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Entry-level consulting salaries have remained flat for the second year in a row, according to a new report from Management Consulted. The slowdown affects top firms like McKinsey and the Big Four, as well as smaller boutique consultancies. The report cites weaker demand, productivity gains from AI, and fewer employees leaving the industry as key factors.

Namaan Mian of Management Consulted says firms can now get more done with fewer people thanks to AI, which is putting a lid on salary growth. The findings are based on verified offer data and show that companies are hiring fewer high-cost MBA graduates. In previous years, entry-level pay typically rose by five to ten percent annually. Management Consulted expects salaries for new hires to remain flat even if demand eventually picks back up.

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HSBC has signed a multiyear partnership with the French startup Mistral AI to bring generative AI across its global operations. According to the announcement, the bank wants to speed up internal workflows and improve customer service by running Mistral's models on its own infrastructure.

HSBC plans to use the technology for financial analysis, translations, and risk assessments. The bank also expects gains in marketing and credit evaluation. It already uses AI for fraud detection and is folding the new tools into its existing security policies.

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Black Forest Labs has raised USD 300 million in a new Series B round, bringing its valuation to USD 3.25 billion. Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP) led the round, with existing investors like a16z and Nvidia joining in, along with new backers including Canva and Figma Ventures.

The company is best known for its Flux image models, which it says are among the most widely used on Hugging Face and support products from partners such as Adobe, Meta, and Microsoft. Black Forest Labs released its newest model, Flux 2, just a few days ago.

The fresh funding will help the Freiburg- and San Francisco-based team accelerate its work on what it calls "visual intelligence" - models intended to combine perception, generation, memory, and logical reasoning. The company also plans to expand its team.

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OpenAI researcher Sebastien Bubeck says GPT-5's math skills saved him a month of work. In a post on X, Bubeck reports that GPT-5 tackled a highly complex mathematical task for him. The model designed the solution path, ran a simulation to check a formula, and then wrote a complete proof, effectively a seamless calculation. While this process would have previously taken him around a month, GPT-5 finished it in just an afternoon. Bubeck calls it the "most impressive LLM output" he has seen to date.

Generative AI is becoming increasingly apparent in high-level mathematics—and not just because of gold medals in Math Olympiads. Mathematician Terence Tao recently noted that AI saved him several hours of work, though he used the tool to verify his theoretical assumptions rather than relying on it autonomously. An OpenAI report backs this up, showing how GPT-5 can save significant research time across various scientific fields.

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Programmers who rely on AI assistants tend to ask fewer questions and learn more superficially, according to new research from Saarland University. A team led by Sven Apel found that students were less critical of the code suggestions they received when working with tools like GitHub Copilot. In contrast, pairs of human programmers asked more questions, explored alternatives, and learned more from one another.

Apel et al.

In the experiment, 19 students worked in pairs: six in human-only teams and seven in human-AI teams. According to Apel, many of the AI-assisted participants simply accepted code suggestions because they assumed the AI's output was already correct. He noted that this habit can introduce mistakes that later require significant effort to fix. Apel said AI tools can be helpful for straightforward tasks, but complex problems still benefit from real collaboration between humans.

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