Also: analyst asymmetry, AI layoff scapegoats, and LinkedIn translation services
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- Tech industry lays off nearly 80,000 employees in the first quarter of 2026 - almost 50% of affected positions cut due to AI - “I don’t know if they are directly related to actual productivity gains,” Cognizant Chief AI Officer Babak Hodjat told Nikkei in reference to the job cuts. “Sometimes, you know, AI becomes the scapegoat from a financial perspective, like when a company hired too many, or they want to resize, and it gets blamed on AI.” Despite that, he said that AI-driven layoffs could still happen, but that it would take another six months to a year “before companies start seeing real productivity gains from AI.”
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Wastebook
- “[I]f Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow.” Ben Thompson.
- Much more than “hallucinating,” in my recent experience the problem with agentic AI is that it forgets things and doesn’t realize it. You’ll be going along weeks later assuming it knows how you like to work, and it does not. A memory system is vital.
- “[O]nyx is the ‘gravitas’ voice but it comes off more like a man reading his own obituary.” Claude on one AI voice.
- “Every year, emergency rooms in the Netherlands treat at least 38 children after they swallow a battery” Here
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