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1 min read
They Fired You and Blamed the Robot
Read more . . . →Almost six out of ten companies now admit they frame layoffs as “AI-driven” when the real reason is financial. Straight up. Into a survey. Block fired forty percent of its workforce and the stock jumped twenty-four percent the same day. Dorsey posted $2.87 billion in gross profit that quarter. Cloudflare axed eleven hundred people — a fifth of the company — while reporting record revenue up thirty-four percent. These aren’t companies in trouble. These are companies doing better than ever who figured out Wall Street pays you more per share when you have fewer employees. Meta’s internal memos said the...
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1 min read
You're Paying to Power the Machine That Replaced You
Read more . . . →Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count. Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it...
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1 min read
How to Tell a Frontier Model From a Fat Kitten
Read more . . . →Before you reshare the next screenshot of a “frontier model,” run it through the Le Chaton Fat test. Is there a real model card or product page, or just a screenshot of a chart? Can you actually call it — open weights to download, or an API key that works? Is the benchmark published and reproducible, or is the “leaderboard” one image somebody made in an afternoon? Le Chaton Fat failed all three: no weights, no API, no model card, and the only leaderboard it ever topped was a parody chart bragging about a croissant context window and 1,000 meows...
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1 min read
The Fake Cat Nobody Could Switch Off
Read more . . . →On Friday June 12, at 5:21pm ET, the US government handed Anthropic an export-control directive: cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere, in the country or out, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national staff. You can’t check the passport of hundreds of millions of users in real time, so Anthropic did the only compliant thing and pulled both models for everybody. Its statement pinned it on “the US government, citing national security authorities.” NBC named Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Bureau of Industry and Security; Bloomberg later published the letter. Anthropic says it disagrees and chalks...
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1 min read
The Fat Kitten That Fooled the Whole Timeline
Read more . . . →In late May, Mistral renamed its chatbot Le Chat — French for “the cat” — to “Vibe.” The fans mourning the cat did what the grieving do online: they built a replacement. Le Chaton Fat. Franglais for “the fat kitten,” an oxymoron with a face. It started in Mistral’s own community, hit X around June 11, and within hours actual machine-learning researchers were asking out loud if it was real. Cody Blakeney posted, dead serious, “Can someone tell me if Le Chaton fat is real or an amazingly elaborate joke?” No weights. No API. No model card. It never hit...
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1 min read
The Layoffs Didn't Even Work
Read more . . . →They told you the robot was coming for your job. Eighty percent of companies deploying AI cut workers this year, and a Gartner study of 350 firms just confirmed what anyone with a calculator already suspected: the cuts didn’t boost returns at all. The companies that fired the most people got nothing for it. No productivity miracle, no margin bump, just a smaller payroll and the same balance sheet. They torched 184,000 jobs this year chasing a number that never showed up. And here’s the part that should make you throw something. Sam Altman — the guy selling the robot...
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1 min read
Fire 290 People, Then Wave a Million Dollars at the Survivors
Read more . . . →ClickUp just cut 290 people — 22% of the company — and the CEO announced it on X like he was shipping a feature. Zeb Evans calls the new structure a “100x org”: roughly 3,000 internal AI agents that now outnumber his remaining humans three to one. The money saved by firing nearly a quarter of the staff doesn’t go back to customers or get banked for a rainy day. It goes to the people who survived the cut, in the form of salary bands that climb to a million dollars a year in cash. Get laid off, or get...
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1 min read
Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
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1 min read
The Velvet Sundown World Tour: Laptop and a Dream
Read more . . . →A Canadian faked an entire band with AI, hit 1.4 million Spotify listeners, and nobody noticed for months. The world tour poster is accurate — it’s just a laptop.
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1 min read
The Last Stream
Read more . . . →Spotify and Universal just launched a paid AI tool that lets you “remix” and “cover” real songs. Twelve apostles, zero royalties, one CEO.
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