Why AI giants keep axing tech jobs (www.businessinsider.com)

Big AI players are laying off tech staff even as their businesses boom: Meta recently cut about 600 roles from its Meta Superintelligence Labs, Google is again removing managerial positions, and Broadcom has trimmed headcount. Analysts say this isn’t a demand-driven downturn but a structural shift as firms move from “research mode” to “productization mode.” With models trained and internal automation tools maturing, many middle-tier engineering, support and coordination roles become redundant—work once done by people (data labeling, routine model maintenance, orchestration) is increasingly handled by internal pipelines and inference-optimized systems. For the AI/ML community this signals a change in the kinds of skills that will be most valuable. Expect continued heavy investment in compute, infrastructure and inference efficiency, while roles emphasizing scaling, deployment, model monitoring, security, governance and new research frontiers (architecture innovation, safety and alignment) will be harder to automate and more in demand. The short-term implication is displacement of repetitive operational jobs; the longer-term effect is a rebalancing toward higher-level system design, productization expertise and oversight functions as companies squeeze headcount by automating execution.