News category
12 briefs in this category, newest first.
China's president opened WAIC 2026 on July 17 for the first time in the conference's history, one day after 29 countries signed the WAICO founding charter and Huawei formally unveiled the Atlas 950 SuperPoD at 8 FP8 ExaFLOPS.
Johannes Heidecke is leaving OpenAI after two years as head of safety systems following a reorganization that embeds safety under research leadership for the second time in under two years.
Microsoft confirmed roughly 9,000 layoffs on July 1, 2026, the second day of its new fiscal year, affecting sales, consulting, and Xbox gaming roles. The cuts represent less than 4% of its global workforce and are tied explicitly to cost control as AI infrastructure spending crossed $100 billion in FY2026.
From Noam Shazeer in February to Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel on June 24, six senior Google DeepMind researchers departed for rival AI labs as Alphabet absorbed its steepest market-cap loss in over a year.
OpenAI appointed Prabhjeet Singh, who led Uber India and South Asia for six years, as its first managing director for India. Singh joins in September and reports to Asia Pacific MD Kiran Mani.
Paul Meade, Apple's vice president of hardware engineering for Vision Pro and its unreleased smart-glasses line, is joining OpenAI's hardware unit alongside Jony Ive, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey.
Senior DeepMind research engineer Arthur Conmy announced June 25 he is joining Anthropic for train-time alignment work, the third prominent Google AI researcher to leave for a competitor in a single week.
John Jumper, who co-led AlphaFold 2 and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced on June 20 that he is joining Anthropic. The move follows Noam Shazeer's departure to OpenAI by one day, and strips Google of two of its most decorated AI scientists in under 48 hours.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth called the company's AI reorganization atrocious in an internal memo, as roughly 6,500 engineers involuntarily transferred into the Applied AI unit describe the assignment as soul-crushing data labeling work.
Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the 2017 Transformer paper and former Gemini co-lead at Google, announced on June 18 that he is joining OpenAI to head architecture research.
Andrew Bosworth admitted in a leaked memo that Meta did an atrocious job rolling out its Applied AI division and pledged caps on manager span of control, clearer career paths, and the return of office perks to stem morale losses.
A Wired investigation published June 12 found that Meta employees assigned to its three-month-old Applied AI group describe the work as soul-crushing and 'literally the gulag,' with some saying they were given no real choice but to join.
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