I Built Open-Source AI. Our New CTO Spent $8M on His Old Company's Product and Fired My Team. Two Weeks Later, the CEO Called.

A new CTO pushed an $8M AI overhaul, then the company laid off the backend team that had built and run a stable five-year production system.

The narrator had already led a small in-house AI pilot using open-source models, and validation results looked strong enough to move forward.

Before the pilot could be deployed, the team was dismissed, leaving the company without the people who understood the system best.

After the layoffs, leadership risked losing the institutional knowledge needed to maintain, explain, or migrate the existing production stack.