Post by @nixCraft@mastodon.social
Microsoft offers 60,000 employees a voluntary exit 😱 The AI affecting is real in IT sector. This is company’s efforts to cut costs amid AI adoption, per Bloomberg. Personnel on select teams in the US, Canada, India, and the UK at a vice president level and below will be eligible. This reflects ~27% of Microsoft's total workforce https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-voluntary-exit-offer/
This is such a brutal thing. Yes job loss is not nice even if they get some money to exit. The whole IT sector is now a race to the bottom until AI causes a massive job and stock market crash and then nobody will have a job, pensions will be burned out in stock market scams and meanwhile, some of these AI tech bros will have made billions in profits. Well done, Microsoft and every other batshit crazy AI company.
@nixCraft "AI", not AI! It's not just code being stolen anymore but literally behavioral patterns extracted from those very employees by forcing them to use LLMs before getting fired.
@nixCraft And this is assuming it doesn't work. I would very much like to see LLMs finally hit a ceiling and stall but I keep getting surprised how far autocomplete in a loop with tools to keep it on track can get.
All this reminds me of the scene from Oppenheimer after the successful test where he tried to give them advice but since he's already done his part, they dismiss him with "we’ll take it from here, doctor".
@nixCraft None of my colleagues who enthusiastically use LLMs want to think about the logical consequences and the endgame. They are feeding the machine examples of how to solve problems until it has enough data points to cover enough real world usage that they're no longer needed.
Probably it doesn't generalize so it's not aAI (actual AI) but automating 99% of the work is still a 99% reduction in needed labor. And they do it "voluntarily" without even a promise of ownership.
@nixCraft coreweave (CRWV), a prominent bitcoin mining company now pivoting to building AI data centers, has lost abt half its stock value since August. Whee.
@nixCraft worst part will be post-crash when there will be no workforce available: laid-off people would had either reconverted to other jobs or become out of touch for whatever techonologies are now required, and new workforce are so AI-dependant that they would be unable to be productive without it