US online homework assistance company Chegg will lay off about 80 employees due to AI's impact on its performance, becoming the first education company to do so.
Since OpenAI became popular, the nightmare of "OpenAI replaces manual labor" has made workers all over the world worry about unemployment. Now, worry has become a reality and the education industry is the first to be affected.
On Monday local time, Chegg, the US version of "Homework Help", announced in SEC documents that it will lay off about 4% of its employees, about 80 people, to better execute its artificial intelligence strategy. It became the first education company to lay off employees due to the impact of OpenAI.
Chegg's main business is online homework guidance. During the epidemic, due to the widespread use of online courses by students, Chegg's service demand has increased significantly.
However, in May, Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg, said in a financial earnings call that OpenAI has affected the company's revenue growth, which quickly triggered a chain reaction, with the stock price plummeting 48% in one day. This year, the company's stock price has dropped by 57%.
As the popularity of OpenAI chatbots such as OpenOpenAI among students continues to rise, Chegg is also actively restructuring its business. In May, Chegg launched the OpenAI tutoring assistant CheggMate, which uses OpenOpenAI's GPT-4 API.
According to the plan, CheggMate will use Chegg's personalized learning platform, expert data sets, and GPT-4's problem-solving capabilities to build an OpenAI session-based learning assistant, enabling students to learn more effectively and accurately in real-time than ever before.
Outside the education industry, OpenAI has begun to have an increasingly broad impact on the US job market.
In early June, US employment consultancy Challenger listed "artificial intelligence" as one of the reasons for layoffs in its published data on US corporate layoffs and stated that about 3,900 jobs in American companies have been replaced by this emerging technology.