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Thousands of tech workers are being laid off, from Atlassian slashing 1,600 jobs<\/a> to Jack Dorsey\u2019s fintech company Block firing almost half its workforce<\/a>. Meta\u2019s latest round of layoffs is rumored<\/a> to affect an astonishing 20 percent or more of the company.<\/p>\n A common thread among these devastating cuts is industry leaders touting the capabilities of AI, claiming that the tech has made the workers who find themselves on the chopping block redundant. Whether those claims align with reality, or whether the layoffs are actually the result of corporate bloat and pandemic-era overhiring<\/a>, is a topic of much debate.<\/p>\n In a Tuesday tweet<\/a> that can only be described as twisting the knife, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that \u201cI have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took,\u201d he added. \u201cThank you for getting us to this point.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a particularly tone-deaf and borderline vindictive missive that suggests Altman has long given up on the idea of fairly compensating content creators and coders for their work. It\u2019s no secret that OpenAI\u2019s AI models were trained on data that was shamelessly scraped from the web<\/a>, a controversial practice that has triggered a litany of copyright infringement lawsuits<\/a>.<\/p>\n Altman\u2019s remarks drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re welcome,\u201d one user responded<\/a>. \u201cNice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away.\u201d<\/p>\n Others called him a \u201cf***ing psychopath<\/a>\u201d and \u201cscum<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNothing says \u2018you\u2019re being replaced\u2019 quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing,\u201d one user wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n The news comes as OpenAI desperately tries to keep up with the competition in an increasingly crowded enterprise and code-facing AI software landscape. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported<\/a> that executives had started ringing the alarm bells, calling for the company to double down on coding and enterprise customers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, told employees in a memo, as quoted by the WSJ. \u201cWe really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, OpenAI\u2019s competitor Anthropic has made major strides, with its Claude Code and Cowork chatbots triggering a trillion-dollar selloff last\u00a0month<\/a> over concerns that AI could make legacy enterprise software a thing of the past.<\/p>\n In short, it\u2019s difficult not to read Altman\u2019s latest tweet as a sleight, directly capitalizing on widespread fears<\/a> of an AI jobs apocalypse<\/a> to tout the capabilities of his company\u2019s offerings.<\/p>\n