about their company.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...
That article seems to be about contracted copywriters.
If your whole job is writing “150-word descriptions” (the article’s words) for $60 an hour and the like, yeah LLMs got you beat.
But that’s a far cry from mass layoff territory.
Also, in that same article, he was rehired by a (granted, a single) client who didn’t like chatgpt. What is the rate of clients that dropped chatgpt?