So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023, with a week packed with job cuts at tech companies.

Duolingo cut 10% of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as the reason. Twitch announced a 500-person cut, and its parent company Amazon also took steps Wednesday to lay off hundreds of employees across Prime Video and MGM Studios.

Google followed, also laying off hundreds of employees working on its Google Voice assistant, with additional reorganization affecting its hardware teams working on augmented reality, the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches and the Nest thermostat. On Thursday, Discord announced it would lay off 17% of its staff after hiring too quickly in recent years.

It’s a wave of announcements that seems all too familiar, but experts say these layoffs don’t necessarily mean 2024 will prove as brutal as previous years. The job cuts are smaller than those made in late 2022 and 2023, when companies like Google, Amazon and Meta laid off thousands of workers after years of rapid growth. And with a stable job market, they don’t necessarily indicate a continued decline in tech jobs, but rather a shift in priorities within companies.

The tech sector looks healthy overall as consumer habits have stabilized after rapid changes during the Covid-19 pandemic, says Rachel Sederberg, senior economist at labor analytics firm Lightcast. Some of these latest reductions target specific departments and products and may only represent a portion of business operations.

“Companies are constantly making choices about what they want to focus on, and that sometimes results in job cuts,” Sederberg says. Companies may continue to make these smaller, targeted reductions in the coming months, but she says she doesn’t expect a “contagion” of layoffs across tech companies or other sectors.

It’s not a radical rightsizing, as tech companies did in 2022 and 2023, says Daniel Keum, associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. As companies look for ways to use and monetize automation and generative AI, “a rebalancing is happening” between jobs and priorities, Keum says. Last year, job postings related to generative AI grew rapidly, even as the tech industry grappled with widespread job losses.