The Word They Hide Behind

Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters called his own staff “lower-value human capital” this spring, then apologized once it landed badly. He knew exactly how it sounded. He said it anyway.

Everyone is blaming AI for the layoffs, and the smartest people building the stuff are not buying it. Jensen Huang called the excuse lazy. Demis Hassabis of DeepMind called it dumb. Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick said the quiet part out loud: the big companies who fired thousands and pinned it on AI “were not telling the truth.”

So why are they really doing it? Follow the money. Meta is spending up to $145 billion on AI this year against a payroll a fraction of that size, which means the layoffs are not paying for the AI at all, they are making a wildly expensive bet look responsible to analysts who would otherwise ask hard questions. Calling overcapacity “AI” is gaslighting the exact people you need to make the tool work.

The future does not belong to the boards bragging about doing more with less. It belongs to the ones brave enough to do more with more. IBM is tripling its US entry-level hiring. Benioff hired 1,000 graduates to build the AI itself.

I wrote down the whole ugly mechanism, the circular money, the entry-level wipeout, the executives hiding behind a single word.

Read it here: https://heliade.net/ai-layoffs-excuse-more-with-more/

What was the real reason behind the last round of cuts you watched happen?