Comment by tombert

It is extremely frustrating that the people who actually make these decisions are pretty shielded from the consequences, but I have learned to never take anything a billionaire says at face value.

There's basically no consequences for lying when you get to that level, and many incentives to (let's say) embellishing. Jack Dorsey is looking to make billions of dollars because of this announcement. If we find out that the AI reasoning was a bold faced lie (e.g. a leaked email or voicemail or something), I doubt that the stock price will go below what it was priced a week ago as a consequence.

It bothers me. I know some people who were victims of these cuts. These are really smart, hardworking people, and I don't think they're going to be easily be replaced with Claude or Codex, but Jack Dorsey ostensibly does. It has to feel like a slap in the face to think that your employer thinks that you're replaceable with a $20/month subscription.

Though of course, the reasoning doesn't really make any fucking sense to me; if you're 40+% more productive with AI, isn't that a good reason to keep the workforce and have them make more and cooler stuff and/or improve your infrastructure? If it's more productive couldn't you make a lot more stuff and blow your competitors out of the water? Presumably a good chunk of those who just got laid off are going to go work for your competitors, and presumably the competitors will have access to the same OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions that you have.