Google CEO Sandal Pichai recently warned employees that as the company continues to shift investments towards areas such as artificial intelligence, there will be more layoffs this year.
"We have ambitious goals and will invest in our major priorities this year," Pichai told Google employees in a memo titled "Priorities for 2024 and the Year Ahead." He also stated that the company's leadership is preparing to share this year's artificial intelligence goals this week and will announce the 2024 OKR (Goals and Key Results).
"The reality is that in order to create the ability to invest, we must make difficult choices," he added. "For some teams, this means layoffs, including eliminating hierarchy to simplify execution and improve efficiency.".
The latest information conveyed by Pichai indicates that Google will continue to cut costs after multiple rounds of layoffs starting in January 2023. At that time, the company announced that it would lay off 12000 employees, accounting for approximately 6% of full-time employees. Google has also reduced spending on employee benefits and office equipment.
Since the new year, Google has cut hundreds of jobs in areas such as central engineering, hardware, and advertising.
"To be frank, some teams will continue to make resource allocation decisions," Pichai said in a memo on Wednesday. He also stated that the scale of layoffs will not be as large as last year, and "it will not affect every team.".
With the AI boom driving a rebound in technology stocks, the stock price of Google's parent company Alphabet rose 55% last year. Google launched the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence model, Gemini, last month. In some tests, the performance of this model surpassed OpenAI's GPT-4 model.
The layoff storm in Silicon Valley continues
Entering 2024, the layoff storm in the Silicon Valley technology industry is still ongoing.
According to the website Layoffs. fyi, which tracks layoff data, in 2024, over 7500 employees in the US technology industry were unemployed. In 2023, the technology industry laid off a total of 262582 employees, while in 2022, the number of layoffs was 164969.
Amazon recently announced in an internal notice that it will lay off hundreds of employees in its streaming and other business departments; Twitch, a video game streaming company under Amazon, also announced that it will lay off 500 employees; Xerox, an American digital and information technology product company, announced that it will lay off 15% of its 23000 employees; Unity Software, a video game software supplier, announced that it will lay off 1800 employees, accounting for 25% of its total workforce; Discord, a gaming chat app, announced a 17% layoff involving 170 job positions.