Google reportedly laid off several hundreds of employees across the company, affecting the central engineering and hardware teams as the company pushes for efficiency and product priorities.
Employees from Google Assistant and other parts of the company were also affected by the cutoff.
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Google Continues Cost-Cutting With Employees
Last 2023, Google started the year with shocking news after cutting down 12,000 full-time employees. The succeeding months also saw other cuts to different divisions of the company.
"To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, and to align their resources to their biggest product priorities," Google wrote in a response to CNBC.
Google has been shifting its priority since AI became popular. Products like the chatbot Bard and the large language model Gemini are just some of the company's biggest product priorities, as the competition rises against Microsoft and Amazon.
Fitbit Co-Founders, Leaders, Leave Google
As Google continues reorganizing the company, Fitbit co-founders James and Eric Friedman, along with other Fitbit leaders, are reportedly leaving the company.
It is also expected that the company will lay off other roles in the following months. The downsizing might also be hinting that Google will no longer work on its AR hardware and will be committed to the OEM partnership model.
Meanwhile, the Alphabet Workers Union expressed their thoughts on another round of layoff, calling it "needless."
"Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our coworkers while making billions every quarter," the union wrote.
Related Article: Google Axes Hundreds of AR Hardware Staff in Division Reorganization
