Google is dropping the Assistant team, and Amazon is dropping the Alexa team. This sounds a lot like Apple is trying to avoid an explicit layoff and forcing employees to quit instead.
Not constructive dismissal, because the goal isn’t to place the burden on the employee. On whatever date, they will all be terminated without cause (layoff) if they choose not to relocate. There is no goal of forcing them to quit. Presumably, Apple has filed (or will file in due time) things like the WARN Act notification.
This is a PR move to hide the layoffs from the general public, but not from the law.
Huh. So they’re all dropping their voice assistant teams. Is this because it turns out people only ever use them as voice activated kitchen timers because it turns out talking to computers sucks, or is some worse generative AI shit coming?
What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT.
My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack
Google is dropping the Assistant team, and Amazon is dropping the Alexa team. This sounds a lot like Apple is trying to avoid an explicit layoff and forcing employees to quit instead.
Constructive dismissal lawsuit?
Edit: see this comment https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6157509
Not constructive dismissal, because the goal isn’t to place the burden on the employee. On whatever date, they will all be terminated without cause (layoff) if they choose not to relocate. There is no goal of forcing them to quit. Presumably, Apple has filed (or will file in due time) things like the WARN Act notification.
This is a PR move to hide the layoffs from the general public, but not from the law.
Ah that’s helpful context, thank you!
Huh. So they’re all dropping their voice assistant teams. Is this because it turns out people only ever use them as voice activated kitchen timers because it turns out talking to computers sucks, or is some worse generative AI shit coming?
What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack