Comment by stult

Many larger companies have an incentive to attribute layoffs to AI, because that serves to hype their AI products. Basically, they didn't want to say, "we are laying people off for financial reasons." Even though the financial reasons were triggered by a change to the tax code, because that doesn't play well in the media, particularly during a period of elevated profits. So Google, Microsoft, etc. laid a bunch of engineers off to reduce their tax burden and used AI as an excuse.