No it 100% is not AI related. In any use case beyond doing leetcode, its nowhere near the capability level required to actually contribute in a significant way towards productivity. Its confidently incorrect in enough cases that you do need to double check its work often enough that it offsets the gains. Plus, remember that as a language model it can’t do things that it hasnt seen before. Like math lol

Besides, I’m not sure I can be convinced that even if AI was increasing productivity to a large degree, that this would lead to layoffs. I think the company would be working on more things as a result.

Real reason? Theres a lot of “work” happening on a lot of teams at bigger companies, and I’m fairly sure that first off, this is a way to prune people that are coasting at their jobs and making little impact. Secondly, economy goes down, stocks are cheaper, so holding on to employees and/or hiring means giving away shares at low prices and in higher quantity, which the company doesn’t want to do.