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Thousands of tech workers are being laid off, from Atlassian slashing 1,600 jobs to Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block firing almost half its workforce. Meta’s latest round of layoffs is rumored to affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company.
A common thread among these devastating cuts is industry leaders touting the capabilities of AI, claiming that the tech has made the workers who find themselves on the chopping block redundant. Whether those claims align with reality, or whether the layoffs are actually the result of corporate bloat and pandemic-era overhiring, is a topic of much debate.
In a Tuesday tweet that can only be described as twisting the knife, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that “I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character.”
“It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took,” he added. “Thank you for getting us to this point.”
It’s a particularly tone-deaf and borderline vindictive missive that suggests Altman has long given up on the idea of fairly compensating content creators and coders for their work. It’s no secret that OpenAI’s AI models were trained on data that was shamelessly scraped from the web, a controversial practice that has triggered a litany of copyright infringement lawsuits.
Altman’s remarks drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.
“You’re welcome,” one user responded. “Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.”
Others called him a “f***ing psychopath” and “scum.”
“Nothing says ‘you’re being replaced’ quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,” one user wrote.
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