In the latest layoff round, tech giant Google has announced a reduction of 10 per cent workforce in managerial roles, including directors and vice-presidents. According to Business Insider, its CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed the decision during an all-hands meeting. He mentioned the company’s ongoing efforts to streamline operations amid growing competition from AI-focused rivals like OpenAI.
The layoffs are part of Google’s broader restructuring strategy that has been unfolding over the past two years.
According to the report citing a Google spokesperson, some of the job roles have been transitioned to individual contributor roles, and some roles have eliminated.
During the all-hands meeting, Pichai addressed another topic: redefining “Googleyness”, a term often used internally to describe the company’s culture and values. “It’s time to update what Googleyness means for today’s Google,” he told employees, signalling a cultural shift to align with the company’s modern challenges.
In September 2022, Pichai stated that he wanted Google to be 20 per cent more efficient. In the following January, Google had cut 12,000 jobs.
According to layoffs.fyi, 539 tech companies have laid off 150,034 employees in 2024 so far. In 2023, a total of 2,64,220 employees were laid off by 1,193 companies.
Big Tech companies like Google and OpenAI are racing to release consumer products that can showcase uses for the snazzy new technology, even as naysayers warn that the lack of guardrails around the development of AI poses dangers for humanity.
Since OpenAI initially launched its text-to-image creation tool, Dall-E, in 2021, the concept of AI-generated artwork has swamped social media and become a focus of consumer products. Google’s Whisk is an image-to-image generator, building upon the popular concept of text-to-image generators.
Google’s newest artificial intelligence tool, “Whisk,” lets people upload photos to get back a combined, AI-generated image – even without users inputting any text to explain what they want.
