The emergence of technological tools such as ChatGPT has led to apprehensions among several individuals regarding the safety of their jobs. As with such powerful tools comes the possibility of companies reconsidering their employee count and business strategies. 

Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, has implemented job cuts to place more emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) development.

On Wednesday (Mar 1), the company, which was known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, acknowledged the downsizing of its workforce via email, stating that it removed certain engineering positions and restructured its staff count to adopt a financially prudent strategy for 2023, according to a report by The Business Times. 

The current layoff reprrepresentsmo’s second round of cuts this year, following a widescale reduction at Alphabet. The parent company, which also owns Google and YouTube, slashed 12,000 jobs globally in January. 

In all, more than 200 employees have been let go from Waymo this year, the Information reported earlier — or about 8 per cent of its workforce.

As part of a larger trend of tech job reductions, Meta Platforms, Twitter, and Amazon.com have all recently fired their workforces. Although Alphabet was initially slower than its competitors to implement staff reductions, later it was compelled to catch up due to investor pressure and a sluggish digital-advertising market. 

In January, it permanently closed down Stadia, its cloud gaming service, ahead of the wider workforce cuts. Not only this, in addition, Alphabet terminated over 240 positions at Verily, its research organisation, and at Intrinsic, an industrial robotics project. 

Subsequently, it eliminated the majority of jobs at Area 120, its internal program for new ventures, after discontinuing several initiatives within the unit in September.