Artificial Intelligence

Mar 14, 2026

AI could trigger massive layoffs at Meta, but not how you'd expect. The company's main goal is offsetting soaring AI infrastructure costs, Reuters reports, while also "preparing" for efficiency gains from AI-assisted work. Managers are reportedly planning to cut up to 20 percent of the workforce, roughly 16,000 of nearly 79,000 employees. No date or final number is set. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the report as "speculative reporting about theoretical approaches."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting big on generative AI: $600 billion for AI technology, infrastructure, and workforce expansion through 2028, aggressive poaching of AI researchers, and acquisitions like Chinese startup Manus. In January, he said projects that once required large teams can now be handled by individuals.

Amazon and Block have made similar cuts recently, reportedly tied to AI. Amazon is already tightening guardrails on AI-generated code after too many errors slipped through, and while Block's mass layoffs may be partly AI-related, they're almost certainly not driven by AI alone.

Comment Source: Reuters

Jonathan Kemper

Mar 14, 2026

AI in practice

New Top 100 AI list shows a maturing market where ChatGPT leads but users are shopping around

Hand reaches for floating binary AI brain above field of flowers against cloudy sky.

Matthias Bastian

Mar 14, 2026

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Another neo-lab enters the scene, this time from Anthropic's ranks: Mirendil wants to use AI to advance research in fields like biology and materials science. Founders Behnam Neyshabur (CEO) and Harsh Mehta (CTO) left Anthropic in December and are currently negotiating a $175 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation, according to The Information. Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins are reportedly co-leading the round, though terms haven't been finalized yet.

Neyshabur led a scientific AI reasoning team at Anthropic and previously spent more than five years at Google DeepMind. Mehta served as a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic. The founding team also includes Shayan Salehian (previously at xAI) and Tara Rezaei (previously an intern at OpenAI).

Mirendil joins a growing wave of so-called neo-labs: specialized AI startups founded by researchers who left major AI companies. These startups zero in on specific areas like office productivity or try to find fundamentally new AI development approaches that address the weaknesses of current systems, for example through continuous learning.

Comment Source: The Information

Matthias Bastian

Mar 13, 2026

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Anthropic is making Claude's extra-large context window a lot cheaper. The Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models now offer a context window of one million tokens at the standard price. Until now, Anthropic charged a surcharge of up to 100 percent for requests exceeding 200,000 tokens. The context window determines how much text an AI model can process in a single request.

Opus 4.6 still costs $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output), and Sonnet 4.6 runs $3/$15. But whether a prompt contains 9,000 or 900,000 tokens no longer matters for pricing. On top of that, the media limit jumps from 100 to 600 images or PDF pages per request. The new pricing applies to Claude Code (Max, Team, and Enterprise) and is available through Amazon Bedrock (except for the media limit), Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.

The GraphWalks BFS benchmark measures how well AI models handle logical reasoning across large amounts of text. Opus 4.6 reportedly shows almost no drop in performance even at full context length. | Image: Anthropic

According to Anthropic, both models achieve the highest accuracy among comparable models at full context length in benchmark tests. That said, the broader problem of declining precision as context windows fill up is still far from solved.

Comment Source: Anthropic

Matthias Bastian

Mar 13, 2026

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Elon Musk's AI company xAI is going through a major shake-up. Musk acknowledged on X that the company "was not built right first time around" and is now being rebuilt from the ground up. Six of the twelve co-founders have left xAI since January, most recently Guodong Zhang and Zihang Dai. Only Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen have stayed on alongside Musk.

At a recent conference, Musk admitted that Grok is falling behind competitors like Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI when it comes to coding - but said the company aims to close the gap by mid-2026. To get there, xAI has hired two senior executives from the AI coding startup Cursor: Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, both reporting directly to Musk. According to the Financial Times, Musk has also brought in "problem solvers" from SpaceX and Tesla to help restructure xAI.

Comment Source: The Information | Financial Times | Musk via X

Matthias Bastian

Mar 13, 2026

AI in practice

Google explains the differences between its three Nano Banana image generation models

A new guide from Google breaks down the three Nano Banana image models and when to use each one. The cheaper Nano Banana 2 reportedly delivers 95 percent of Pro’s capabilities and can search the web for reference images on its own before generating output.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 13, 2026

AI in practice

AI chips are pushing everything else off TSMC's most advanced production lines

By 2027, 86 percent of TSMC’s N3 capacity could go to AI accelerators, according to SemiAnalysis. Smartphones are becoming a buffer for overflow demand.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 13, 2026

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Ukraine opens its battlefield data to allies to train AI models for autonomous drones.

"Today, Ukraine has a unique array of battlefield data that is unmatched anywhere else in the world," Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on Telegram. "This includes millions of annotated images collected during tens of thousands of combat flights."

Fedorov had first announced the plan in January, shortly after taking office. Now, he says a platform has been created that provides allies and companies with constantly updating datasets and large quantities of photos and video footage. The goal is to accelerate the development of AI models that can guide drones to their targets without a pilot or quickly analyze vast pools of data.

Ukraine wants to increase the role played by autonomous systems in the war. Top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said the war had "entered a new phase" with platoons of drone interceptors are now being created inside the Ukrainian armed forces.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 13, 2026

AI and society

Bytedance secures access to Nvidia Blackwell cluster in Malaysia, circumventing US export ban on China

Jonathan Kemper

Mar 13, 2026

Short News

Perplexity AI's "Personal Computer" is an AI assistant that works around the clock - handling emails, presentations, and app control. It runs on a dedicated Mac Mini connected to the user's local apps and Perplexity's servers, controllable from any device. CEO Aravind Srinivas called it a "digital proxy" that never sleeps on X. The service builds on Perplexity Computer, which launched in February and bundles multiple AI models.

Security features include a kill switch and an activity log. Access requires the Max subscription at 200 dollars per month, with only a waiting list available for now. Perplexity is also launching an enterprise version that connects to over 400 tools like Salesforce and Snowflake - the company claims it completed 3.25 years' worth of work internally in four weeks. The concept draws comparisons to the controversial OpenClaw, whose developer now works at OpenAI. Agent-based AI systems dominate the current landscape but face sharp criticism around resource demands and security vulnerabilities.

Comment Source: Perplexity