Snap cuts 1,000 jobs, or 16% of its workforce
Snap will lay off about 16% of its global workforce, impacting about 1,000 full-time employees, according to a memo sent to employees Wednesday by Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. The company cites advances in AI as the reduction effect. “While these changes are necessary to realize Snap’s long-term potential, we believe rapid advances in artificial intelligence […]
Reid Hoffman weighs in on the ‘token maxing’ debate
Days after Meta shut down its internal “tokenmaxxing” dashboard following news that its AI leaderboards had been leaked to the press, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman has voiced support for the concept that has recently taken Silicon Valley by storm. AI tokens are small chunks of data that an AI model processes as […]
This energy startup’s 100-year bet on grid technology is paying off
Demand for transformers, fueled in part by AI data centers, has grown so much that one prominent investor is backing a startup using very old technology. Ayr Energy manufactures transformers with iron cores, the same basic technology used in the power grid for more than a century. Although many other startups have emerged to take […]
HBO Max comes to India with exclusive deal from JioHotstar
JioHotstar, the Indian streaming service owned by conglomerate Reliance Industries, announced on Wednesday that it is expanding its partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery to offer HBO Max in India. HBO Max will be available to JioHotstar subscribers as an add-on starting at 49 ₹49 (approximately $0.50) per month and will feature content from HBO, Max […]
Spotify launches physical book purchase feature in US and UK
In February, Spotify made an exciting (and somewhat unusual) move by entering the world of physical bookselling. As of this week, the new feature has been officially rolled out in the US and UK, allowing users to purchase physical books through the Spotify app. This collaboration is with Bookshop.org, an online marketplace dedicated to supporting […]
Anthropic’s rise is causing some OpenAI investors to have second thoughts
OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation faces skepticism from some of its own investors as the company pivots around enterprise customers and rushes to fend off Anthropic’s attack, according to the Financial Times. Anthropic’s annual revenue soared from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March, largely due to demand […]
Someone has put a backdoor into dozens of WordPress plugins used by thousands of websites.
Dozens of plugins for the widely used open source web blogging software WordPress are currently taken offline due to the discovery of a backdoor that could be used to push malicious code to websites that rely on the plugins. The backdoor was discovered after a new company owner purchased these plugins. Austin Ginder, founder of […]
Anthropic co-founder confirms company briefed Trump administration on Mythos
Jack Clark, one of Anthropic’s co-founders and director of public interest at Anthropic PBC, confirmed that the AI company briefed the Trump administration on its new Mythos model. The model, announced last week, is so dangerous that it has not been released to the public, mainly because of its suspected strong cybersecurity features. In an […]
YouTube livestreams now suppress ads during peak engagement times to protect atmosphere
YouTube announced this week that it will suppress ads during live streams when chat engagement peaks and users show support with Super Chats, Super Stickers, gift purchases, and more. Previously, the only way to avoid seeing ads was to pay for a YouTube Premium subscription. The Google-owned platform said in a blog post that it […]
Max Hodak’s Science Corporation is preparing to place its first sensor in the human brain
Science Corporation, the startup from former Neuralink president and co-founder Max Hodak, has hired a leading neurobiologist to lead the first human clinical trial in the United States for its biohybrid brain-computer interface. Dr. Murat Günel, chair of neurosurgery at Yale University School of Medicine, was signed on as a scientific advisor after two years […]