From what I can tell, much of the recent layoffs by Amazon and other large companies has been relatively surgical, focused on specific projects or silos within the company. According to the WSJ, part of these layoffs are directly tied to the shutting down of the Fresh and Go Business. Looking back, in October 2025, there was Gaming division layoffs. Echo division in 2023. Meta laid off VR reality employees a couple weeks ago.

These layoffs don't seem to be driven by productivity gains of AI (yet), more so shifting out of failed business experiments. I wonder if this will act as a signaling mechanism for employees to avoid "novel" projects to avoid getting laid off or being associated with a whole division getting shutdown.

Was going to post this too:

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/28/tech/amazon-layoffs-ai

Some more earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793906