Finally one ceo came out honestly and said ai is the reason for laying off people. It makes sense, no point in being obscure. It doesn’t matter if they over hired or not, AI is giving them the freedom to lay off. I would expect a lot more layoffs and more importantly the configuration of teams and nature of roles is going to change, has to change to be effective with AI
In theory yes, but it’s not applicable to the vast majority of people. You have to be musk or bezos to have that flexibility.
Even then as you see with the abortion ban, the folks on that side will not be satisfied without a federal level policy and they are just whittling away state by state.
Not sure where the synergy is except that both sell used stuff. For their market shipping speed doesn’t matter and so their large store foot print is not useful either. This is just a play to become more meaningful and to have actual revenue.
Genuine question, there are a lot of overly ambitious efforts like, even though this seems the most ambitious of them all - but is this all optimistic investment or is there any iota of indication that this is a viable path? I am very skeptical of the ai initiatives in medicine and biology where they want to solve problems that humans cannot yet. I would love to be wrong of course
In, say, civil or aerospace engineering, science is understood well enough to allow your building or airplane to be modelled and tested using computer modelling, CAD software, FEM and CFD algorithms and so on. You can design a house or an aircraft without ever building a single physical model, and it will stand (or fly), 99 times out of 100. It is oversimplification to a degree, but sufficiently close approximation.
No such thing exists in biology, pharmaceutics, biotech and so on. The accuracy of computer models and simulation is not sufficient to produce results with single-digit percent accuracy for any metrics, hence long and complex Phase I-II-III trials. Maybe 1 out of 100 candidate drugs works.
Why? Because we do not have the same level of understanding for biological systems as we do for buildings or aircraft, or software. Amount of information is much larger, complexity is far greater, enzymes and cell signalling network make biochemistry extremely non-linear. This makes the problem space vast. It is practically untapped domain and it can eat any amount of computational power and biologists, data scientists and software devs (manpower-wise).
Any incremental improvements in simulation, modelling and interpretation of biological system behaviour will generate downstream improvements in medicine, pharma, biotech. But general-purpose LLM AIs are not that useful in biology, you need more specialized solutions to improve both accuracy and performance of large number of algorithms that have tremendous computational complexity: computational chemistry, molecular dynamics, genomics->proteomics->interactomics->metabolomics (all of that for just intra-cellular behaviour - tissues, organism and organisms are multiple orders of magnitude harder).
But fundamentally it is a problem of missing software to better model biological systems (AI or non-AI). Once created, such a solution will enable large amount of very big breakthroughs in almost every biology-connected discipline.
> there are a lot of overly ambitious efforts like, even though this seems the most ambitious of them all
Chan Zuckerberg is NOTORIOUS for overly ambitious claims, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative started in 2015 with the bold statement they would "cure all disease in our lifetime." It's been 11 years. Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.
When Zuckerberg realized he probably wasn't going to hit this goal they quietly changed it to "within our children's lifetimes."
I used to work in their building and actually saw them change it on the wall and as "within our childrens" 3 years in. Stay posted, probably in 15 years they buy themselves some more time and make it "our children's children's lifetimes."
>Have they cured 1 disease? Let alone ~all~ disease? No.
I mean, curing all disease isn't something where progress is linear. A large portion of the work is done upfront before you see any result. Then when your knowledge base and methodology is sufficiently robust, many disease can then be cured in quick succession. The fact that they have no visible success after 10 years says little about the viability of their goal.
Looking at the history of modern medicine, the cure rate of diseases was not exponential, it was gradual over the course of hundreds of years.
Sure there were a few big jumps- water sanitation and antibiotics come to mind- but if you look at cured cardiovascular diseases, cancers, GI diseases etc., they all started with bad treatments that indeed slowly improved over decades.
If CZI is looking to eliminate all disease in a lifetime (say 100 years) I would expect some progress.
You're talking about curing diseases where each disease is a largely independent effort, which is distinct from an enterprise aimed at curing all disease. The former will be much more linear in appearance than the latter.
I honestly don't think it matters, so long as they're working toward the same guiding direction they'll achieve the same thing regardless of the arbitrary point in the future they pick to aim toward.
It is nice to know when confronted with new information that they might revise their stance too.
So they can vote themselves out to do the right thing, and they purposefully allowing themselves to invest in the stock market with insider information. My cynicism tells me they are throwing this bone to divert attention from the stock market loophole
i'm not sure it's productive to think this way. senators could be making more money on prediction markets. they took a nice step which will lead them to make no money on prediction markets (less money overall). it also sets a precedent which could easily be applied to the stock market.
what you're saying is probably on the mind of at least one Senator, but all things considered, this feels like a net-positive move which they didn't have to do.
I get what you're saying but they did also vote themselves a restriction on stock trading in 2012, so the same behavior as this? If prediction markets get really profitable you might expect the same loophole there too.
Americans were leaking that Saudi Arabia was pushing for the attack. Saudi Arabia was leaking that the leader pushed against the attack. Then there was a leak about them wanting USA to finish the job and just maybe, they were for it.
It all depends on how Saudi wants to be seen in the moment and what Trump thinks makes him look better in the moment.
But like, Saudi gave Americans golden planes and extraordinary amount of bribes, so one would assume they were buying something.
Meanwhile all the ceos of Apple, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, nvidia and palantir went to kiss his feet one more time. That obviously did not happen now but you would have believed it.
If someone wants to move off Claude what are the alternatives? More importantly can another system pick up from where Claude left off or is there some internal knowledge Claude keeps in their configuration that I need to extract before canceling?
I am trying Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6 since a couple of days now locally coming from OMLX. Either via Hermes or Continue in VS Code. It's oka'ish, even performance-wise.
I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.
I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
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