cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/46477169
Amazon on Tuesday appeared to have prematurely alerted Amazon Web Services cloud-computing employees to layoffs planned for Wednesday morning by sending a commiseration email and team-wide meeting invitation hours early.
Reuters reported on Friday that Amazon intended to lay off thousands of corporate employees starting this week. But the company has not yet informed impacted employees, nor has it confirmed the layoff plan.
The email sent on Tuesday signed by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at AWS, wrongly said that impacted employees in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica had already been informed they lost their jobs.
In Slack messages viewed by Reuters, AWS employees who received the email said the Wednesday meeting was almost immediately canceled. Amazon referred in the email to the layoffs as “Project Dawn.”
“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey wrote in the email, reviewed by Reuters. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More in the article.
Fucking Christ, they apparently said it was because of AI that they’re laying off people? And then has the person in charge of AI at the company “write” the email? What fucking worms.
AI is an excellent scapegoat though, and it will pay them dividends as they continue to rely on it to both fire more employees, and make excuses for anything that goes wrong by blaming it on that same AI. One day the company will consist of a handful of people but will also be 10x the size.
No matter what, they’d be saying the layoffs are because of AI
It’s promoting their own AI products, while also painting the layoffs as a positive thing for the company
LLMs are a good scapegoat, but it’s really just marketing when you get down to it. They can tell wall street that they’re laying off people and replacing them with AI. It’s a method to try to pump the stock. Notably Amazon’s stock has been flat YoY, so they’re trying everything they can to boost it.