There’s growing skepticism that AI is really the culprit, though — that it’s more of a convenient cover story than the actual cause. Few examples illustrate the pushback better than what happened at the payments outfit Block earlier this year. After getting hammered over laying off nearly half the company earlier this year, Jack Dorsey denied the cuts were a sign of trouble, insisting instead that AI tools “are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” But pressed by commenters on X about the bloat he’d created during the pandemic, Dorsey later acknowledged that Block had, in fact, over-hired.

Other voices have also begun to weigh in, including famed VC Marc Andreessen, who recently called AI the “silver bullet excuse” for layoffs that are really about mismanagement in some cases. In conversation with podcaster-investor Harry Stebbings, Andreessen said, “Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It’s at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.”

What makes this combustible is that at the very moment that tens of thousands of workers are being shown the door, a small cohort of AI insiders is becoming wealthy on a scale that’s hard to comprehend.

Early last month, AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems closed its first day on the Nasdaq up 68% from its $185 IPO price, giving the chipmaker a market cap of roughly $67 billion — the largest US tech IPO since Snowflake’s 2020 debut. By the close, co-founders Andrew Feldman and Sean Lie were billionaires. (The company’s shares have since fallen 30%.)