Meta cut 8,000 jobs to fund its AI buildout.
April 26, 2026
Meta told staff this week it’s cutting 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, in what Bloomberg called a “push for efficiency” and CNN called an AI-driven reorg. The cuts hit hardest inside Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI division Zuckerberg spun up last year to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.
Here’s what happened: The cuts help fund Meta’s $72B AI capex commitment for 2026, up from $47B in 2025.
This is the first “AI layoff wave at an AI-leading company” moment of the year, and it arrives right as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicts white-collar cuts across the economy.
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AI can cost more than human workers now; IT budgets are getting blown out as some companies increasingly spend more on AI than on employees’ salaries.
April 26, 2026
Why it matters: Maybe human labor will be more cost-efficient after all.
What they’re saying: “For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro,vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios.
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We need a better deal from Project Jupiter
April 24, 2026
…the county negotiated and altered the agreements in secret, making changes and adding pages that weren’t there on the day [Doña Ana County Board of ] commissioners voted. When the dust settled 11 weeks later, 359 pages had grown, behind closed doors, to 1,583.… nothing in the agreements appears to prohibit Project Jupiter from purchasing additional water from a sod farm whose wells are considered non-potable. As the developers of the gigantic campus of data centers that will power artificial intelligence assistants have confirmed, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. They’ll use that water beyond construction in the operation of their power plants.
This matters. Potable and non-potable water may rise to the surface through different wells, but they come from the same, finite supply. And our arid region is in crisis.
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Using AI to Help America “Buy Right” in Health Care
April 24, 2026
When I arrived in Washington in the summer of 1979, the hottest policy issue was the soaring cost of hospital care and the Carter administration’s drive to contain it. Back then, national health expenditures equaled 8.4 percent of GDP. Today, they approach 18 percent and keep climbing…. Artificial intelligence offers a path to make “buy right” more than a slogan. Properly used, AI can turn quality reporting from bureaucracy into real‑time accountability.
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Sam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human. And he has a way to prove it.
April 24, 2026
The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.
If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life.
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Meta Now Lets You Check In on Your Teens’ Conversations With Its AI Chatbot. The rollout comes six months after Meta first announced the feature.
April 23, 2026
Meta is officially rolling out new parental controls that make it easier to keep tabs on the conversations teens are having with the company’s AI. Meta revealed the news in a blog post on Thursday… According to Meta, parents using the “supervision” feature on Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram now have an “Insights” tab as part of supervision. If you select this tab, you’ll see all the topics your teen or teens have been chatting with their AI bots about over the past seven days.
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OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 sets up agentic superapp
April 24, 2026
On Thursday, the ChatGPT app maker took the wraps off its latest flagship model, GPT-5.5, just seven weeks after launching GPT-5.4. The OpenAI team said the model itself and the company’s agentic coding tool Codex were used to build GPT-5.5. This process of the models helping to build themselves is called recursive self-improvement (RSI) and it has long been anticipated as a moment when AI would take a dramatic leap forward.
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The Pope moves to police AI
April 24, 2026
The Vatican is racing to build digital defenses for the artificial intelligence era — and quietly positioning itself as a global referee of what’s real…. Church leaders are increasingly warning about a “crisis of truth” driven by AI-generated content, something the late Pope Francis addressed before his passing…. In February, Leo XIV told priests not to use AI to write homilies or to seek “likes” on social media platforms like TikTok, per the National Catholic Reporter.
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Anthropic probes Mythos breach
April 23, 2026
Anthropic is investigating a possible breach of Mythos, a new AI model designed to detect software vulnerabilities that the company released to a small group of major enterprises earlier this month as part of Project Glasswing. The breach reportedly occurred in a third-party vendor environment…. This incident exposes a growing paradox in AI security: models built to find vulnerabilities can become vulnerabilities themselves.
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“Colossus Failure”: Elon Musk’s Data Centers Face Lawsuit for Polluting Black Neighborhoods in Memphis
April 22, 2026
As tech companies scramble to build massive new data centers to power artificial intelligence, marginalized communities are bearing the brunt of the environmental harms. In Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk’s xAI operates over two dozen methane gas-burning turbines without legal permits to power its data centers, Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, polluting the nation’s largest majority-Black city with toxic emissions. The NAACP is suing xAI for violating the Clean Air Act.
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Yelp now does AI bookings
April 22, 2026
Yelp is giving its AI Assistant chatbot a major upgrade, positioning it at “the center of the app experience” with the ability to answer questions, make recommendations, and handle bookings in a single conversation. The chatbot, which debuted in 2024 as a tool for hiring service professionals, will now span every category on Yelp through a new dedicated “Assistant” tab.
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AI Data Center Resistance: Maine Passes Nation’s First Statewide Moratorium — Will Gov. Mills Sign It? (Carolyn‘s note: Gov. Mills just vetoed it.)
April 22, 2026
Communities across the United States are pushing back against resource-draining data centers being built to fuel artificial intelligence and crypto ventures. In Maine, state legislators recently passed a first-in-the-country statewide moratorium on large data centers. “Maine residents are concerned about the impacts of data centers on both their electric rates and other utility rates, as well as on our wonderful environment,” says Democratic state Representative Melanie Sachs, who sponsored the bill designed to give legislators time to develop regulations around new data center construction.
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Florida’s attorney general announces criminal investigation into OpenAI.
April 21, 2026
James Uthmeier said OpenAI’s ChatGPT offered detailed advice to the suspect in the 2025 FSU mass shooting, including what type of gun to use. Florida’s attorney general said his office was issuing subpoenas to OpenAI on Tuesday morning, seeking information about how their leading AI company approaches user threats of harm to themselves and to others.
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How to Purge Palantir. And how I got permanently banned from X
April 21, 2026
On April 18, government surveillance giant Palantir Technologies published a fascist manifesto on X. In response, I pointed out the screed’s flagrant fascism. Among other things, it called for Silicon Valley elites to become a militant arm of the state and suggested imposing a system of compulsory military service.Two days later, on April 20, I received notice that my X account has been permanently suspended…today’s episode of the Nerd Reich podcast focuses on Purge Palantir, a campaign to raise awareness of the need to get Palantir out of our government and our lives.
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