When Meta cut 8,000 employees in April and framed it explicitly as an investment in artificial intelligence, it joined a growing list of highly profitable companies trading headcount for computing. Coinbase followed weeks later, cutting around 14 percent of its workforce, citing market volatility and the proliferation of A.I. tools in the same breath. The…
On the heels of Sam Altman’s testimony in the ongoing trial over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, a clearer picture is emerging of how Musk might have run the company differently. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI as a nonprofit, is suing the company, its CEO Altman and president Greg Brockman for “stealing a charity.” He…
The relationship between Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and the company’s former chief scientist, has long been tumultuous. Once considered close collaborators, the pair split in 2023 when Sutskever orchestrated Altman’s brief ouster as CEO. He later reversed course and called for Altman’s reinstatement, a move he described as a “Hail Mary” during…
When we wrote about the legal and ethical implications of A.I. in hiring in 2019, we focused on the assessment of job candidates before they had been hired or consented to an ongoing relationship with an organization. What has become increasingly clear since then is that the far more consequential, and far less scrutinized, deployment…
President Donald Trump will travel to Beijing this week for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, accompanied by a delegation of top U.S. CEOs from the technology, finance and manufacturing sectors. The meetings, which begin May 13, come at a particularly strained moment in U.S.-China relations, with tensions spanning trade, A.I., semiconductor exports,…
Fears that A.I. could displace human workers have become a defining concern for younger generations. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sees it differently. The technology, he argues, has “kick-started a revolutionary wave”—one today’s graduates are well positioned to ride. “I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life’s work,” Huang said during a keynote…
A few years after the launch of consumer A.I., companies are racing to build governance structures, appointing chief A.I. officers, drafting policies and formalizing oversight processes. The goal is to ensure that A.I. adoption delivers measurable value while minimizing operational, legal and reputational risks. But in the scramble to establish new frameworks, organizations are overlooking…
Tech workers are burning through massive amounts of A.I. compute in a race to code faster and automate more work. In Silicon Valley, the practice is known as “tokenmaxxing,” where employees push their use of ChatGPT and other large language models to the limit to maximize productivity. The trend has accelerated alongside the rise of…
Earlier this month, StarkWare’s chief product officer Avihu Levy published a proposal that has been the focus of active debate within the Bitcoin community. His scheme, Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), allows users to transact in a way that remains secure even against a large-scale quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, and it does so without requiring…
Mark Stevens, a venture capitalist and early Nvidia investor, and his wife, Mary, are donating a staggering $200 million to the University of Southern California to accelerate A.I. research and education across the institution. The gift will help the 145-year-old university position itself as a “trailblazer” in A.I., according to Stevens, a USC alumnus. The…
