Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two have seemingly held some layoffs this week. As spotted by Game Developer, the company’s head of AI Luke Dicken shared a post on his personal LinkedIn page where he shared that both he and an unknown number of his team have been let go.

“It’s truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with T2 – and that of my team – has come to an end,” reads the post from Dicken. “I will take the time in a week or so to make a more reflective post on my time with Zynga and T2, but for right now I would appreciate your help in finding these awesome talented folks new positions – especially in the current climate.” Dicken noted further that the team had been “developing cutting edge technology to support game development now for 7 years.” A number of other team members have also confirmed their departure.

Dicken seemingly worked at Zynga (which was acquired by Take-Two in 2022) for more than 10 years, his last role at the company being senior director of applied AI before moving over to Take-Two to head up their AI department.

Last month, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke somewhat negatively about the implementation of generative AI tools, though more specifically around how the usage of them don’t guarantee successful games, as opposed to outright decrying them. “These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits,” he explained at the time. “There are loads of assets out there now. It doesn’t matter if you push a button to create an asset, or it takes you six weeks, at the end of the day, you have an asset. And thousands of mobile games are launched every year, and there are only a handful of hits.”

Perhaps what’s stranger is that only in February did Zelnick talk about how enthusiastic he is about generative AI, and bigging up how much of a leader the company is in the space.

It’s not clear why these layoffs have taken place at Take-Two. Last month also saw OpenAI shutting down its AI video generation app Sora, resulting in the cancellation of its $1bn partnership with Disney. Perhaps the big wigs over at the GTA publisher can see that the AI bubble is about to burst, though I wouldn’t necessarily see this move as the end of AI at Take-Two owned studios.