Silicon Valley is making a show of helping prepare the country for AI layoffs. In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about AI. " AI is changing how we work and live," one message read. "You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure--that's normal." I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course from the Labor Department created to help workers succeed in the ChatGPT economy. The weeklong program, created in partnership with an AI start-up and delivered by text message, was supposed to equip Americans with "foundational AI skills," according to an agency press release.

The Fallout: New Vegas developer has not escaped Microsoft's Xbox layoffs unscathed. Obsidian Entertainment, the developer behind the Pillars of Eternity series, and, is being reshuffled as part of Xbox's larger reset and mass layoffs across Microsoft's gaming business. Josh Sawyer, the director of and the Medieval adventure game, is reportedly leading development of the new game. Getting a new Fallout game out is particularly relevant given that, a multiplayer survival game from 2018, is technically the most recent release and Fallout has now been adapted into a successful streaming series on Amazon Prime Video. This change in studio direction is also being paired with layoffs.

We're done paying for executives' failures, one Xbox developer said. Rumor has it that Microsoft is preparing to enact mass layoffs across its gaming division this July, following multiple reports out of plus recent comments made by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty. The Communications Workers of America Union, which represents thousands of video game employees at Microsoft and beyond, is preparing to negotiate for employee protections, while calling for transparency from executives and demanding basic dignity for developers. Sharma and Booty laid the groundwork for layoffs in early June, with a memo marking the first 100 days of new Xbox leadership. We have found ourselves over-extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content, the pair wrote.

Soon-to-be-laid-off Meta contractors say they're being treated differently than Mark Zuckerberg's full-time employees, who stand to receive more generous severance packages. Now we're being left behind," chanted a horde of contract workers who gathered outside Meta's offices in Dublin, Ireland, on Friday afternoon. Waving flags, brandishing signs, and armed with whistles and vuvuzelas, they were out to protest a round of planned layoffs. The workers are employed by Dublin-based company Covalen, which handles content moderation and data labeling services that help Meta to fine-tune its AI products. In April, Covalen told 700 employees that their jobs were at risk, citing "reduced demand," WIRED reported . A large swath of the affected workers won't receive any severance because they've been employed for less than two years. The rest are being offered the minimum payout required under local labor laws--two weeks' pay for every year of employment--according to the Communications Workers' Union (CWU), whose members include Covalen employees. "We're just getting the crumbs here," Aadel Obaid, a team manager at Covalen who is part of the planned layoffs, tells WIRED. "Give us a little bit of the pie." To try to compel Covalen into revising the severance package, workers voted to strike outside the company's corporate office, before marching to Meta's nearby European headquarters. According to John Bohan, an organizer at the CWU, Meta could use its leverage as an anchor client to pressure Covalen into offering its employees an enhanced severance package. The workers are asking for double what's currently being offered--and at least some form of payment for workers who don't meet the two-year threshold. The company could also release Covalen workers from a "cooldown period" preventing them from working on another Meta account for six months after being laid off, Bohan says. At 1 pm local time on Friday, the striking workers began to gather outside Covalen's corporate headquarters, a red-brick office building on an otherwise largely residential street in the heart of Dublin. The protests began with a wall of sound: the workers beat drums, booed, whistled, shouted, and catcalled. Then came a volley of call-and-response chants led by a worker with a megaphone. The building's security guard watched, bemused, from inside the lobby, hands on his hips. Two hours later, the group--now more than 150 people--began to march down the center of the mile-long stretch of road to Meta's campus, slowing the trailing traffic to a crawl. Dubliners enjoying the early onset of summer stopped to gawp; some applauded. When the protesters arrived at Meta's complex, two security guards stood with crossed arms, blocking the way. The group set up at the gates and began another round of chants: "We scrub the feed.

A new Gartner study says 80% of companies deploying AI reported workforce reductions, yet those cuts did not appear to translate into stronger returns on investment.

Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search's Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates This week on, the team discusses Meta's recent layoffs and what they've been hearing from employees about the increasingly grim vibes at the company. They also talk about Elon Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI and share highlights from Google's annual conference--including an ambitious AI vision to change how people search the web. Finally, what do recent college graduates and women whose spouses work in AI have in common? Google Search Goes Agentic--and Doesn't Need You Anymore Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . We spoke to more than a dozen employees and it turns out the job cuts are far from the only reason why Meta employees are really going through it. He lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI in really as full a way as you can, as dramatically as possible. I know, Zoë, you're looking forward to talking about that. We're going to get into why young adults might be using AI, but they have very complicated feelings about it. And later in the show, we're going to hear about why women married to AI bros have had enough . This week, the company is letting go of roughly 10 percent of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees total. It's the latest round of job cuts, adding to the roughly 25,000 jobs that have been cut in the past few years as part of Mark Zuckerberg's Year of Efficiency that started in 2023 and now the latest AI-forward workplace, which he is trying to develop and impose. And while these latest cuts are not as big as some of the rounds of layoffs that have already happened, they're getting a ton of attention because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has said that the reason they're happening, in part at least, in large part, is because the company is spending so much money on AI and data centers.

Next week, Meta is cutting about 10 percent of its staff. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees about what it's like inside a company where everyone is unhappy. As Meta employees brace for layoffs next Wednesday, May 20, many say the vibes are horrifically, historically low. "Everyone is unhappy; the only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives," says an employee who works on Instagram. The social media giant plans to cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or nearly 8,000 people, "to run the company more efficiently" and "offset the other investments" it's making, according to a human resources leader .

In this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we get into how the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial goes way beyond their rivalry and could have major implications both for OpenAI and also the AI industry at large.

'It's Undignified': Hundreds of Workers Training Meta's AI Could Be Laid Off More than 700 people working for a Meta contractor in Ireland are at risk of losing their jobs, documents show. Hundreds of workers in Ireland tasked with refining Meta's AI models have been told that their jobs are at risk as the company embarks on a sweeping new round of layoffs, according to documents obtained by WIRED. The affected workers are employed by the Dublin-based firm Covalen, which handles various content moderation and labeling services for Meta. The workers were informed of the layoffs over a brief video meeting on Monday afternoon and were not allowed to ask questions, according to Nick Bennett, one of the employees on the call. "We had a pretty bad feeling [before the meeting]," he says.

The golden era of the tech industry is dead--leaving 1.2 million laid-off workers like me scrambling in a job market that no longer wants us. On Feb. 10, 2025, at 7:32 a.m., the dreaded email hit my inbox. After nearly six years at Meta as a content strategist, one total company rebrand, and three previous mass layoffs, I got the axe. My time was bound to come. I often joked darkly that I was a cat with only so many lives left.