Google has laid off more than 100 employees in design-related roles in its cloud unit, according to CNBC, employees within the cloud unit’s “quantitative user experience research” teams and “platform and service experience” teams, as well as some adjacent teams.
These roles often focus on using data, surveys and other tools to understand and implement user behaviors that inform product development and design. Many of the roles impacted are U.S. based, and the employees have time till early December to find a new role in the company.
This comes as Google accelerates job cuts to focus on spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company has offered voluntary exit packages to many U.S.-based units across the company and eliminated more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams since the beginning of the year. It has also been reportedly pushing employees to use more AI in their work.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in August that the company would need “to be more efficient as we scale up so we don’t solve everything with headcount.”
A number of tech companies have seen mass layoffs of late, sparking anxiety. xAI recently cut 500 employees, about a third of its data annotation workforce, the largest division responsible for training its AI models. Oracle too recently laid off staff in its cloud division. Over 9,000 employees were let go by Microsoft earlier this year.
Meanwhile Google, along with Apple and Meta are facing a lawsuit over their casino-style gambling apps. A federal judge on Tuesday denied the companies’ requests to dismiss lawsuits claiming they promoted illegal gambling by hosting and accepting commissions from such apps that cause addiction in users.
Plaintiffs claimed that Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Store and Meta’s Facebook promoted an “authentic Vegas-style experience of slot machine gambling” through an illegal racketeering conspiracy. The defendants have allegedly triggered depression, suicidal thoughts and other consequences, while brokering and collecting 30% commissions — estimated at more than $2 billion — on transactions they processed, according to the plaintiffs.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, rejected the companies’ main argument that Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from liability over third-party content, shielded them from the proposed class actions.
In a 37-page decision, Davila found that Apple, Google and Meta did not act as “publishers” when processing payments, undercutting their Section 230 immunity claims. He said that the companies may immediately appeal his decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in part because of the importance of the Section 230 issues.