"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," Altman told CNBC-TV18 on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday. "I expect we'll see more of the latter over time," he said.
In Australia, AI has largely been positioned as a way to stretch limited skills capacity in high-cost specialist roles, rather than as a headcount reduction tool. Despite widespread tech layoffs globally and locally over the past few years, Australia's skills shortage has remained largely unchanged. Cuts at large technology firms have often weakened the broader ecosystem, impacting smaller suppliers and subcontractors alongside the firms making redundancies. Rather than releasing excess capacity into the market, layoffs have tended to redistribute pressure across an already constrained talent
Pinterest has decided to eliminate 118 jobs in the Bay Area. These include 102 jobs in San Francisco and 16 positions in Palo Alto. Google intends to cut 77 jobs, all of them in Sunnyvale. All of the job cuts are expected to be permanent, the EDD posts state. The Google layoffs are scheduled to occur over a period that begins on March 15 and ends on April 12, the official filings show.
The California-based Trevor Project, which runs a 24-hour hotline and digital crisis services for LGBTQ+ young people, just received a surprise, $45 million gift from Bezos's ex, MacKenzie Scott. The Trevor Project was the subject of an outcry last summer, joined by many celebrities, after it lost federal funding for the LGBTQ+-focused hotline it administered under the national 988 suicide-prevention hotline. [Chronicle]
The tech layoff wave is still kicking in 2025. Last year saw more than 150,000 job cuts across 549 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. So far this year, more than 22,000 workers have been the victim of reductions across the tech industry, with a staggering 16,084 cuts taking place in February alone. We're tracking layoffs in the tech industry in 2025 so you can see the trajectory of the cutbacks and understand the impact on innovation across all types of companies.
State of play: Elliott Krivenko, senior market analyst at CoStar, tells Axios the steep drop in leasing demand and rent is already undermining valuations, and true recovery may still be years away. By the numbers: The office vacancy rate for the region stands at 17.3% with about 43 million square feet listed for sale or lease, per CoStar, and it's projected to peak at 18.3% in 2026.
There is a little bit of showmanship that is going on. That's what I'm hearing from my circle," said Dawn, founder of Upplai, which uses AI to help job seekers with résumés and cover letters.
"While businesses aren't investing, it's hard to make much progress in the software world," Fowler said. "And so we have this weird mix of no investment, pretty much depression in the software industry, with an AI bubble going on."
As of publication, residents of San Francisco's District 4, comprising most of the Sunset from 7th Avenue out to the Pacific Ocean, do not have a representative on the city's Board of Supervisors; the 29-year-old former pet shop owner whom the mayor appointed to the position had to resign after around a week on the job. The cascading series of reasons is both very funny and a revealing look at the strange state of San Francisco local politics.
SAN JOSE Two tech companies, IBM and Infineon, have disclosed new rounds of employment cutbacks that will erase the jobs of more than 100 tech workers in the Bay Area. The staffing reductions extend what has turned out to be a difficult two weeks for Bay Area tech workers, who are collectively facing the loss of several hundred jobs in the region as a result of recent layoff disclosures by their employers.
in 2025, the tech industry had the highest recorded number of layoffs for the month of October: 33,281 compared with 5,639 in September. Tech companies have announced 141,159 job cuts this year compared with 120,470 during the same period in 2024. Total year-to-date job cuts in the U.S. are at their highest level since the pandemic struck in 2020, and t he firm says that layoffs for the month of October haven't been this high since 2003
Karp notes that while the company has "grown quite significantly," it has kept to its "constraints." "Our head count is one manifestation of this disciplined approach," Karp wrote in the letter to shareholders. "The casual expansion of our ranks would have diminished the need to lean even more heavily on the strength of our software and the Ontology and to ensure their continued maturation.
If you are majoring in computer science or computer engineering right now, good luck on finding a good job when you get your diploma - even if you graduate from a top program. That's the sobering takeaway from Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who appeared on NOVA's "Particles of Thought" podcast to talk the current state of AI, the tech job situation that's been shredded by multiple lay offs, and how should tech graduates navigate this rocky new landscape.
In April, I went through my third tech layoff in two years, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back: I was leaving tech behind. I just got married this summer, and it made me think about what I want my life to look like in five or 10 years. I had thought about leaving tech to go into education before, but it was hard to justify leaving when I was making up to $110,00 a year with just a bachelor's degree.
