Google Lays Off Hundreds Of Employees Despite A Profit Record, Accused Of Compensation With AI

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, claims that the company will focus more on AI development (photo: x @sundarpichai)

JAKARTA - Google, the world's largest technology company, has announced a wave of massive dismissals. This leaves concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) is replacing human workers even though the company recorded record earnings. Last month alone, about 1,000 employees from Google's sales, hardware and engineering team were dismissed, with confirmation that several hundred employees from each team were affected.

Although Google reported a net profit of 20.7 billion US dollars (IDR 323.8 trillion) in the fourth quarter of 2023, which was an increase of 52 percent compared to the previous year, the company experienced a four percent decrease in the number of employees. The dismissal decision follows a trend that has also been experienced by other technology companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, and eBay, which have made mass dismissals of tens of thousands of employees in the last 12 months.

Google employees are starting to fight this dismissal policy, with some voicing their dissatisfaction. A Google software engineer, Diane Hirsh Theriault, wrote on LinkedIn that company leaders "without the intention of trying to show a faint direction (AI) while killing their golden resources."

A strong response also came from the Alphabet union, which denounced the dismissal as unnecessary. They insist that their members and co-workers have worked hard to produce great products for users, and the company cannot continue to fire employees while recording billions of dollars in profits every quarter.

One of the employees affected by the dismissal, Kenneth Smith, expressed disappointment with the company's way of dealing with the situation. He expressed his disapproval at a post on LinkedIn, saying the company did not recognize the humanity of the fired employees.

Meanwhile, Google launched a new big language model (LLM) calledANG, which is developed for internal use and trained with more than 25 years of company engineering expertise.diam can answer questions about Google's specialized technology, write code using internal technology stacks, and support new capabilities such as editing code based on instructions in natural language.

This massive dismissal comes as the technology company's massive investment announcements in artificial intelligence development. Both Google and Amazon, for example, have confirmed millions of dollars investment in AI startups like Anthropic. However, analysts believe that this dismissal is part of the company's efforts to simplify operations and adapt to market changes.

Although AI-related dismissals are still relatively low, technology companies are believed to continue to consider cutting jobs due to their focus on developing AI technology. In response to this dismissal, Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims that the company will focus more on AI development and a helpful personal computing platform.

Despite this massive dismissal suggests that although tech companies are experiencing a significant increase in profit, they are still cutting jobs as part of a more advanced AI technology restructuring and development strategy.