"AI" Became a New Name or Placeholder for Debt
Because they will only ever lose money for this thing with "tokens" or "potential"
Almost all the news about the Microsoft LinkedIn layoffs (apparently over 5% of staff) boils down to parroting, LLM slop, or both. There's almost no new information in any of the articles we've seen.
Microsoft never reports profitability, if any, in LinkedIn. But LinkedIn itself has said, formally in fact, that profitability is an ongoing concern. It is the reason for the many waves of staff cuts.
As usual, fools in Reddit cannot tell the difference between profit and revenue; it's the same with YouTube. The elephant in the room is, can they make money? Twitter lost a ton of money and was deep in debt when finally sold to some right-wing fanatic who masturbates to violence and turned Twitter into a platform for synthesising child porn. As we put it last year, from what we can gather based on the companies' history (both LinkedIn's and Microsoft's), LinkedIn is losing money for the same reason Twitter does (even as x.com, press reports said the losses persist). We habitually write about it. LinkedIn is doing no better than this. It just tries to "upsell" a "pro account" (or whatever those are called this year), just like x.com entered the business of selling "ticks" and "premiums".
In more recent times, in an effort to make actual profit, LinkedIn tried to imitate Facebook. As if LinkedIn wanted this...
As someone put it some months back: "I have been an active user of LinkedIn for many years but recently, it seems to have suffered a decline that I do hope isn’t terminal. It has become Facebook on steroids."
It's not going to work. Many people are leaving, there are LinkedIn layoffs, and the userbase/traffic of LinkedIn is measured as declining.
And this brings us to the above "AI" BS. No, the layoffs are not because anything even remotely connected to slop. This is just what utterly dumb media (maybe composed by bots, not journalists) keeps saying. Earlier today in IRC we discussed how the media similarly lies about "shortage" of workers who are clearly available and are looking for jobs, e.g. alleged lack of pharmacy staff despite many pharmacies (with qualified staff) being shut down across the United States. All this "AI layoffs" narrative is a symptom of oligarchs who are peddling slop taking control of the major media. █
That's right, Amazon's debt increased by about 55 billion dollars in just 3 months and AWS now forces lots of staff to adopt slop (before another wave of layoffs).