tech

6/17/25

Amazon CEO: AI will cut Amazon’s workforce

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says that AI will reduce the company’s workforce over the next few years. Currently, Amazon has 1.56 million employees, but that might soon trend downward.

In a message to employees today, Jassy wrote:

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Some thoughts on Generative AI

In a message to employees today, Jassy wrote:

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

More Tech

Congress Considers Bill To Force Sale Of TikTok

By some measures, TikTok has grown bigger than Facebook or Instagram in the US

Oracle’s potential TikTok takeover is a big deal to US competitors like Meta and Snap.

tech

19h

Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, CoreWeave pledge $42 billion investment in UK AI projects during Trump’s visit

Nvidia, Microsoft, and CoreWeave announced pledges to invest tens of billions to build out the UK’s AI infrastructure.

Coinciding with President Trump’s visit to the UK, the companies announced new data centers, hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and support for the UK’s sovereign AI programs.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are joining Trump for the visit.

Nvidia, CoreWeave, and UK AI infrastructure startup Nscale announced plans to roll out 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in UK data centers, including OpenAI’s “Stargate UK” data center project.

Part of the UK’s sovereign AI initiatives include the development of the country’s own “UK-LLM” and “Isambard-AI,” the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which uses Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.

Trump Lands in UK With Flurry of Pledges From Microsoft, Open AI

Trump Lands in UK With Flurry of Pledges From Microsoft, Open AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are joining Trump for the visit.

Nvidia, CoreWeave, and UK AI infrastructure startup Nscale announced plans to roll out 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in UK data centers, including OpenAI’s “Stargate UK” data center project.

Part of the UK’s sovereign AI initiatives include the development of the country’s own “UK-LLM” and “Isambard-AI,” the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which uses Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.

tech

19h

Amazon launches AI chatbot to help create and distribute ads and ad agency investors don’t care

Amazon has launched a “creative partner” AI chatbot to help small businesses create ads and distribute them. The tool, currently in beta, helps users create the ads themselves, including video, with text prompts and then can place them across Amazon’s ad inventory, including outside websites and platforms Amazon has deals with, including Netflix.

Typically an announcement like this one pummels big advertising firms, whose livelihoods may or may not be threatened by the tech, but today Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP aren’t sinking on the news.

But perhaps the continuous stream of AI ad tool announcements from tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta is already baked into ad agencies’ stock prices. The ad agencies listed above are all down for the year.

Or perhaps these tools really are only for small businesses that can’t afford to work with big ad agencies.

“We’re not talking about professional marketers. These are customers that really need our help growing their business,” Jay Richman, Amazon’s vice president of product and technology, told The Wall Street Journal. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company expects to fully automate ad creation next year, said something similar on the company’s latest earnings call.

Amazon Aims to Grow Ad Sales Further by Automating Creation

Amazon Aims to Grow Ad Sales Further by Automating Creation

Typically an announcement like this one pummels big advertising firms, whose livelihoods may or may not be threatened by the tech, but today Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP aren’t sinking on the news.

But perhaps the continuous stream of AI ad tool announcements from tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta is already baked into ad agencies’ stock prices. The ad agencies listed above are all down for the year.

Or perhaps these tools really are only for small businesses that can’t afford to work with big ad agencies.

“We’re not talking about professional marketers. These are customers that really need our help growing their business,” Jay Richman, Amazon’s vice president of product and technology, told The Wall Street Journal. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company expects to fully automate ad creation next year, said something similar on the company’s latest earnings call.

tech

21h

Report: Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for surveillance irks White House

The Trump administration’s warm embrace of AI companies has led to many federal agencies using chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for many different applications.

Like its competitors, Anthropic is offering the government version of its chatbot — Claude for Government — for $1 per year to any agency that requests it, through the General Services Administration.

Semafor reports that contractors working for federal law enforcement agencies have encountered an obstacle: Anthropic’s policies don’t permit law enforcement to use Claude for surveillance applications. According to the report, Anthropic’s refusal to carve out an exception for federal law enforcement applications has “deepened hostility to the company” in the White House.

Under a section in Anthropic’s policy titled, “Do Not Use for Criminal Justice, Censorship, Surveillance, or Prohibited Law Enforcement Purposes,” the company explicitly prohibits the use of its products to “target or track a person’s physical location, emotional state, or communication without their consent, including using our products for facial recognition, battlefield management applications or predictive policing.”

Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use

Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use

Semafor reports that contractors working for federal law enforcement agencies have encountered an obstacle: Anthropic’s policies don’t permit law enforcement to use Claude for surveillance applications. According to the report, Anthropic’s refusal to carve out an exception for federal law enforcement applications has “deepened hostility to the company” in the White House.

Under a section in Anthropic’s policy titled, “Do Not Use for Criminal Justice, Censorship, Surveillance, or Prohibited Law Enforcement Purposes,” the company explicitly prohibits the use of its products to “target or track a person’s physical location, emotional state, or communication without their consent, including using our products for facial recognition, battlefield management applications or predictive policing.”

Lyft jumps as it gets partnership with Google’s Waymo for Nashville expansion

Waymo is currently in five cities, and intends to operate soon in six more.

A Waymo car.

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