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Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs (www.theregister.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”

The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.

“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”

His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.

“We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

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[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Lots of companies are doing this. They invested in LLM tech. Most on the ground realized it doesn't work except in very, very specific circumstances. Upper management either decides they're lying to protect their jobs, or doesn't care and just wants an excuse to reduce "human resource" costs and lays off the people they expected the AI to replace anyway. Short term profits rise while remaining employees are stuck doing double or more work to take up the slack, but with so many companies doing it, they can't leave. Eventually, the bubble will burst anf companies will fail. Retirement funds will take tons of loss to prop up all of the "too big to fail" companies while their smaller competitors die off. Some new bubble will come along and repeat the process. Meanwhile consolidation makes products worse and increases inflation, fraud runs rampant, and crime spikes as more and more people can't afford to live. End stage capitalism as predicted many times over the last few centuries. All we can do is try to survive at this point and keep showing the right wing masses the truth until they either stop following hate driven distractions to their own detriment or the whole system collapses.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 10 hours ago

I'm relatively certain most of the masses you describe are still unaware they're being used.

They hear words they like, which come along with actions they can't even put in their reality, so they must be fiction. I've been in an abusive relationship. It's rather like classic Star Trek: No matter how traumatic an experience was, you wake up in the morning, and it's all been reset. You pretend it didn't happen, because if you start seeing a pattern, you suddenly see the problem, which is a very human response.