AI in practice Archive

Mar 31, 2026

Oracle is laying off thousands of employees to fund its AI infrastructure push. Business Insider broke the story, and CNBC confirmed the cuts through two anonymous sources. Oracle, which had 162,000 employees as of May 2025, declined to comment.

The cuts stem from Oracle's aggressive AI spending, which has pushed the company into debt as cash flow shrinks. Since announcing plans to raise $50 billion in January, the stock has lost roughly a quarter of its value. TD Cowen analysts estimate that eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 positions could free up as much as $10 billion in cash flow.

On an earnings call, co-CEO Clay Magouyrk defended the spending, saying AI hardware demand outpaces supply. He pointed to $553 billion in guaranteed revenue, including a $455 billion order from OpenAI. But whether OpenAI can actually pay up remains unclear; the ChatGPT maker is also burning through cash at a rapid clip.

Oracle's internal termination email cites only "current business needs" without giving a specific reason. Meta is also reportedly planning large-scale layoffs to offset its own massive AI infrastructure costs.

Comment Source: CNBC | Business Insider

Matthias Bastian

Mar 31, 2026

Short News

Anthropic inadvertently published parts of the source code for its AI coding tool, Claude Code. Developers discovered more than 500,000 lines of source code and over 1,000 related files on NPM, a public repository where developers share JavaScript software packages. When publishing Claude Code as an NPM package, Anthropic accidentally included far more internal files than intended, including details about how the tool works and references to unreleased models and features.

Anthropic says the leak was caused "by human error," not a security vulnerability, and that no customer data was affected. The company is working on measures to prevent similar incidents. This is Anthropic's second leak in just days, coming right on the heels of internal blog posts about their new Mythos AI model accidentally slipping out.

Comment Source: via X

Matthias Bastian

Mar 31, 2026

Short News

Google Deepmind is launching Veo 3.1 Lite, its most affordable video generation model yet. It costs less than half the price of Veo 3.1 Fast but matches its speed, according to Google. The company doesn't specify quality differences between the three tiers.

Veo 3.1 Lite supports text-to-video and image-to-video at 720p and 1080p in portrait and landscape formats, with clips of 4, 6, or 8 seconds. Pricing starts at $0.05 per second for 720p. Starting April 7, Google is also dropping Veo 3.1 Fast prices.

Pricing (per second in USD)	Veo 3.1 Lite	Veo 3.1 Fast	Veo 3.1
720p	$0.05	$0.15 ($0.10 from 4/7)	$0.40
1080p	$0.08	$0.15 ($0.12 from 4/7)	$0.40
4K	-	$0.35 ($0.30 from 4/7)	$0.60

Veo 3.1 Lite is available now through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, with more video news for developers coming soon. Full details are in the developer documentation.

Google's announcement comes right after OpenAI revealed it's shutting down Sora. That leaves Google facing serious video generation competition primarily from China, especially Alibaba's Seedance 2.0, which delivers higher quality but comes with copyright concerns.

Comment Source: Google

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 31, 2026

Short News

AI infrastructure company Nebius Group is building a 310-megawatt data center in Lappeenranta, Finland, close to the Russian border. The project is valued at over $10 billion and would become one of the largest AI data centers in Europe. Finnish developer Polarnode is already constructing the facility, with a phased launch planned starting in 2027.

Nebius recently signed contracts totaling more than $40 billion with Microsoft and Meta. The new data center will train AI models and run AI applications but isn't tied to a single customer. Nebius picked Finland for its low energy prices, renewable power, and cool climate, all of which help cut cooling costs. The facility would be the company's largest site outside the US and is expected to cover roughly 10 percent of Nebius' total planned capacity, according to CEO Arkady Volozh.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 31, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI launches a Codex plugin that runs inside Anthropic's Claude Code

Matthias Bastian

Mar 30, 2026

AI in practice

Insiders liken AI to "the Ozempic of the music industry" as hitmakers reportedly hide their generator use

The use of AI generators in professional music production is growing fast, but the industry would rather not talk about it. Top producers and songwriters are quietly embracing the technology behind the scenes, and while established creatives are finding new opportunities, an entire class of working musicians fears for its livelihood, according to extensive research by Rolling Stone.

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Matthias Bastian

Mar 30, 2026

Short News

Microsoft is making "Copilot Cowork" more widely available and launching a new AI research agent. The previously announced feature builds on Claude Cowork and lets the system handle multi-step tasks using tools, accessing and outputting files. It also includes calendar planning and daily briefings. The feature is available as part of the Frontier program.

Microsoft's "Researcher" tool now has a "Critique" function where one AI model writes a draft and a second one reviews it. It pulls from both Anthropic and OpenAI models. Microsoft says the new agent hits best-in-class deep research performance and outperforms Perplexity with Claude Opus 4.6 by 7 points. Microsoft's benchmark doesn't include a comparison with OpenAI's new GPT-5-based Deep Research, though.

There's also a new "Model Council" feature where users can compare answers from different AI models side by side to see where they agree or differ. All of these updates ship as part of Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Comment Source: Microsoft Tech Blog | Copilot Cowork

Matthias Bastian

Mar 30, 2026

Short News

OpenAI's Sora app saw rapidly declining usage while costing the company around one million dollars a day, according to the Wall Street Journal. After a hyped launch, the app grew to about one million users, but that number quickly dropped to around 500,000 and never recovered.

On top of the shrinking user base, OpenAI ran into copyright issues and growing internal concerns that the cheap, low-quality engagement videos people were generating could damage the OpenAI brand. Sora proved more liability than asset. Development costs piled up too. According to the report, OpenAI canceled training runs for new video models entirely.

The real nail in Sora's coffin was increasing competitive pressure from Anthropic. OpenAI chose to redirect its limited compute toward coding, enterprise, and agent-based AI products, areas with greater long-term business value. Sora fell victim to a strategic pivot: away from complex video generation, toward the most economically promising parts of the business. The Sora team will now focus on world models for robotics. The Sora app shuts down in April, with the API following in September.

Comment Source: Wall Street Journal

Matthias Bastian

Mar 30, 2026

Short News

Mistral AI has taken out a loan of 830 million dollars. The money will fund the operation of a new data center near Paris in Bruyeres-le-Chatel. The deal lets Mistral avoid giving up any company shares, but it also saddles the startup with significant debt, a risk for both the company and the banks backing the loan, especially given that Mistral is unlikely to be profitable anytime soon.

The new facility will be equipped with 13,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 GPUs and deliver 44 megawatts of output capacity. A consortium of global banks is backing the loan, including Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole CIB, HSBC, La Banque Postale, MUFG, and Natixis.

By the end of 2027, the French AI company plans to provide 200 megawatts of computing capacity across Europe to meet demand from governments and businesses looking to build their own AI systems. Mistral is the only European frontier AI startup positioned to benefit from growing concerns across the continent about technological dependence on the US.

Comment Source: Mistral AI

Matthias Bastian

Mar 29, 2026

Update

AI in practice

OpenAI's Sam Altman and Science VP Kevin Weil hype AI-assisted dog cancer story ignoring there's no proof the vaccine worked

An Australian AI consultant used ChatGPT, AlphaFold, and Grok to find a possible treatment for his dog Rosie’s incurable cancer. The story went viral after high-profile AI executives like OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Deepmind’s Demis Hassabis shared it as proof of what AI can already do. But there’s no evidence the AI-designed vaccine actually worked.

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