“Difficult changes.” “Challenging time.” “Tough choices.”

Big Tech companies’ recent layoff announcements and earnings calls have had these familiar buzzwords in common, but many of them have also shared an overarching vision: That AI advancement is the future, and it’s time to shift more focus and funding toward machine learning projects.

• So far this year, 270+ tech companies have reportedly laid off more than 86,000 workers, which includes headcount reductions of about 12,000 at Alphabet, 10,000 at Microsoft, and 8,000 at Amazon, according to industry tracker Layoffs.fyi.
• In November, Meta announced it would lay off 11,000 of its staff. These announcements follow nearly 160,000 layoffs of tech workers in 2022, per Layoffs.fyi.

Three of the most influential tech companies—Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta—have said that, in part, they’re using the period of retrenchment to try and elevate their in-house AI projects.

• This quarter’s tech earnings calls resulted in tech execs using the terms AI, generative AI, and machine learning “two to six times as often as they did in the previous quarter,” according to a Reuters analysis.

Big picture: The aim is to potentially better position themselves to compete in a landscape where generative AI, a sector that raised $1.4 billion last year according to Pitchbook data, has quickly sparked widespread interest and adoption across industries. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently became the fastest-growing consumer application ever recorded, according to a UBS study, netting ~100 million monthly active users in two months. Read the full story on the rise of AI.—HF

Apprenticeships have existed for centuries, but they may be seeing a surge in popularity.

As tech companies including LinkedIn, Twilio, Intuit, and IBM have struggled to recruit and retain talent, they’ve turned to this form of on-the-job training for potential hires who, as Tracy Stone, Intuit’s director of DE&I, told HR Brew, “may not have had the opportunity to have educational or work experience in technology,” but have the potential to develop into valued employees.

Recruiting with a wider lens. In the good old days, apprenticeships offered one of the only opportunities to learn a trade. Today, these programs are used by HR teams to expand and diversify recruiting pipelines, especially in historically homogeneous industries like tech.

“There’s so much talent in the industry that gets filtered out because they don’t have the right credentials, they don’t have the right degree,” Shalini Agarwal, senior director of engineering at LinkedIn and leader of the company’s REACH apprenticeship program, told HR Brew. “All of those people are overlooked in our recruiting pipelines…so we wanted to open up that opportunity funnel.” Read the full story from HR Brew here.—AK

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

The intersection of engineering, finance, and manufacturing. At this stage of the tech and product development, the amount of value engineering and design for manufacturability is highly correlated to the long-term design language of the product and thus the cost. If we can integrate the supply base early and often—from machine shops to electronic manufacturers, from specialty coaters to tube benders—we can get feedback at the right time so our design engineers can pick which industrial processes to use and which to develop specially for our application.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

Even though I have worked in very cool tech projects most of my career, including rockets and sustainable aviation, nothing has come close to how I feel about fusion energy…Fusion so far has been experimental in nature—this means that there is no supply base developed that can produce more than a couple of pieces of hardware a year. If they can produce them in the first place.

It is not uncommon for companies to want to be part of the supply chain just because the hardware is so different from what is in their shop now; statements like “making parts like this is why I got into this business” make a manufacturing nerd like me very happy.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I co-owned a small pizza shop with my now-wife—girlfriend back then—for a while. We both had full-time jobs in which we worked during the day and then took over from the day manager after 6pm every weekday. Then 12pm-12am on Saturdays and Sundays.

Stat: In 2022, Meta lost $13.7 billion on its metaverse division, officially known as Reality Labs. In the past, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said metaverse losses would only deepen in 2023…but TBD on how that will be reconciled with his new promise that this will be the “year of efficiency.”

Quote: “Autonomy is going to come to all of the airplanes eventually.”—Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun, in an interview with Bloomberg TV

Read: The Biden admin’s plan to build a domestic EV battery industry is off to a hot start.

It’s the first trivia of February. Time to start the month strong.

Click here to play.

Catch up on the top Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• The FAA could require some airlines to upgrade to 5G-friendly altimeters
• How connectivity giants are embracing the space race
• Tech hiring has fallen close to pre-pandemic levels