Not supposed to say the quiet part out loud
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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“I’m fucking our employees, but you’re forbidden from explaining that it’s because I’m milking their misery for my own enrichment!”
I didn’t read the article but a lot of the “AI layoffs” are more about correcting the over-hiring from the COVID era.
Oh my God. Now I've heard it all. 🤣
Nvidia is only begging because they didn't realise that putting out a free product that essentially makes most work redundant would bite them in the ass as it would mean less people able to buy their products.
Oh, and because they're worried about what happens when they start charging the companies who fired everyone the real price of the AI service they're currently providing for free.
“How is it possible that AI became productive and useful only six months ago, and they were somehow laying people off two years ago because of AI?” he added. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
This is very telling. Jensen is pulling this "6 months" figure completely out of his ass here, but the reason why he wants that number to be true is because it moves the goalposts. If AI hasn't actually, really, been here for even a single fiscal year then it explains away everything. Suddenly the fact that it's made zero impact on productivity, that no one is making any profit on it, all of that becomes justified. "It's still early." You'll recall that this was the narrative around crypto too. Every time anyone criticized anything about it a herd of sheep would bleat "It's still early" even over a decade into the technology existing.
Investors are starting to ask serious questions about when these tools are actually going to start delivering greater productivity to their companies. Managers are starting to get the screws put to them about why their budgets are ballooning to cover subscription and token costs with nothing to show for it. Jensen can't have that, because AI is the whole reason why his company is on top of the world, so he's trying to reset the clock.
For the record, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that AI has ever become productive and useful, but that wouldn't fit Jensen's narrative either. So instead he has to invent a world where AI is totally productive, 100% useful, just trust me! When did that happen? Oh, just now. That's, um... Yeah, that's why you didn't notice. It just happened, right before you walked in.
They just can't help themselves. All of these techbro fuckers jumped the gun on this being "THE" AI wave but instead have bet everything on the equivalent of the self checkout kiosk at the grocery store. That was touted as the way to save money, lower the chances of unionism, and make the checkout process more efficient. Instead it has been a money pit that introverts and morally flexible people love! AI slop is flooding Youtube, drowning the tech industry in biblical sized code commits and hallucinated security threats, while continuing to be the greatest theft in the history of our species (after that mother fucker Thog stole my ancestors shiny rock).
the layoffs are because of greed, plain and simple.
STOP MAKING US LOOK BAD!
-catches own reflection-
FUCK, WHAT IS THAT?!
Honestly I find this darkly hilarious. The circlejerk is becoming more and more obvious. I’m going to be surprised if the bubble doesn’t pop within the next 6 months or so - definitely before the end of the year.
All it took for this to happen was:
- skyrocketing energy prices
- skyrocketing hardware prices
- skyrocketing water usage
- the effective priceout of PC/homelab enthusiasts and hobbyists which will probably destroy much of the community, and thus most of the consumer-oriented hardware manufacturers
- turning the US economy into a house of cards
- sharply accelerated enshitification of all major search engines (in the interest of pushing people to use LLM bullshit for no good reason, when a perfectly suitable and deterministic alternative already existed and was deployed at scale everywhere)
- flagrantly ignoring licensing and usage terms for basically any and all open source software projects hosted anywhere on the internet
- the hollowing out of software engineering as a discipline, the collapse of the hiring prospects of fresh grads/juniors because “ai can do that”, and the creation of a generational gap in staffing across huge swathes of the tech industry writ large
- the (even more) accelerated enshitification of social media as it becomes a series of gigantic LLM bot farms talking to each other
- we can go on
What a time to be alive.
Jensen can suck my Huang.
Don't forget the open outright theft of virtually all digitized media and content produced by humanity.
What if AI is already too big to fail?
Its here to stay, but we are in the "we dont know the best way to use it try everything" phase.
From my experience using it as a consumer, and writing custom agents; i think the way it will pan out is as specific tooling that unlocks things that weren reaaonable to do before. Key word here is tool. Its just a god damned tool.
We will still need to hire people, because something llms can never do is be held accountable. Someone needs to use the tool.
As far as the data centers, this is an overenthusastic bet that all compute will be rented. It wont. At best a few additional datacenters needed for hosted inference, not at the scale they are going for.
Here to stay, but the industry might collapse if they don't become profitable, and llms can become a small niche after that, made of people that pay to use or run locally
I agree we are stuck with it. I see the most benefit of AI going to businesses and scammers. Right now I don't see AI being very beneficial to the average Joe. I feel like people know how to prompt AI better than they ever have and AI hallucinates more than it ever has. People need to fact check everything it tells them.
- it’s rather different than 2008, because credit default swaps were just a bag holder thing, whereas these massive data centers are not only a huge amount of sunk cost capital, but also have extremely high OpEx.
- that said, I would be 0% surprised if our Captains of Industry (🥴) manage to convince the orange regime to just shell out trillions of our fucking taxpayer dollars to them because line go up
- and if they do, I hope all the little baby Molotov cocktails that will be born have wonderful, bright, and impactful lives 🥰
Mario's brother is a plumber
AI has been around since the 50s. We just keep changing what we call AI. The only difference with LLMs is this time they actually tried to sell it as a real sentient solution and it’s biting them in the ass because it isn’t any better than anything that came before and in many ways is actually worse. I feel like people totally forgot about when Watson beat Ken Jennings.
Wow I knew ai had been around for a long time but I didn't think it was that long. Color tv came out in the 50s.
What I meant by it's too big to fail was so much money has been invested into AI. I was also referencing when Obama said banks were too big to fail but that was more a satire statement.
Yeah, some of the very first neural networks were created in the early 50s. TV is an interesting example and I am glad you mentioned it. Different components of what make up (analog) TV and TV broadcasts were ready to go in the 30s but weren’t adopted in mass for nearly 20 years due to WWII. Likewise a lot of other technologies were put on hold or redirected for the war effort and computing technology is no different. This is part of why it feels like technology exploded after the war.
I understood what you meant. I was trying to point out that a lot of AI companies like IBM haven’t invested in LLMs in the same way that, for instance, Open AI has. IBM isn’t really at risk of failing if the bubble pops, as their AI models and other products have been in use for decades, but Open AI has nothing else to show for its investments and is yet to be profitable.
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Stop telling fired employees the truth says billionaire CEO.
In most cases it's a blatant lie. A lie he helped to perpetuate.
Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They're Fired Because of AI, it's hurting Nvidia's stock price.
Yep. Remember when he said nobody should learn how to code anymore with a shit eating grin on his face because it was good for Nvidia's stock price at the time?
It's also a lie. LLMs can't replace a single worker, and most CEOs know that, they are using it as an excuse to cover up the consequences of mismanagement and/or increase short term profits at the expense of future growth.
LLMs can’t replace a single worker,
I don't think that's true, it's just not how the execs are seeing it.
If you have 100 staff using AI within the means of what it can actually do, you might not need the whole 100 staff. Maybe you only need 98 now to get the same outcome, or whatever it is.
What it can't do is replace a whole job category. You can't replace all your customer service with it, or all your developers or all your marketing team. You still need those people, but if you employ enough people in a category, eventually it could reduce how many you need, which is essentially replacing them.
You’d be surprised…
An AI hype company did a fairly ok study with programmers. Some used ai some didn’t and they compared the difference in completion time.
The AI users were 20% slower than the non AI users, but thought they were faster.
So for your scenario, the company would need to hire 20 extra people to make up for the lost productivity.
Saying you're doing layoffs lowers stock price. Saying you're replacing workers and stocks might even go up. It's a pretty big incentive if your pay package depends on the stock price.
What is this magical place where saying you do layoffs lowers the stock price. I'd like to go there.
The real world apparently. But if your company is far enough in la-la land and the disconnect between profit and reality is big enough, weird things happen.
If a big part of the market is floating in la-la land then that's a good impression of Wile E. Coyote before he looks down.
It's actually a mixed bag. It's complicated, but part of what influences investors to either punish or reward public companies for mass layoffs is whether other companies in their sector are also doing mass layoffs. Outliers are punished. Trend-followers are rewarded. That's part of what makes layoffs contagious.
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I really hope AI ends up replacing CEOs and upper management.
I appreciate the sentiment (Fuck CEOs) but find the idea of taking orders from an AI that is also in charge of steering the direction of the company devastatingly horrific.
Given that AIs are demonstratably incapable of successfully operating a vending machine for more than about a week, sounds like a great time to start a competitor.
I'm torn, because fuck the ceos... but fuck the ai... I don't want to take orders from some slopshit robot, nor these rapist criminals
See, what we should all do, is just stop buying ANYTHING.
Watch the shares of every single company collapse. Watch the great depression 2 start for the rich.
Because lets be real, for the average working man and woman, we've been in a depression that gets worse and worse as time goes on since the 80s. Now lets let it affect the rich too.
Why? The AI would be a step up from the avg CEO. I mean, it’s a low looooow bar, but incremental progress is still progress
~imma throw in this is a joke, cause I know someone isn’t gonna take it that way~
Hope you like making paperclips while Clippy watches you and ratchets up your productivity expectations, buddy.
~also a joke, but an AI with surveillance capabilities has the potential to be a really annoying boss. See Amazon drivers that aren't allowed to wipe their brow while they drive or take a pee break~
Hey there skipper! Looks like your meatbag fingers are getting tired! That 1% decrease In speed is coming out of your paycheck!
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Let's rage against all the machines
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Management, maybe. CEO's probably no. The dream of the CEO is to eventually create the single proprietor company with a trillion-dollar market cap. No employees. No management. Just an owner and a machine that manufactures profit that he'll never have to share with anyone.
Making stupid decisions based on imaginary scenarios and hallucinated situations... you wouldn't see any difference.
A pathological liar is begging other pathological liars to stop lying about people being fired due to the lying machine...
Crazy times we are living in.
He finally took off that stupid leather jacket
He’s getting a new one made of human skin.
Whoever gets to wear his skin is going to look amazing, à la that scene in Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller. 
Imagine it.
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I have a sudden craving for Huang Pow Chicken.
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