In a Hacker News thread, I remember reading someone say something along the lines - “The AI Jobpocalypse is obviously here, for how long will we be using COVID over-hiring as an excuse?”

One of the key problems in sorting out the AI Jobpocalypse issues is that 1. Executives are incentivised to say that layoffs are due to AI optimizations, and 2. The economy isn’t doing that great to begin with.

I’m writing this in response to the Wix CEO posting that AI was the reason they were laying off 1000 employees:

https://www.thestreet.com/technology/wix-ceo-sends-layoff-message-to-employees-citing-ai

The WIX CEO gives 2 reasons. The first is the Israeli currency gaining value in comparison to the US Dollar (Many employees are in Israel). The second is AI. He also said similar things to other tech CEOs:

“We need to become a faster, leaner, and flatter organization.”

Which begs the question, why do tech CEOs hire so much in the first place if smaller organizations are faster, but I digress.

I don’t know that there’s an easy way to grok all the factors, since so much is happening at once. A war in the Middle East spiking energy prices.

Really, it seems like we won’t know this until we look back through history 10 years from now.

ChatGPT launches in 2022, which does correlate pretty closely to the highest job openings rate.

Ha! It’s interesting to look at the data, because it never looks the way you might expect. There’s a dip in layoffs in 2022 (correlating to the great resignation) but layoffs never get back to their pre-COVID rates, even up until today:

According to Layoffs.fyi, layoffs peak in 2023, and Q1 2026 doesn’t look great, but they are receding. https://layoffs.fyi/