(DailyAnswer.org) – Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is reportedly forming a new structure and slashing jobs at X, its innovation lab. X has in recent months increased its talk with venture capitalists and investors with the aim of launching projects more quickly.
X, established in 2010 by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was founded to develop futuristic technological advancements that would make the world a “radically better place”. The secretive lab let dozens of staff go as part of a broader move to cut costs. A spokeswoman for X said that the company battled challenges such as climate change and that times called for more streamlining of how the lab’s projects are brought to life. Since its formation, X has housed hundreds of moonshot projects, several of which grew to become independent businesses.
Alphabet Inc. previously culled 12,000 jobs at the beginning of 2023 after a hiring spree during the pandemic to focus more on AI and cut down on staff working on experimental projects. At the time shares in Alphabet Inc. had risen by 4% after dropping by 30% over the previous year, following an overall slump of 24% in the tech industry as a whole. In December 2023 Google launched its Gemini AI. The AI model is scalable and comes in three versions – Nano, Pro and Ultra.
Google is one of many companies in Silicon Valley to lay off large numbers of staff over the last year; Meta, having previously laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022, cut 10,000 staff in spring 2023. Amazon, Microsoft and Musk’s takeover of Twitter also saw large numbers of staff laid off. The move to cut staff at the X lab comes after Google announced at the end of 2023 that it would lay off several hundred employees due to cost-cutting measures. In early January 2024, the company announced it would be culling a few hundred staff working on its voice assistant, a few hundred working on its augmented reality, and that a few hundred roles in the central engineering team would also be affected.
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