I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork.
This week, a big wave of tech layoffs is raising the question: has AI job loss truly begun? Then, writer Jasmine Sun is here to help us answer the question: why are chatbots bad at writing? And finally, it's token maxing time. Why tech companies are building leaderboards to measure who is spending the most on AI.
Well, Casey, for years now, we've been monitoring for signs of an AI job apocalypse.
Yeah, we've been monitoring the situation.
It's true. And over the past few weeks, I think we've gotten some early indications that something is happening in the labor market, especially for tech workers.
Yeah, we have certainly heard CEOs of companies announcing layoffs, invoking AI as a reason that it is happening. And so that has gotten our attention.
Yeah. So, just a couple examples from the last few weeks. Last week, Atlassian announced a 10% reduction in its staff, about 1,600 jobs, that they said were going to help them fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales. That came on the heels of a big round of layoffs at Block, the financial tech company formerly known as Square, which said that it was cutting its staff by about 40% or about 4,000 jobs, saying that they were shifting the way that they were working to use smaller and flatter teams. And then the big one that folks are expecting, maybe as soon as this week, is that Meta is reportedly poised to lay off 20% or more of the entire company. This was reported by Reuters last Friday, who said that their sources had told them that Meta was preparing to cut as many as 16,000 jobs, the largest layoffs at that company since late 2022 or early 2023 when they laid off 20,000 people. So, as of this recording, that hasn't happened yet that we know of. But I know that people at Meta are very on edge and are awaiting the further news about their jobs. Meta, after this story came out, told Reuters that it was, quote, 'speculative reporting.'
Which, if you're not familiar with the language deployed by Meta communication staffers, means this is happening, but we don't want to tell you it's happening yet.
Correct.
So Casey, I want to hear what you make of these layoffs, but first we should do our disclosures. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and my fiancée works at Anthropic. So, okay, Casey, what do you make of the fact that all these companies are referencing AI in some way as a reason for their layoffs?
Well, I think it's a little different at each company, Kevin. And I think we can make a decent case for and against the idea that AI is really driving the show at each of them. So, maybe we should get into that. But at a highest level, I would say companies do continue to tell us now that AI is a significant factor in the reduction of these workforces. And sooner or later, I do think we're going to have to believe them.
Yeah, I think there is probably some complications here and we should get into them. But like, I think this is the early warning sign for a lot of people, especially in the tech industry, who are, I think it's fair to say, going to be some of the first people to see their jobs change or disappear because of these new AI tools. But let's get into some of the specifics here. So let's start with Atlassian, the first company I mentioned. Their CEO, Mike Cannon-Brookes, said in a company blog post that the bar for what great looks like for software companies on growth, on profitability, on speed, on value creation has gone up. He said, 'We are choosing to adapt thoughtfully, decisively, and quickly to drive durable, profitable growth.' He claimed that AI was not replacing people, but he said it would be disingenuous to pretend that AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas.
Yeah. So I take him at his word. It seems like he himself is trying to walk a middle path there, right? And sort of not denying that AI is a factor here, but also not saying like this is the only reason this is happening. I think some other context that is worth having is that Atlassian is one of the companies that could be part of what we've been calling the SaaS apocalypse around here, right? This is a company that makes tools for businesses. A lot of its products are essentially structured workflows. And there are those who believe that sooner or later you're just going to be able to code your own pretty cheaply. Now maybe you will still choose to buy a product from a company like Atlassian, but maybe you're not going to be willing to pay nearly as much as you would before. And so the company's stock price has just been battered over the past year. And I think that has left them, one, hurting for cash a little bit, but two, and probably more importantly, looking for a different story that they can tell the stock market about what they're doing. And so today that story is we're going to get rid of some of these workers and we're going to figure out how to make our remaining workers more productive.
So there's this term that's been floating around called AI washing, which is basically when a company wants to lay a bunch of people off or maybe they don't feel like they need as many people.
I thought it was when a software engineer finally took a shower.
And basically the thesis is like these aren't really layoffs about AI. This is just sort of a convenient excuse that these companies are using. Do you think Atlassian qualifies as AI washing?
I would like to get a little bit more detail on exactly who they are laying off here, which is a detail that we do have about some of these other companies that helps us answer that question. I don't know exactly how it is happening inside of Atlassian, but I think that their CEO was relatively straightforward as these things go in saying like it's a little bit about AI. It's not entirely about AI, but like yes, keep your eye on AI. So, to me, that just reads as honest and so I'm going to give them a pass.
Okay, let's talk about Block. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block, gave an explanation about their layoffs. He said, quote, 'We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong, but something has changed. I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.' Casey, your take.
So, something to know about me and Jack Dorsey is I have a bit of a bias against him. As a former Twitter user who misses that website dearly, at this point in 2026, I would not hire Jack Dorsey to run a lemonade stand. Okay. But if you want to talk about Block specifically, this is a company that tripled its headcount from about 3,800 people in 2019 to more than 10,000 today in what seems like just kind of classic inattention to what was happening in the business during pandemic-era boom times, right? And I did, I wonder if you saw this detail because it truly took me out, Kevin. Five months before the layoffs, Block spent $68 million to fly 8,000 people to an in-person event with Jay-Z.
Yeah. So, that's the kind of famous attention to detail that has turned Jack Dorsey into one of the greatest visionaries in tech. So, look, is this about AI? Again, you know, what does Block really do? They have those little iPads at the coffee shop and then they have Cash App. Okay. How many people do you really need to run those products? Probably fewer than 10,000. Is that about AI? I don't know. Maybe if you squint. But again, this is a company whose stock price was cratering. They needed a different story to tell the market. And I do think you can make a case that AI will make the remaining workers more productive. So again, this is another one where it's like you could use AI to justify what's happening, but you also could just say this company has been mismanaged for a while now.
Yeah, you could use AI washing or Jay-Z washing, which seems to be what they are doing here.
Yes. So, this did seem to have an effect on their stock price. In fact, the day after Jack Dorsey announced the layoffs, Block stock shot up 17%. It's gone down a little bit since then, but they're still up from where they were before these layoffs. And I think we should just say like this is also a part of the equation here, right? These are companies, largely public ones, that have investors' attention. And right now there's sort of this narrative power around AI where if you seem like a company that is investing heavily in the AI tools and the AI way of working, your investors say, 'Oh, that company is really forward-looking. They must have a plan for how to navigate this transition.' And so I think there's sort of, they're seeing the power in telling the story that all this is related to AI.
Yeah. Which by the way reminds me of like the peak of crypto mania when like some publicly traded companies would just add like a crypto term to their name and their stock price would shoot up by like 40,000%. It turns out that the public markets actually can just be tricked that easily.
Yes, that would give me some relief if I was a CEO just knowing that I could fool people like that. But anyways,
Totally. And I don't think everyone is falling for it. Aaron Zamos, the former head of communications for what was then Square, wrote a guest essay in the New York Times recently, basically saying these job cuts aren't what they seem. This is just a company that wants to show that it is adapting to the new reality, but that also it's just kind of a vision that everyone sort of has to get on board with or decide that they're not comfortable with and leave.
Yeah. I have to say like what do we even think the future of Block is? Again, they make like a little widget you can plug into your phone so that you can sell bracelets at the craft fair and then it makes a PayPal competitor. What are we using AI to do here?
Exactly. I don't know what the roadmap is. Like these people are not building a metaverse. They don't appear to be building a machine god. So like I truly do not know what they're going to be up to over there. And if you know, don't email me.
Don't email Casey. Just Cash App him instead.
Yeah, there you go. So, let's talk about the third large tech company that is reportedly conducting layoffs. Meta. We don't know exactly who or what teams are being affected by these layoffs, but this is a significant part of their workforce. And they seem to be saying in their communications with the public what all of these other companies are saying, which is we are going all-in on the new way of working and we are going to have to make some cuts to make that work.
Yeah. On a recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that, quote, 'Projects that used to require big teams now can be accomplished by a single very talented person.' And we should also say that this cut is coming alongside this massive AI infrastructure investment, right? They're going to spend $135 billion on capital expenditures this year. And even for a company of Meta's size, like that is real money, right? So, I know that they're trying to be careful, again, trying to not spook the stock markets too much. This is obviously the biggest bet in the company's history, and I think that making substantial cuts are going to signal to the market like, 'Hey, don't worry. We're not like completely losing our minds here. Like, we're going to keep some of these expenses under control.'
Yeah, I think that's a really important point because what we're seeing here at some of these companies is that they are not actually sort of cutting costs in the aggregate by using these tools. They are just shifting the cost from human labor to AI.
They are plowing this money that they are going to save by laying off these thousands of people into the building of data centers and other AI infrastructure. And basically the bet they're making is these new AI workers are going to be faster, more efficient, maybe cheaper in the long run, maybe not. But they are going to be able to do the work that used to require many thousands of people. And that is a profound shift in the way that companies are talking about their workers. I recently talked to a venture capitalist who said that a lot of the AI startups that he sees, the most AI-native companies, are spending more on AI tools than they are on payroll. And that may be an outlier, but I think that is sort of where these companies believe that we are headed, where the majority of your expenses will not go to paying the salaries of human workers. It will go toward buying the AI tools and the tokens that your company runs on.
Yes, I think that's absolutely the bet that they're making. I also just think it is worth noting that this is still purely mostly speculative, right? Like in the case of Meta specifically, this is a company that has arguably been struggling when it comes to AI. They had to abandon their last model, Behemoth, because it wasn't very good. The Times reported last week that it's delaying the release of its latest model, Avocado, because it hasn't been hitting its performance targets. It's apparently barely outperformed Gemini 2.5. What is this? Last March.
Yeah, that model is really the pits. That's an avocado joke.
That's very good. Thank you. So again, this is not as simple as saying they're able to cut 20% of their workforce because they've just made these massive gains. I'm sure there are individuals there who have made massive gains, but as a company, it still seems like it is somewhat mired in dysfunction. They just did yet another partial reorg of their AI teams. And that just always sort of makes me raise my eyebrows.
Yeah. I will say like one thing that's been surprising to me about this recent round of layoffs is that the companies that are making them are not the ones on the frontier, right? It is not the OpenAIs, the Anthropics, the Googles. Those companies are not sort of laying off people en masse because of these AI tools which they are building and presumably have even better models than the ones they're releasing to the public. So you have to think that part of this is just companies that are sort of lagging behind their competition saying, well, maybe if we just use a bunch of AI it'll help us catch up.
Yes, but also like OpenAI and Anthropic are much smaller companies than some of the ones that we've been talking about today, at least in number of workers, right? Like I think it is interesting to think that Atlassian is like bigger than OpenAI in terms of the number of people who work there when you look at the relative value of what they're generating. So DocuSign has 7,000 employees.
That there's no funnier sentence that is true in all of tech journalism. As somebody who has a paid subscription for DocuSign that I truly resent paying for. Get to work over there people or get not to work. Get not to work. Here's another question that I would ask Kevin. Okay, so we're seeing a bunch of layoffs. Like are these AI related or not? Does it actually matter if the effect on workers is the same, right? You know, if you're the worker, like whether it's about AI or not, you're still out of a job.
Yeah. And it's not clear to me what workers can or should be doing to sort of protect themselves against these layoffs. One person I talked to said, you know, they work at one of these big tech companies and they're like, well, there's just a lot of jostling and fear and anxiety right now. People don't know if they should be like using the AI tools a ton because then it shows that they're like getting with the program or whether that just means that they're proving that their work can be automated. Like I think there's a lot of fear and suspicion and mistrust inside these companies right now and for good reason. Their executives are planning to lay them off.
Yes. And by the way, I think at least some of these companies that is maybe not an explicit reason for these layoffs, but some of the executives there would see that as a positive byproduct, right? Because you know, if you're like Mark Zuckerberg, you lived through the 2020 era. You had these restive employees that like wanted a lot of things from you and they wanted to have a lot of control over what the company could and could not do and how it did it. And you know, I just know that executives over there really resented that sort of thing. And once Meta entered this new era of massive layoffs, employees over there did get really scared for all of the reasons that you would assume. They were like, 'Oh god, like, you know, maybe I actually am going to lose my job.' And all of a sudden, they got a lot more quiet and you started to see a lot fewer protests over there. So, I'm not going to say that like these occasional mass layoffs are a way of like keeping the workforce in line, but I have noticed that it seems to be having that effect.
Totally. And it makes me wonder whether something that I predicted was going to happen, you know, a year or two ago that did not happen, which is the sort of sudden and mass unionization of workers at these companies may actually start to happen in the next year or two. I think one major difference between what's happening now at these tech companies and what has been happening for decades at manufacturing companies, car companies, you know, factory workers, is that those workers were by and large unionized. And so when the employers said, 'Hey, we're going to lay a bunch of you off,' they were able to negotiate. They were able to say, 'Hey, maybe instead of laying us all off, maybe you could find other jobs for us. If our jobs are being automated, maybe we should be allowed to sort of retrain to do something else.' And that was largely successful. There were still layoffs, of course, but not the number that we're seeing today at these tech companies. So, do you think there's any possibility of that, or is that just sort of a union fever dream?
Here's what I will say. I cannot think of anything that would make Mark Zuckerberg more mad than a union of software engineers at Meta. And I think the software engineers at Meta should use that information how they will.
You think that would make him more mad than getting booed at a UFC fight?
Absolutely. I think that probably just made him really sad.
Well, there you have it. If you want to make Mark Zuckerberg mad, Meta employees, sign your union card. Well, Casey, over the last couple of years, we've talked on this show about how AI models are getting better at so many things. They are getting better at coding, at competition math, at solving novel physics problems, mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons. And I think the story of the last few years in AI has been one of sort of rapid, steady progress. But these systems are still sort of jagged and they have flaws and weaknesses. And one place where they arguably haven't improved that much is in writing.
Now that's our domain. Yes, at least that is the argument that Jasmine Sun made in The Atlantic this week. She is a freelance journalist. Her piece was called 'The Human Skill That Eludes AI' and it's her attempt to understand why despite so much progress in all these different areas, the models of today don't seem to be writing anything particularly good or compelling.
Yeah. And while I think the question of are LLMs good at writing is highly subjective and dependent on the use case, I do think Jasmine makes a really interesting technical case for why these models write the way they do.
Yes. And we should say before we bring her in, Jasmine is a friend of mine. She has also been my researcher on the upcoming book that I'm working on. And I just think she's like one of the best people writing about AI today. She writes on her Substack which is called Jasmine News. It's jasmi.news and you can read much more of her writing there.
All right, I'll allow it, but I do want to balance it out by next week bringing on one of your enemies. Okay, let's bring her in. Jasmine Sun, welcome to Hard Fork.
Thanks for having me. I'm excited.
Hi, Jasmine. So, you wrote this great piece in The Atlantic this week about the human skill that eludes AI. And I want to start by challenging the subtitle of your piece.
Why can't language models write well?
Can't language models write well?
They can. So I do say in the piece that most writing, period, is very bad. And so I think that language models are definitely better at writing and language than most humans are. But the question that I was really curious about is why can't they write at a sort of literary creative fiction level? Because the thing is, if you listen to these AI leaders talk about their aspirations, they say, 'We're going to cure cancer. We're going to solve physics. We're going to build a superhuman coder.' They are not shy about, 'Oh, our AI models are going to be better than 75% of human coders.' They're saying, 'No, we will literally build a self-replicating factory tomorrow.' And then Tyler Cowen asked Sam Altman in an interview from last October, 'When do you think GPT will be able to write a good poem?' And Sam Altman says maybe in the future ChatGPT will be able to write, quote, 'a real poet's okay poem.' So that was the thing that fascinated me is even these guys who are more bullish than anybody else about the capabilities of their technology, they are very reserved about how much literary writing their models can do. And so that was the gap that I was really interested in.
And you start your piece with this interesting provocation which is that in some ways GPT-2 was the peak of AI when it comes to creative writing. So explain that.
Part of what got me interested in this piece was I was actually doing research for your book. And I was going through all of these previous generations of models and reading the outputs. And the thing that really shocked me is that like in a way the writing style of GPT-2 and GPT-3 I found so much more compelling than ChatGPT today. It doesn't have any of the annoying ticks. It doesn't have the em-dashes, the tripartite list, the 'it's not this but that.' The tone was much more variable. Like it would actually surprise you. It would be funny. It would be poetic. And that shocked me to sort of like go back a few generations and realize that maybe, you know, they were also lying all the time and all sorts of other things. But from a writing style perspective, I kind of preferred it and I wanted to investigate.
That shocks me. Talking to GPT-2 was like talking to somebody who had just fallen down the stairs. You know what I mean? Where it was like, do we need to get you to the hospital? You smell toast.
Yeah. There are these amazing prompts for this like early OpenAI prompt library where they would say like, you know, 'I just won $175,000 in Las Vegas. What do I need to know about taxes?' And GPT-2 would say like start just writing some short story about like an orphanage and like it was...
They were surprising. They were like nutty. They were weird. They would absolutely be a terrible corporate assistant. Horrible like coding intern. It can't do any of the things that modern LLMs can do that I'm very grateful for. But like from a pure writing style perspective, they're very good.
So GPT-3 in particular, like they, there's I found this like set of samples that some guy did where it was like, oh, write in the style of Paul Graham, write in the style of Richard Dawkins, whatever. And it could style match better than modern LLMs can. And particularly because so much of sort of literary writing comes from voice and style. That was one of the things I was really interested in is like what did we lose that the LLMs can no longer emulate Paul Graham style or whoever's style because I would put in the same exact prompt that this guy gave GPT-3, put it into ChatGPT 5.4 thinking or whatever and it would be god awful and I was like that's really weird.
So tell us about what you learned about what happened after the GPT-2 and 3 era that changed the way that these models respond to us.
Yeah, I mean I think the answer is post-training basically. So they started adding a post-training layer which is basically saying we have these like crazy unpredictable like nut job concussed models and they need to learn how to behave because a model that can't behave is a very bad corporate assistant. And so the AI researchers give them example dialogues and scripts to learn from. They give them words that they can and can't say. They do RLHF which is a process by which human graders will rate like which response is the most helpful sounding or something like this. And so now these post-trained models have been trapped in a way or trained or guided towards a very particular character or persona that is a very helpful assistant but might be very bad at writing in creative and surprising ways.
I mean the way that you described it was that there is a phase within the post-training phase where these AI models are evaluated by humans. And that's part of what they call RLHF or reinforcement learning from human feedback. And what struck me in your reporting is that you actually talked to some people who have done this kind of feedback to the models who say that they're just being asked to grade things in ways that don't make sense.
Right. Tell us about that.
Yeah. I mean this is super interesting because like these job listings you'll see on like places like Mercor or xAI, Elon's company will list them directly. It'll be like creative writing expert, $45 an hour, must be a New York Times bestseller and have like a starred Circum review or something like this. Have you ever gotten a starred Circum review, Roose?
Okay, good job. All right, you might qualify to help Annie from Grok write a little bit better.
Yeah, we're going to get him that job listing, but okay. You were saying...
So these companies because they realize that these AI researchers, they're really good at knowing like what good coding is, but they don't actually know what good writing is. So, they're like, why don't we hire some humans to find out? And so, they'll commission like MFAs and published authors and sometimes just like random guys with a blog or whatever. And one of the people I talked to who was a contractor for Scale AI as a writing evaluator and he was doing this for one of the bigger labs, he said that the rubrics just didn't make any sense. He would be told things like you have to grade them based on the number of exclamation marks that there are and so if something has three exclamation marks that's too many and so you have to ding that one.
Yeah. And I have to say generally not bad writing advice. I mean, I guess it depends on the length of the text. But three feels like a lot for many.
This is what they tell women in business communications. It's like, take all those exclamation marks, replace them with periods. Like, we are just going to remove all the ideas.
We teach women to shrink themselves.
