Has the AI Apocalypse Arrived? Tens of Thousands Being Laid Off in Big Tech – AI has to Either Replace Them or AI Spending Must Stop

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

Tens of thousands of employees are being laid off in Big Tech, again, and the narrative that is being spun in the U.S. press, both corporate and “alternative”, is that AI is replacing their jobs.

But if you dig into the news about these layoffs, you will quickly see that it is NOT AI that is replacing their jobs, it is AI SPENDING that is forcing them out of their jobs, as this spending on anything and everything related to AI has continued to increase and inflate perhaps the largest financial bubble in world history.

In other words, if you don’t already work in helping to build the AI bubble, your technology job is in danger.

Earlier this week Microsoft laid off 9,000 employees, just shortly after they had laid off 6,000 employees a few weeks earlier, with a total of 15,000 employees laid off so far this year.

When they did their most recent round of layoffs, Microsoft told their existing employees to “Invest in your own AI skilling.” In other words, either learn how to make AI useful and productive, or risk losing your job, because Microsoft and everyone else is still investing in AI, big time, whether it is profitable or not.

After Layoffs, Microsoft Tells Staff to ‘Invest in Your Own AI Skilling’

After Microsoft announced last week it would cut 9,000 workers, its second major layoffs this year, it told its remaining salespeople to lean on artificial intelligence to be more productive.

“We all need to use AI tools,”

said Travis Walter, an executive overseeing Microsoft’s sales to small and medium enterprises in the Americas, during a staff meeting on Monday, according to an attendee.

Walter pointed staff to internal AI tools that aim to help salespeople get up to speed on customer accounts faster and automate the drafting of sales pitches, this person said.

“This is a great opportunity to invest in your own AI skilling,” Walter said.

The Microsoft layoffs reflect pressure to offset surging capital expenditures for data centers and chips that run AI applications for Microsoft products and those of its customers, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Microsoft estimated that it would spend $80 billion in capex the 12 months that ended in June, up from $56 billion the year prior.

CEO Satya Nadella told investors in April that the company was simultaneously “lowering costs and increasing performance” to balance things out, and CFO Amy Hood said capex would grow at a slower rate in the fiscal year that started this month, compared to the last one.

Full article. Subscription needed.

Microsoft’s ChatGPT is still standing at the top of the AI bubble, being introduced in November of 2022, when it became the most downloaded app of all time.

But it has many competitors now, including good free ones developed in China.

In a report published yesterday, it appears that ChatGPT may have finally peaked out, as its percentage of use went down for the first time, between May and June of this year.

Why Some Companies Are Canceling ChatGPT Subscriptions

Companies that buy artificial intelligence chatbots for their workers have many options, and some of them have started looking for the cheapest option. That could explain new data from payments startup Ramp, showing a slight dip in the percentage of Ramp customers that spent money on AI products like ChatGPT between May and June, to 42% from 42.5%.

Ramp’s more than 30,000 corporate card customers collectively spend billions of dollars annually on AI, and the share of companies spending on the tools has been steadily increasing since the start of 2023 before falling slightly for the first time in June, according to Ramp economist Ara Kharazian. (Full article – subscription needed.)

Elon Musk’s own investment in LLM AI through Grok, has put his companies in danger also, particularly Tesla, as I have reported many times now. Musk has admitted that Tesla is no longer really an EV company, but an AI company that is going to mass produce robots.

But this week another one of his companies took a big hit: X.

Grok is integrated into all aspects of X, for the whole world to see. When it started praising Hitler earlier this week, it quickly went viral, and then Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X for the past two years, quit unexpectedly, and gave no reason why.

Why Elon Musk’s AI Focus Doomed Linda Yaccarino

Oh, how times have changed!

Just two years ago, Elon Musk hired Linda Yaccarino as the CEO of Twitter with a mandate to clean up relationships with advertisers, many of whom were worried about their products showing up next to hate speech.

On Wednesday, Yaccarino unexpectedly announced her departure at a time when the merger of X with Musk’s AI startup xAI had essentially downgraded her role to the head of the combined company’s social media division.

It probably didn’t bode well for Yaccarino’s diplomatic outreach to advertisers that xAI’s Grok chatbot on Tuesday went viral for repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler on X.

Yaccarino could well have been planning to leave X before the bad publicity about Grok’s misbehavior emerged (The New York Times reported as much), but the problem exemplifies a tension that’s been brewing for a while: xAI is clearly more important than X to Musk nowadays, and what’s good for xAI isn’t necessarily good for X’s business or users.

Just look at how X’s user experience changed during Yaccarino’s tenure.

It feels like Grok has been shoved into every possible nook and cranny of the social media site, including the addition of a Grok button to every single post and Grok-generated responses ranking highly in responses to popular tweets.

While this no doubt boosts engagement with the chatbot, helping to improve its capabilities, it doesn’t exactly encourage conversations with other people, which is what made Twitter appealing in the first place. (Full article. Subscription needed.)

And the problems for Musk’s Tesla keeping going from bad to worse. This was published this week by Forbes:

Elon Musk’s Robotaxi Dream Could Be A Liability Nightmare For Tesla And Its Owners

The company has avoided major legal problems for fatal accidents involving its partially automated Autopilot and FSD features. A fully autonomous ride service changes that.

Elon Musk’s tightly controlled Tesla robotaxi pilot program in Austin has managed to go 16 days without a major accident. But on June 24, a Model Y in its test fleet dinged a parked Toyota Camry outside a popular pizza parlor. It was a minor thing, but what if the car had hit a person instead?

Bullish Tesla investors are counting on Musk’s robotaxi dream to create a vast new revenue stream from autonomous rides.

That may happen, but it also creates a risk the company hasn’t faced before: legal liability from self-driving tech failures.

Tesla owners hoping to make money Airbnb-ing their cars in a company-run robotaxi ride service Musk has touted for years could be on the hook as well. (Full article.)

So the Big Tech massive layoffs that began in 2022, are now picking up speed again after a brief slow down to jump aboard the new AI bandwagon.

Here is another headline just published today showing how massive layoffs in Tech right now are in response to AI spending, not AI replacing humans.

Indeed, Glassdoor to lay off 1,300 staff amid AI push

Recruit Holdings, the Japanese parent of Indeed and Glassdoor, said on Friday it is laying off about 1,300 employees at the two companies. The layoffs are part of a broader restructuring that involves Glassdoor’s operations being integrated within Indeed, and an increasing focus on using AI.

The job cuts would affect functions mostly in the U.S. across the two companies’ R&D, tech, and HR and sustainability divisions, though all functions across all countries will be affected, according to an internal memo by CEO, Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba, seen by TechCrunch.

The cuts would affect 6% of Recruit’s HR technology division.

As part of the restructuring, Glassdoor’s current CEO, Christian Sutherland-Wong, is leaving the company on October 1. LaFawn Davis, chief people and sustainability officer at Indeed, is also leaving the company.

The job cuts come as tech companies across the world roll back their sustainability initiatives and cut jobs to balance out extensive spending on integrating AI into their businesses.

Tens of thousands of people stand to lose jobs at Microsoft, TikTok, Match, Intel, and Meta, per announcements in just the past couple of months. (Full article.)

Meta has increased spending on developing AI probably more than anyone else in the past several weeks, spending gaudy numbers to hire away some of the top AI developers by stealing them from competitors.

But here is a dirty secret of Big Tech that has been true for a very long time: Big Tech has so much free flowing cash that they will hire people that they feel are among the top talent in their fields, just to keep them away from their competitors.

They will hire a top developer for several hundred thousand dollars a year salary, and then have them sit around and do basically nothing.

Here is a great article just published by The Information this week about the toxic culture within Meta AI research.

Meta AI Researcher Warns of ‘Metastatic Cancer’ Afflicting Company Culture

Over the past month, Meta Platforms has overhauled its stumbling efforts in artificial intelligence by making a head-spinning series of hires of leaders and researchers from outside the company.

But a key question has lingered: Why has Meta struggled so badly in AI that it’s injecting so much fresh blood into the company to lead a turnaround?

One outgoing research scientist from Meta’s generative AI group has come up with his own diagnosis of the company’s AI problems—and his assessment isn’t pretty.

In a more than 2,000-word essay that has circulated inside Meta in recent days, the research scientist, Tijmen Blankevoort, paints a bleak picture of cultural and organizational dysfunction inside Meta that he argues has stymied its progress in AI.

“I have yet to meet someone in Meta-GenAI that truly enjoys being there. Someone that feels like they want to stay in Meta for a long time because it’s such a great place,”

wrote Blankevoort, referring to the nearly 2,000-person group that develops Meta’s flagship AI model, Llama.

“You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission. To most, it’s not even clear what our mission is.”

Full article. Subscription needed.

The Situation is Far Worse Today than in 2022

When the massive layoffs began in Big Tech in 2022, one person tracked all the layoffs and started layoffs.fyi.

According to this website, there were 165,269 tech employees laid off from 1,064 tech companies in 2022.

There were 264,220 tech employees laid off from 1,193 tech companies in 2023.

There were 152,922 tech employees laid off from 551 tech companies in 2024, as the trend started moving lower with fewer layoffs.

At the present midpoint of 2025, there are 74,408 tech employees laid off from 154 tech companies, which seems to be following the same trends as last year in 2024.

However, layoffs.fyi has added a new metric to track here in 2025, government employees laid off by DOGE. So while layoffs from private tech companies are on pace with last year, what about tech jobs being eliminated by the current administration?

You can’t be more “tech” heavy than NASA when it comes to the federal government. Did you see this report this week in your news stream about what is happening with NASA?

Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push

The losses could endanger the administration’s plans for landing astronauts on the moon and Mars.

At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff, according to documents obtained by POLITICO — potentially spelling trouble for White House space policy and depriving the agency of decades of experience.

The 2,145 employees are those in GS-13 to GS-15 positions — senior-level government ranks that are typically reserved for those with specialized skills or management responsibilities. The losses are particularly concentrated at higher levels, with 875 GS-15 employees set to leave, according to the documents.

Those 2,145 employees, in turn, make up the bulk of the 2,694 civil staff who have agreed to leave NASA under a slate of offers that fall within broader administration efforts to trim the federal workforce, according to the documents. NASA has offered staff early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.

Many of those leaving also serve in NASA’s core mission sets, according to the documents. Those leaving include 1,818 staff serving in mission areas like science or human space flight, with the rest performing mission support roles like IT, facilities management or finance.

“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,”

said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society.

“What’s the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?”

Full article.

The failures of technology and the result of us being too dependent upon it are very obvious, if one can remove their blinders and actually see things as they actually exist TODAY, and not the Darwinian belief system that thinks society only ever advances, because after all, we are the most technologically superior country in the world.

No, the technology also fails, and its evidence is all around us.

When is the last time you needed technical support on a product or service that you own or subscribe to? Would you say, in general, that tech support today is better, or worse, than say 5 years ago?

I know from my own experience, that it is FAR worse today than it was in the past. Chat bots are sometimes the only interaction I can get when looking for technical support, and it sends me into this endless loop that never addresses my problem with their product, and often with no opportunity to talk to a REAL person who can actually THINK rather than read code based on algorithms (that’s what AI actually is).

Look at the failures in the civilian aviation sector, with air traffic controllers’ screens going blank, to planes exploding or falling out of the sky.

The fact is that the “non-AI” technology is rapidly declining, in my opinion, because all the jobs right now are for AI.

I have coded for years and especially designed websites and ecommerce systems for over 20 years now, and I can spot crappy code on websites all the time, and much more frequently in recent years since the AI bubble started.

And then there is the U.S. military’s huge investment into AI, where today Google, Amazon, Palantir, and other technology companies have now become the largest defense contractors.

The little manufacturing base that is still left in the U.S. is primarily military contractors to build bombs, planes, ships, etc.

And yet, what we see happening today is a tiny group of people in Yemen produce the same kind of weapons through local manufacturing, for a tiny fraction of what it cost the U.S. to produce the same things, and often the more expensive U.S. equivalent is inferior!

As I write this, the Houthis are still launching bombs into Tel Aviv and sinking ships in the Red Sea! America and Britain’s “vastly superior” military has been completely unable to stop them.

And then there was the 12-day war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel fully believed that their technology could defeat Iran and enforce regime change, as they used their “superior technology skills” to track down Iran’s top military leaders and assassinate them before Iran had a chance to respond.

It failed, and so did American technology. The U.S. only had 12 days worth of hardware produced by U.S. manufacturing to continue bombing Iran and try to stop their missiles from hitting targets in Israel, which they failed at miserably. They even had to temporarily halt shipping weapons to Ukraine.

Iran stated that they only used 5% of their manufactured military hardware during those 12 days, such as their hypersonic missiles. They have completely shut down the country’s Internet service twice now since the war started, to safeguard more infiltrations by Mossad.

At the end of the war, Iran informed the U.S. that it was going to bomb its military base in Qatar. And yet, at least according to the Iranian Press, the U.S. could not stop their missiles, and one of the U.S. Military’s top technological communication centers was completely destroyed.

New satellite imagery has revealed significant damage to Al Udeid US airbase in Qatar after Iran’s retaliatory strikes last month, debunking claims by US President Donald Trump that the largest American military base in the West Asia region had been left unharmed.

The images, analyzed by The Associated Press and provided by Planet Labs PBC, showed that a geodesic dome — known as a Radome — housing key secure communications equipment used by American forces was present on the base just hours before the Iranian attack but was no longer visible in subsequent images.

The US Air Force’s 379th Air Expeditionary Wing, which operates out of Al Udeid Air Base, announced the installation of the $15 million piece of equipment in 2016.

Radome, a weatherproof enclosure, housed a roughly satellite dish-shaped modernization enterprise terminal (MET), which was a cutting-edge communications hub within the US airbase.

The MET “provides secure communication capabilities including voice, video and data services, linking service members in the US Central Command area of responsibility with military leaders around the world,” the Air Force wrote.

The MET in Qatar was the first outside the United States and features anti-jamming technology, it added.

The damage to the dome followed American aggression on the three Iranian nuclear sites of Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan on June 22, which was retaliated against the day after by Iran’s strikes on the US airbase. (Full article.)

AI cannot win wars. Military hardware, produced by humans in factories, and then operated by humans, still trumps AI on the battlefield.

The AI apocalypse is coming. There has been too much invested in AI for almost the past 3 years now, probably valued in the $trillions.

None of the big players in this field are going to step up and admit: “We blew it. We never should have invested so much money in this.”

Not yet, at least. They will wait until it is too late.

And in my opinion, that day has already arrived, and it is too late to turn back now.

Comment on this article at HealthImpactNews.com.

This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)

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The Bewitching of America with the Evil Eye and the Mark of the Beast

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Distinguishing True Prophets from False Prophets in These Evil Modern Times

Insider Exposes Freemasonry as the World’s Oldest Secret Religion and the Luciferian Plans for The New World Order

Identifying the Luciferian Globalists Implementing the New World Order – Who are the “Jews”?

The Brain Myth: Your Intellect and Thoughts Originate in Your Heart, Not Your Brain

Fact Check: “Christianity” and the Christian Religion is NOT Found in the Bible – The Person Jesus Christ Is

The post Has the AI Apocalypse Arrived? Tens of Thousands Being Laid Off in Big Tech – AI has to Either Replace Them or AI Spending Must Stop first appeared on Vaccine Impact.