If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.
Also with higher margins, more money can be invested in research/experimental products
Obviously not directly, because work stretches itself to the time available.
"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."
They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained. Folks whose experience snd expertise is valuable. Don't kid yourself.
> For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently
I don't understand how this could be the case for Cloudflare specifically. They made their name with DDoS protection and sandboxed hosting. These are exactly the products whose demand rises in lockstep with agent adoption. How could they possibly be allowing all the growth opportunity to slip past them? In times like this, with rising productivity to boot, you increase headcount, not decrease.
If A1 was real, cloudflare would be 1000% more needed and they would be falling behind with their 600% productivity gainz
They don’t need them. Simple as that
But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.
Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
Huh? How is it not connected? More productivity means fewer people are required. I'm not sure how you are not able to connect these obviously connected statements.
I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?