It"s happening again. Another company has announced that it will be cutting down its workforce thanks to AI. This time, it"s DeepL, the Germany-based translation service famous for being a high-quality alternative to Google Translate.
According to CEO Jarek Kutylowski, who posted the news on LinkedIn, this was the "most difficult" decision of his career. He called the layoffs a necessary structural change, arguing that the company needs "fewer layers, faster decisions and far less time spent on the back and forth that slows large teams down" to compete in an AI-driven world. The company is cutting approximately 250 roles from its global headcount.
We are moving to smaller high-agency teams where AI handles the routine, so people can focus on what only humans can bring, like using our intuition, coming up with new creative ideas and seeing projects through from start to finish. AI systems will allow us to put more energy into the work that actually matters and move at a speed we haven"t seen before, leaving behind recurring roadblocks and day to day inefficiencies.
To accelerate this transition, I will personally go deeper into founder mode, leading a small taskforce that will further completely rethink how we build products, find customers and partner with them at every level, with AI at the center of it all.
As part of the layoff announcement, Kutylowski said DeepL is acquiring the team from Mixhalo, which he described as "a pioneer in breakthrough audio streaming technology". The company will use this team to open a new office in San Francisco and push its development of real-time voice translation.
The last few months have been an absolute bloodbath for people working in the tech industry, as more roles get automated or outright replaced by robots. Just days ago, Coinbase announced it was laying off 14% of its workforce. The crypto exchange"s CEO explained the goal was to become a leaner, "AI-native" organization.
Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, last month, slashed 16% of its global workforce after its CEO said AI tools let smaller teams do more work. Big dogs like Meta and Oracle have also made huge cuts to free up capital for their AI initiatives, letting go of over 8,000 and 20,000 employees, respectively.
Amidst all this chaos, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, dropped a post on X last weekend, claiming that OpenAI wants to build tools that "augment and elevate" humans, not replace them. Altman dismissed "jobs doomerism" as likely wrong in the long term, arguing that people will eventually transition to new, more fulfilling types of work. And if you don"t want to work hard, Altman sees a future where you and people like you can choose not to and still enjoy an "amazing life of prosperity."