Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been on a cost-cutting tear over the last six months, shutting down various projects inside the company. This Friday, the ax has finally fallen on a big chunk of Google's workforce. In its largest layoff ever, Google says it will cut 12,000 jobs across Google and its parent company, Alphabet. The cuts represent about 6 percent of Google's workforce and match similar recent moves by Microsoft and Amazon.
Pichai announced the layoffs on the Google blog, saying US employees who are being let go have already been informed. For international employees, Pichai said that "this process will take longer due to local laws and practices." Pichai blamed the layoffs on the economy, saying, "We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
As always, Pichai talked up AI as the future of the company, saying, "Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry." Google has struggled to monetize much of its AI work, though. The highest-profile Google AI product is the Google Assistant, but that is reportedly seeing reduced support after plans to monetize it failed (Amazon Alexa is facing a similar fate). Deepmind wowed the world with its ability to take on top players of the complicated game "Go," but that project never translated into any kind of business.
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