The software giant Microsoft announced it was laying off 4,000 people, primarily its X-box division. The move is designed to optimize X-box and other divisions using AI. The layoffs amount to 2.1% of its workforce. 1,600 of those layoffs are already happening, and they’re all in the X-box division.
AI Watch
AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood to appear in feature film set in the ‘Tillyverse’ – National– globalnews.ca
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The AI “actor” known as Tilly Norwood will be used in a new feature film entitled Misaligned, its first lead role as a digitally generated persona.
Particle6, the AI production studio that built Norwood, is developing and producing the film, the company told Global News in an email statement. The company is led by comedian and writer Eline Van der Velden.
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arXiv:2607.05382v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks.
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Sometimes the great verities are pretty straightforward. For example, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” an observation made famous by economist Herb Stein. Let’s stick with that one, given its sensible application to the Trump administration’s current quasi-licensing regime for frontier AI models. The effort has proven to be a vibey, ad hoc process that The Economist correctly describes as “opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable.” Good news that a more structured process apparently is coming soon.
The Financial Times reports that, as early as this week, the White House will roll out “voluntary standards for the release of new models” that would “set benchmarks for models with cutting-edge cyber capabilities and establish release timelines in an effort to streamline future launches.” What’s more, the guidelines would clarify “who is able to access advanced models, both domestically and abroad, in a move that could set the stage for a global framework including US allies.” Definitely seems less haphazard, I’ll give it that.
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Water is the most abundant liquid on Earth’s surface, and it is highly anomalous compared with other liquids because it expands upon freezing. The anomalies in water have been linked to how its microscopic structure changes with temperature and pressure. However, there is no systematic scheme for characterizing these structural changes.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told staff that the company’s effort to replace human workers with AI agents is moving slower than expected, even after the tech giant cut thousands of jobs and reorganized aggressively around artificial intelligence.
The admission came during an internal town hall after months of restructuring at Meta.
Earlier this year, the company cut roughly 10% of its workforce and reassigned about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles.
Those moves were framed internally as urgent, as Meta raced to compete with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other major players in the artificial intelligence arms race.
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Water is the most abundant liquid on Earth’s surface, and it is highly anomalous compared with other liquids because it expands upon freezing. The anomalies in water have been linked to how its microscopic structure changes with temperature and pressure. However, there is no systematic scheme for characterizing these structural changes.
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Xbox is handing the pink slip to 3,200 of its employees, or 20 per cent of the total workforce, over the next year. The move comes as part of the Microsoft-owned company’s broader AI-led layoffs, with Xbox being affected the most as its “business is not healthy”, Chief Executive Officer Asha Sharma said in a letter to employees.
In her email to workers, Sharma noted that 1,600 employees will be laid off on Monday, while the remaining ones will be let go over FY27. In addition, Xbox will divest four of its gaming studios and is preparing to part ways with another.
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It appears humans still have the edge over AI.
For now at least.
Ford has announced it has rehired nearly 300 engineers after initially letting them go after replacing them with AI.
The decision by Ford to rehire the engineers comes after its AI system was unable to perform well while conducting quality checks.
BBC had more details to report on Ford’s latest move:
Ford says it has hired back some human engineers after AI failed to match their skills and experience.
In a bid to reap the benefits of the tech, which developers claim can cut costs and boost productivity, the US carmaker adopted it across some parts of its operations including for quality checks.
But, according to Bloomberg, its executives said the firm has rehired more than 300 “veteran” quality inspectors in recent years to make up for the pitfalls of automated systems.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.
“Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles,” he said.
The US automaker is among many to have seized on the buzz around AI, particularly amid Wall Street fervour about the tech’s potential to increase margins.
We are going to see a lot of companies give up on AI and start rehiring staff like Ford
— Michael (@TheMG3D) June 29, 2026
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Experts are sounding alarms after artificial intelligence giant Anthropic hired a notorious economist who argues that a one-in-three chance of ending human existence is an acceptable tradeoff if AI delivers massive economic growth.
The AI company, known for publicly warning about the dangers of the same technology it is racing to build, recently brought on Stanford economics professor Chad Jones.
Jones’s past work is now drawing scrutiny after the Financial Times highlighted a paper in which he calculated what level of existential risk from AI could be considered “optimal” when weighed against potential gains in living standards.
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Flexion Robotics, a Swiss startup founded by former Nvidia researchers, is approaching the problem from a different angle. It teaches robots basic physical skills and uses a higher-level AI system to decide which skill to call up and when. The goal is not just to complete tasks but to adapt…
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The US government has lifted restrictions on powerful AI models, such as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, according to Anthropic, the AI firm behind
The company will soon begin restoring global access to its most powerful AI models, it said on Tuesday.
Posting on X, Anthropic said: “We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5,” adding, “We’ll begin restoring access tomorrow.”
Earlier this month, US authorities blocked access to the models on national security grounds.
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Technology companies that propose to build data centers to provide the computing power for artificial intelligence would have to pay any costs to upgrade local power grids under a bill that took a step forward in the House on Wednesday
The Ratepayer Protection Act, H.R. 9340, would authorize states to charge companies building data centers the full cost of new power generation to support the electricity-gobbling centers and transmission upgrades.
The Subcommittee on Energy, a panel that is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, moved the bill, which had bipartisan support, forward. The full committee will now consider it.
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The AI industry’s most fascinating stories often come from unlikely alliances, and this is certainly one of them. Getty Images, a company that has spent years raising concerns about how AI models are trained and how creative work is used, is now officially partnering with OpenAI.
The new agreement will allow Getty Images’ licensed content to appear across ChatGPT’s search and discovery experiences. That means users may begin seeing Getty’s professionally licensed photos and visual assets integrated into ChatGPT responses, adding more visual context to searches and AI-generated answers. Getty says the goal is to make AI-powered search more useful and trustworthy by relying on high-quality, licensed content rather than the murky sourcing practices that have sparked countless debates across the AI industry.
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Oracle Corp. reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees in the past 12 months, a wider scale than previously known, including those whose jobs were eliminated by the use of artificial intelligence.
“The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” Oracle said Monday in an annual financial regulatory filing.
The company’s global headcount shrank to 141,000 full-time employees as of the May 31 end of the fiscal year, compared with 162,000 a year earlier, Oracle said. The reductions led to about $1.8 billion in restructuring costs.
Oracle is under financial pressure because of an expensive build-out of AI data centers for customers like OpenAI. Earlier this year, it began cutting thousands of jobs as part of efforts to save cash, Bloomberg has reported. The exact scope of the cuts was never formally disclosed.
As of the end of May, the company had about 49,000 US workers while about 92,000 were employed internationally.
General Motors Replaces 1,000 Human Workers with ‘Collaborative Robots’ at Detroit Plant– slaynews.com
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General Motors has replaced roughly 1,000 workers with just 50 robots at its flagship Detroit-area manufacturing facility, sparking backlash from labor unions and reigniting concerns about automation’s growing impact on American jobs.
The move comes as the auto giant looks to cut costs and improve efficiency amid slowing demand for electric vehicles and increasing pressure to remain competitive in a rapidly changing industry.
According to reports, the new “collaborative robots,” commonly known as cobots, have been installed on the assembly line at GM’s Factory ZERO plant in Michigan, where they now assist with attaching body panels to vehicles as they move through production.
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Meta is pausing a divisive employee tracking program after an internal security issue exposed potentially sensitive data collected through the initiative to other workers.
“We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we’re pausing it while we investigate,” says company spokesperson Tracy Clayton.
Meta rolled out the Model Compatibility Initiative (MCI) tool in April to US employees. The tool “collects computer inputs such as mouse movements, click locations and keystrokes, as well as screen content,” according to workers who have been petitioning against it over privacy, security, and personal liberty concerns. When MCI first launched, employees couldn’t opt out, but that changed to a limited degree after workers protested.
Meta executives have repeatedly defended the data-gathering project, saying it was necessary to train AI systems to operate computer software the way humans do and that employees were the best examples for the artificial intelligence to learn from.