Thousands of tech workers are being laid off, from Atlassian laying off 1,600 people to Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block laying off almost half its staff. Meta’s latest round of layoffs is rumored to affect 20% or more of the company’s employees.
A common denominator among these devastating layoffs is that industry leaders tout the ability of artificial intelligence, claiming the technology makes redundant workers who find themselves on the chopping block. Whether these claims are realistic, or whether the layoffs are actually the result of corporate bloat and pandemic-era overhiring, is a hotly debated topic.
In a tweet on Tuesday that can only be described as “knife-twisting,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I am deeply grateful to the people who literally write incredibly complex software.”
“It’s hard to remember how much effort went into it,” he added. “Thank you for getting us to this point.”
It was a particularly tone-deaf, almost vindictive letter that suggested Altman had long since given up on the idea of paying content creators and programmers fairly for their work. OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models are known to be trained on data shamelessly scraped from the web, a controversial practice that has prompted a series of copyright infringement lawsuits.
Ultraman’s comments prompted an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “It’s nice to know that our reward is that our jobs are being taken away from us.”
Others called him a “fucking psychopath” and a “scumbag.”
“Nothing says ‘you’ve been replaced’ like a heartfelt thank you from the replacement,” one user wrote.
The news comes as OpenAI scrambles to keep up with competition in an increasingly crowded enterprise and code-oriented AI software space. on Monday, wall street journal According to the report, executives have begun to sound the alarm, calling on companies to double down on coding and enterprise customers.
“We cannot afford to miss this moment because we are distracted by side missions,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s application chief executive, told employees in a memo. wall street journal. “We really have to improve overall productivity, especially on the business side.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI rival Anthropic has also made significant progress, with its Claude Code and Cowork chatbots triggering a multi-trillion-dollar sell-off last month on concerns that artificial intelligence could make traditional enterprise software a thing of the past.
In short, it’s hard not to view Altman’s latest tweet as a ploy to directly exploit widespread concerns about an AI jobs disaster to promote the capabilities of his company’s product.
More information about OpenAI: As walls loom, panicked OpenAI execs cut projects
