Meta will begin cutting 8,000 jobs on 20 May while reporting record quarterly revenue of $56.31 billion, as the company raises AI infrastructure spending to as much as $145 billion in 2026. Employee morale has cratered, with internal protests over surveillance software, declining compensation, and the expectation of further layoffs through the autumn.
TL;DR
Meta will begin cutting approximately 8,000 jobs on 20 May, the largest single round of layoffs the company has undertaken since its 2023 restructuring, in a move that lays bare the scale of Mark Zuckerberg’s bet that artificial intelligence infrastructure is worth more than the people it replaces. The company is also cancelling 6,000 open requisitions, bringing the effective headcount reduction to 14,000 positions.
The cuts arrive not during a downturn but during a period of record financial performance. Meta reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $56.31 billion and net income of $26.8 billion. Full-year 2025 revenue was $201 billion, up 22 per cent year over year, with free cash flow of $43.6 billion. The company is not shrinking because it is struggling. It is shrinking because it has decided that the return on AI infrastructure exceeds the return on human labour, and it is converting one into the other on a scale that no technology company has attempted before.
Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from $72.2 billion in 2025 and $39.2 billion in 2024. Nearly all of the increase is directed at data centres, Nvidia GPUs, custom silicon, and infrastructure to support the company’s Llama model ecosystem and recommendation systems. In the first quarter alone, Meta added $107 billion in new contractual commitments for cloud and infrastructure deals, and it has committed $27 billion to a joint venture with Nebius for a gigawatt-scale AI data centre campus in Louisiana.
Bank of America has estimated that the layoffs could generate $7 billion to $8 billion in annualised savings, a fraction of the capital expenditure plan but a meaningful contribution to the operating margin that CFO Susan Li has pledged to protect. Li told investors during the Q1 earnings call that the company believed a leaner operating model would allow it to move more quickly while helping to offset its infrastructure investments. She also acknowledged that executives “don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” a remarkable admission from a CFO whose company is simultaneously reporting record profits.
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The arithmetic is blunt: Meta is spending more on AI infrastructure in a single year than the combined annual revenue of most Fortune 500 companies, and it is funding part of that spending by eliminating the jobs of people who helped build the business that generates the revenue in the first place.
The financial case for the restructuring is coherent. The human experience of it is considerably less so. Meta’s record quarterly results were reported three weeks before the layoff notifications are scheduled to go out, a sequence that has produced what employees and industry observers have described as a particularly corrosive form of corporate dissonance.
Zuckerberg held a company-wide town hall on 30 April to address the cuts directly. He was explicit about one thing: AI tools were not driving the job losses. “Getting everyone internally to use AI tools and getting to do the work more efficiently is not the thing that’s driving layoffs,” he said. He did not, however, identify what was driving them, and the silence has fuelled anxiety across the company.
Meanwhile, Meta has been cutting compensation for the broader workforce while dramatically increasing it for AI researchers. Median total compensation at Meta fell from $417,400 in 2024 to $388,200 in 2025. The stock portion of annual raises was cut by 5 per cent in February 2026, on top of a 10 per cent reduction the previous year. At the same time, Zuckerberg has been personally recruiting AI researchers with compensation packages reportedly reaching $100 million to staff Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division he launched last year under former Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wang.
The gap between those two realities, shrinking pay for most employees and nine-figure packages for a select few, has produced what multiple reports describe as an atmosphere of resignation. Employees have built at least three countdown websites tracking the days until 20 May, one of which carries the header “Big Beautiful Layoff.” Data from Blind, an anonymous professional network that requires work email verification, shows Meta’s overall employee rating has declined 25 per cent from its peak in the second quarter of 2024, with a 39 per cent drop in its culture rating. In every category other than compensation, Meta now underperforms Amazon, Google, and Netflix.
Compounding the mood is a programme called the Model Capability Initiative, which Meta deployed on US employees’ work laptops in April. The software captures mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots across a designated set of work applications. Meta has said the data is used to teach AI agents how humans navigate software, not as a general surveillance tool. Employees at several US offices have responded with visible protest, distributing flyers that described the programme as an “Employee Data Extraction Factory” and citing the National Labour Relations Act. Workers have characterised the tool as “dystopian” and created an online petition urging Zuckerberg to shut it down, with some reporting that their work computers have slowed noticeably since the programme was installed.
The objection is not merely about privacy. It is about the implication: Meta is asking its remaining employees to generate the training data that will teach AI systems to replicate the computer-use patterns of the very roles being eliminated. The programme may well be a legitimate research initiative, but its timing, weeks before mass layoffs, has made it impossible for employees to read it as anything other than a preview of their own obsolescence.
Including the May round, Zuckerberg has now overseen the elimination of roughly 33,000 positions since 2022. The 2022 cuts corrected pandemic-era over-hiring. The 2023 round was framed as a “year of efficiency.” Early 2025 cuts were presented as performance management. The January and March 2026 reductions, which removed approximately 1,700 employees from Reality Labs, recruiting, and other divisions, were targeted. The May round is different: it is a company-wide structural reorganisation that touches every major business unit, with teams being reconstituted into AI-focused “pods” under Wang’s Superintelligence Labs division.
More layoffs are expected this year, including a potential round in August and another in the autumn, according to people with knowledge of the plans. Earlier reporting suggested the total reduction could eventually reach 20 per cent of the workforce.
Meta is not alone in converting payroll into AI capital expenditure. Microsoft announced its first-ever voluntary retirement programme the same week, offering buyouts to roughly 7 per cent of its US workforce. Oracle cut an estimated 30,000 employees in March. Amazon eliminated 16,000 corporate roles in the first quarter. Across the technology sector, almost 110,000 jobs have been lost at 137 companies so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, after roughly 125,000 cuts in all of 2025.
The theory behind Meta’s restructuring is that a smaller number of highly talented people working alongside powerful AI systems can accomplish what previously required entire departments. Zuckerberg has described the vision as developing AI-powered products that amount to a kind of “personal superintelligence” for billions of users. The Superintelligence Labs division, the AI-focused pods, and the massive infrastructure spending are all oriented toward that goal.
Whether the bet pays off depends on whether the AI systems that Meta is building at a cost of more than $100 billion a year can generate enough incremental revenue, through improved advertising targeting, content recommendations, and new AI-powered products, to justify both the infrastructure spending and the loss of institutional knowledge that comes with eliminating 10 per cent of the workforce in a single month.
The human cost of the technology industry’s AI pivot is not evenly distributed. The roles being eliminated at Meta are concentrated in recruiting, sales, middle management, and non-AI-adjacent product work, areas where the skills gap between what employees currently do and what the company now needs is too wide for incremental retraining to bridge. The roles the company is actively hiring for, at salaries between $62,000 for entry-level positions and $240,000 or more for senior AI research scientists, are almost entirely in machine learning, infrastructure engineering, computer vision, and natural language processing.
Zuckerberg has been through this before. The 2023 efficiency programme, which produced 21,000 job cuts across two waves, was followed by a period of exceptional financial performance that silenced critics and sent the stock to record highs. This time, the market has been less forgiving: Meta’s stock is down roughly 7 per cent year to date, underperforming every megacap peer except Microsoft. The broader pattern across Big Tech in 2026 suggests that investors are rewarding the same playbook at every company that adopts it: cut headcount, redirect the savings to AI infrastructure, and let the stock price validate the decision.
For the 8,000 people receiving notifications this week, the validation will be someone else’s. For Zuckerberg, the question is whether personal superintelligence, a product that does not yet exist, can justify a restructuring whose costs are immediate, measurable, and borne by people who did nothing wrong except work in roles that an algorithm has not yet learned to perform.
Uninstalling apps on macOS is usually very easy. You drag an app to the Trash, empty it, and move on. The annoying part is that many apps still leave residue behind, including support files, caches, preferences, containers, and logs. I have always found that frustrating, especially when old app data keeps sitting around long after the app itself is gone.
AppCleaner by FreeMacSoft has been the popular go-to option for this for years, and it still does the job well. But I recently came across a new open-source alternative called Uninstally by Codenta, which solves the same basic problem. It removes Mac apps along with the support files, caches, preferences, containers, logs, and other leftovers they usually leave behind.
Uninstally can be used directly from Finder. Once its Finder extension is enabled, you can right-click any .app bundle and choose “Uninstall with Uninstally.” The app then opens a confirmation window instead of making you start from a separate app browser.
The cleaner part is how it finds related files. Uninstally uses the app’s bundle identifier and helper namespaces to match leftover items across the Library hierarchy, rather than just looking for folders with the same name. Before anything is removed, it shows the app name, icon, reclaimable storage, item count, and lets you review or deselect matched files.
There is also a standalone app browser for a more deliberate cleanup. You can search installed apps, switch between grid and list views, and filter by largest apps, recently installed apps, never opened apps, broken installs, duplicated apps, and apps with leftovers.
Uninstally also includes a leftover scanner for apps you have already removed. Instead of digging through Library folders manually, you can scan for orphaned support files, caches, containers, preferences, logs, and old installers in one place.
It also supports Homebrew casks and formulae, shows dependency relationships, and can remove Homebrew leftovers through optional zap cleanup. User-domain files are moved to the Trash, while privileged items require an administrator prompt. You can download Uninstally from Codenta’s website or its GitHub repo.
Google is rolling out a feature that flags when an advertisement was made using AI. The label will indicate if an ad was created or edited with generative tools, TechCrunch reports.
The disclosure appears in the “My Ad Center” panel, reachable via the three-dot menu or info icon on ads. It covers ads across Google Search, YouTube, and Google Discover, and is available globally.
That panel already lets users block or report ads and learn why one was shown. Now it adds an option labelled “how this ad was made”, which surfaces any AI involvement.
The rationale is straightforward. AI makes it cheap to generate slick product imagery, which can mislead shoppers who assume they are looking at a real photograph rather than a synthetic one.
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Until now, Google only required AI disclosure on election ads. Extending it to commercial ads is a meaningful widening of the policy.
The reach of the feature depends heavily on how an ad was built. When advertisers use Google’s own generative AI ad tools, the disclosure is switched on automatically.
When an ad is made elsewhere, though, the advertiser must actively flag that AI was involved. Google says it will not run its own check to verify the claim, so the label rests on advertisers being honest.
That gap matters because the incentive to stay quiet is real. An advertiser hoping a synthetic scene passes for a genuine photo has little reason to volunteer otherwise, and Google is not looking over its shoulder.
The timing is not accidental. Google’s move front-runs tougher rules, as the EU AI Act’s transparency obligations for AI-generated content start to bite in August.
Industry is already resisting the mandatory version, with retailers lobbying to exempt AI-made ads from those EU rules. A voluntary, self-declared label is a far lighter touch than what Brussels has in mind, and part of a broader fight over the AI Act.
Google is not consistent across its own products either. On YouTube it will auto-label AI videos whether or not creators disclose them, a stricter stance than the advertiser honesty it relies on here.
The feature is still a step toward a market drowning in synthetic media, where even Google has branded some AI content spam. Giving users a place to ask how an ad was made is better than silence.
Whether it changes behaviour is another question, in an ecosystem where deceptive advertising is already a lucrative problem. A label only helps if the people with the most to hide choose to apply it.
For now, Google has built the disclosure and handed advertisers the switch. The honest ones will flip it, and the rest are exactly the reason such a label was needed.
Ireland, Spain, France and the Netherlands are the only member states yet to incorporate the NIS2 directive into national law.
Ireland is one of four countries being referred to the highest court in the European Union for failing to adopt cybersecurity directives into law. The European Commission’s move comes as Ireland commences its six-month rotational presidency heading the EU Council.
The Network and Information Security 2 (NIS2) Directive entered into force in January 2023 and sets high security standards across 18 critical sectors, including health, energy, transport and the public sector, mandating organisations to implement appropriate security measures and report any relevant incidents to the authorities.
However, directives must be incorporated into national legislation by EU member states before gaining effect. Member states had until October 2024 to carry out the transposition.
But by late November 2024, 23 member states, including Denmark, Germany, Finland and Sweden, were yet to transpose the directive, while by May 2025, 19 had still not done so.
In its referral yesterday (8 July), which also includes Spain, France and the Netherlands, the Commission requested the Court of Justice of the European Union to impose financial sanctions on infringing member states, consisting of lump sum and daily penalties until NIS2 is incorporated into national legislation.
The cybersecurity threat landscape is fast evolving, as newer technologies such as AI provide bad actors with advanced tools to commit phishing attacks, scams and infrastructure break-ins, while breaches go underreported in Ireland, according to a recent Compliance Institute report.
“While Ireland is not alone in having missed the deadline, this is not a great start for Ireland to our presidency of the Council of the European Union,” said Dentons partner David Kirton.
“The Government has listed competitiveness and security as two of its three key pillars for the presidency, so putting this legislation into effect would be a strong symbol of that commitment.”
The Government published a general scheme of the National Cyber Security Bill in August 2024, and a National Digital and AI Strategy this February, where it committed to “prioritising legislation to implement the EU NIS2 Directive”, but did not provide a timeline.
The bill remains in pre-legislative scrutiny and is only expected to go before the Oireachtas by September at the earliest.
Transposing the directive will not be straightforward, Kirton said, “as parts of the legislation are technical in nature and present a major change in empowering the National Cyber Security Centre to act in an enforcement role alongside other competent authorities”.
“The Government will need to prioritise the preparation of a bill, which has been promised by the Minister for Justice for later this year, which will no doubt provoke further debate as it proceeds through the legislative process before entering into force,” he added.
Earlier this year, the Commission proposed amendments to simplify NIS2 as part of its digital omnibus overhaul that aims to cut regulatory red tape and make business in the bloc easier.
Amendments to NIS2 aim to increase legal clarity by simplifying jurisdictional rules, streamlining the collection of data on ransomware attacks and facilitating the supervision of cross-border entities, the EU argued.
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We’ve seen a lot of “smart art frames” at CES over the years. Most of them feel like glorified digital photo frames in turtlenecks. However, there’s one that feels genuinely different: Fraimic, and I say that as someone deeply skeptical of this category.
The pitch appears quite compelling at first. Speak a prompt into the device, and its built-in mic sends the command to OpenAI’s GPT Image 2.0, which then generates full-color artwork that lands on a Spectra 6 E Ink display.
Normally, you’d take out your phone to do that with a regular digital photo frame, but with Fraimic, you just have to tap, speak, and watch something appear on your wall that looks more like paint on paper than pixels on a screen.
The device also features an accelerometer that determines whether it’s oriented in portrait or landscape.
Coming to the competition part, Aura Frames require a subscription and don’t let you swap out the surrounding frame. SwitchBot frames, on the other hand, do not support voice generation. Fraimic does both, while keeping your prompts and images private by default.
The company offers you 100 free AI generations per year and also provides access to thousands of public-domain works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A REST API even opens it up to smart home integration for developers.
Because $499 for the 13.3-inch and $1,499 for the 31.5-inch sounds a bit too steep. Aura’s comparable frame runs around the same for the smaller size, but it also offers buyers smaller options that cost even less. Switchbot sells a 31.5-inch variant that costs $200 less.
It’s worth noting that the 13.3-inch ships now, but the 31.5-inch shows a July 2026 shipping date on the official website. To make the brand’s case, it did grab a Red Dot Award: Product Design 2026. But for a first-gen device from a Chicago startup, it appears to be asking a lot of your wallet.
To me, Fraimic appears to be sitting in an awkward but interesting spot. It’s too expensive to be an impulse buy, too genuinely capable to dismiss. Anyway, we’ll reserve our final verdict for later, when we actually get our hands on it.
SOFTWARE
Linux distro accuses former contributor of deleting years of work and pushing a package that could have broken installs
OpenMandriva has accused a former contributor of using his trusted admin access to trash repositories and push a package that could have broken desktop installations after a community dispute spilled over into the project’s infrastructure.
The Linux distribution disclosed the incident in a forum post this week, describing what it called an attempted act of “distribution sabotage” allegedly involving Davide Beatrici, a developer known for his work on the Mumble instant messaging app.
According to OpenMandriva, Beatrici joined the project some time ago and later offered to migrate its repository infrastructure from GitHub to his privately operated OneDev instance, mirroring several dozen repositories in the process.
While some maintainers were uneasy about concentrating so much of the project’s infrastructure in one person’s hands, the proposal went ahead because, as the project put it, “he was such a well-known figure that we didn’t expect anything bad.”
OpenMandriva says trouble started after two other contributors joined alongside Beatrici. One allegedly engaged in repeated abusive behavior toward users and project members, much of it in private messages. The project says several contributors left before the maintainers finally stepped in, kicking the individual out of the OpenMandriva-Cooker Matrix chat. He wasn’t banned from the project, but OpenMandriva says the decision “triggered a cascade of events.”
Beatrici and another contributor then resigned. When OpenMandriva later decided there was little point continuing to mirror repositories to Beatrici’s private infrastructure, it says it began severing those connections.
According to the project, that didn’t go down well. “This infuriated Davide so much that, abusing of the administrative privileges he still had, he sabotaged the distribution today in the early morning hours,” the statement says.
OpenMandriva alleges Beatrici deleted parts of its GitHub repositories containing years of development work. It also says he “decided to publish an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages, which could have damaged the systems of people using gnome or cosmic.”
The Cooker repository is OpenMandriva’s rolling development branch, not a stable release, so the damage appears to have been confined to bleeding-edge users rather than to everyone running the distro. Even so, having one disgruntled admin yank years of work and potentially break package updates isn’t the sort of resilience test most projects volunteer for.
The project says it is restoring the deleted repositories and repairing the affected packages. It also says it carried out “a full system audit” and found that “aside from the removed packages, we found no other violations.”
OpenMandriva adds that it considered legal action, saying the alleged sabotage “constituted a criminal offense,” but ultimately decided against it.
According to tech publication The Lunduke Journal, Beatrici said that “this was by no means a sabotage. The objective was not to harm the distribution I cared for.” He reportedly admitted deleting Cosmic and Gnome repositories and said he did this because someone was “messing with my work.”
The Register has contacted OpenMandriva to ask whether any stable releases were affected, how many repositories were deleted or modified, and what changes the project plans to make to administrative access. We also reached out to Beatrici but have not heard back.
Every project needs contributors, but they don’t all need the kind of access that can turn a disagreement into a recovery exercise. ®
A camera roughly the size of a small car has begun the most ambitious astronomical survey ever attempted from Earth.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched atop Cerro Pachón in northern Chile, officially started its Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
Every 40 seconds throughout the night, the 6,600-pound instrument captures a new image using its 3200-megapixel sensor, the largest digital camera ever built.
Over the coming decade, the camera will return to each patch of sky roughly 800 times, building a living record of celestial change.
Željko Ivezić, head of LSST, said the launch followed extensive system optimization and a careful review of technical readiness across multiple performance measures.
“Important factors that played a role in this decision included image quality, effective survey speed, system uptime and reliability, and calibration accuracy,” Ivezić said.
The $800 million observatory is jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made…This moment reflects decades of vision, innovation and the power of federal investment,” said Brian Stone of the US National Science Foundation
Each night, the camera collects approximately 10 TB of data while generating as many as seven million alerts flagging changes across the sky.
During early optimization surveys lasting roughly six weeks, Rubin already discovered more than 11,000 previously unseen asteroids, including 33 near-Earth objects.
Scientists intend to use the completed dataset to build a new inventory of the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy.
The survey will also help researchers examine dark matter by studying the distorted light of distant background galaxies.
Bob Blum, director of the Rubin Observatory at NSF NOIRLab, said the project follows more than two decades of sustained engineering and scientific effort.
“Rubin Observatory is for everyone; the LSST will change how we do astronomy and astrophysics,” Blum said.
Phil Marshall, deputy director of Rubin Operations for SLAC, noted that millions of alerts generated in recent months already demonstrate the system functioning as a genuine discovery machine.
Once complete, the final dataset will contain billions of astronomical objects and trillions of individual measurements, according to the observatory.
This data will be released regularly, marking the first time such a comprehensive astronomical archive becomes publicly accessible to researchers and the public alike.
“Rubin is bringing the universe to life, illuminating a treasure trove of discoveries: pulsating stars, supernova explosions, the fossil record of galaxies, clues to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter, and entirely new phenomena never seen before,” the observatory team said.
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The US Federal Reserve has announced the industry leaders who will head up its various task forces guiding monetary policies. The country’s central bank has made some baffling appointments to its productivity and jobs team, which will “Assess the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”
One of the advisors will be new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. After moving to gaming from Microsoft’s Core AI group, in the first few months of her tenure, she’s overseen yet another price hike for the gaming hardware and most recently announced to the company that it would be cutting 3,200 jobs across its studios. Microsoft has been gutting its staff across many divisions for awhile, so this isn’t a new policy she’s personally brought in. But the timing here could not be worse, especially as so much of the game industry is struggling to keep people employed and to figure out a responsible way to use AI.
Joining her in this strange advisory trio are Marc Andreessen, who doesn’t have the best track record on talking intelligently about AI, and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford University economics professor who is currently on leave to work at the Anthropic Institute. Jones aside, it’s not necessarily the most reassuring group when it comes to being critical of artificial intelligence and the job market.
Bezos is reportedly set to invest $2bn into the company himself.
Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly nearing closing a $10bn funding round that would value the space company at around $130bn. This would be the first time Blue Origin is opening itself up to outside investors since being found in 2000.
Bezos is set to invest $2bn into the company himself, while Coatue Management – which has close ties to Bezos Expeditions – is committing $4bn, reports suggest.
The remaining $4bn has seen significant demand, sources told news publications, mirroring recent investor appetite around major tech IPO listings.
“We finally have enough visibility into our future and our financial success,” Bezos told CNBC in May. “It’s a good time actually to start thinking about the future and bring on some other outside investors.”
The reported funding into Blue Origin comes weeks after its biggest rival, SpaceX, raised a record-breaking $85.7bn in its IPO listing (including the underwriters’ option).
The Elon Musk-owned company has filed for a satellite constellation of up to 1m with major plans for orbital AI data centres. The company currently has more than 10,000 active satellites in orbit.
Earlier this year Blue Origin launched ‘TeraWave’, a new communication network with a planned constellation of nearly 5,500 satellites. The constellation is set to be deployed from Q4 2027, the company said in January. Blue Origin claims that TeraWave will deliver connection speeds of up to 6Tbps anywhere on Earth.
Plans, however, suffered a setback this May after one of Blue Origins’ New Glenn rockets exploded on the launchpad during a hot-fire test. The US Federal Aviation Administration ordered the company to investigate a previous malfunction during a failed launch test in April.
Meanwhile, Bezos’s other big venture, Amazon, purchased satellite telecommunications provider Globalstar to better compete with Starlink.
The $11.6bn deal, announced this April, sees Amazon acquire Globalstar’s existing satellite operations, infrastructure and licences. According to Reuters, Globalstar has 32 planned active low-Earth orbit satellites.
The e-commerce giant plans to integrate Globalstar’s assets into its own space internet service Leo, which aims to have more than 3,200 satellites in space. Currently, the company has more than 375 satellites in space already, and is planning several launches over the course of the year.
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OpenAI unveiled its newest family of models on Thursday, introducing a new set of heavyweight programs into an increasingly crowded field of AI offerings.
GPT-5.6 comes in three variants: Sol (considered its workhorse), Terra (a more intermediate option), and Luna (its budget friendly option). These models expand what users can do across a variety of fields — with the company promising powerful capabilities in enterprise work, coding, and even scientific research.
CEO Sam Altman has promised that his company’s newest models are orders of magnitude more efficient and cost-effective than previous versions, recently telling CNBC that Sol is 54% more token efficient when it comes to AI coding tasks.
Most notably, the company calls 5.6 its “strongest cybersecurity model yet, achieving frontier performance with significantly fewer tokens.”
Indeed, much hubbub has been made about the model’s cyber capabilities, as the Trump administration previously sought to restrict its rollout, ostensibly due to fears of how the model could be misused. GPT-5.6 supports defensive activities, including threat modeling, code review and patching, and blue teaming (simulating an attack on your own systems to find weaknesses before real hackers do).
OpenAI also released a new tool called ChatGPT Work, which — just as it sounds — is designed as a workplace companion for enterprise teams, running on desktop, web, and mobile, that can help with daily clerical tasks, like drafting documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
OpenAI’s newly announced family of models follows on the heels of similar releases this week from competitors SpaceXAI and Meta.
However, GPT-5.6 and its attendant marketing seems most designed to take aim at OpenAI’s primary opponent, Anthropic. Anthropic has managed to make itself the likable underdog of the AI race, focusing fixedly on enterprise customers and winning a growing share of support as a result.
Not to be outdone, OpenAI cites the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, a notable benchmarking metric, to claim that its latest family of models outshines Anthropic’s models at every turn.
OpenAI calls Sol its “best coding model yet,” and has explicitly compared it to Anthropic’s recently released (and much hyped) Fable. Using the Coding Agent Index, OpenAI claims that Sol “sets a new state of the art at 80, 2.8 points above Fable 5, while using less than half the output tokens, taking less than half the time, and costing about one-third less.”
It adds: “That advantage extends across the family: Terra performs just above Fable 5, while Luna outperforms Opus 4.8.”
The company says that 5.6 is now available across ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. Availability per million tokens is priced as follows: Sol is $5 input / $30 output, Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output, and Luna is $1 input / $6 output.
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ai and ml
Searching for work sucks; AI combs the internet and sucks it all up. Combine the two and let ‘er rip with this Python project
Combing through job postings and company help wanted pages for a position that matches your resume is the very definition of drudge work. Now, there’s an AI designed to suck up information from the web, do the search for you, and even help you apply.
Software developer Tarun Gupta created just such a tool in the form of Autopilot-Jobhunt. When configured with a profile of the user and their desired jobs (and what they absolutely won’t accept in an opening), A-J will scan the web while users sleep, take stock of the positions that are a good match, and then send a Telegram message to its user.
That message includes all matching openings, scored against the user’s resume and ranked according to the AI’s assessment. Users can ask A-J to format a resume and cover letter tailored to the position, which it’s up to the user to review and send – the bot won’t do so automatically.
You might be thinking that an AI-crafted resume and cover letter would be a bad strategy for getting your foot in the door at a company you’re keen to work for, but that might not be the case, actually. As we reported last year, researchers found that some AI hiring bots, often the first line a company uses to separate the wheat from the chaff, favored applications generated by the same AI model they used for screening – suggesting the human touch may be worth less than you think in the modern job market.
A-J is designed to be free to use (what hard-up developer can afford to do hundreds of AI API calls a night, after all?), and relies on free models to comb the web for jobs. TinyFish’s AI web agent is used to crawl for jobs, while OpenRouter provides the API for one of several default free AI models that A-J will run through, starting with Llama and falling back to free versions of Nvidia’s Nemotron, Google’s Gemma 4, and Alibaba’s Qwen3 when all else fails, or quotas run out.
Claude Code and the Anthropic API can be used in place of OpenRouter if you’ve got tokens to spare.
For those concerned about A-J broadcasting personal details to the web, Gupta writes that it’s designed to be private, providing an entire privacy readme as part of the project’s GitHub documentation.
As mentioned above, A-J never applies for a job on a user’s behalf, and the config file where users link to their locally stored Markdown-formatted resume and set other options is gitignored so it won’t ever be committed by accident.
That said, resumes do get routed to the LLMs OpenRouter is configured to use. Gupta said those who want to avoid sending that data through OpenRouter can use Claude Code instead, provided they have an Anthropic subscription that supports it.
As for who could make use of the tool, it’s configured by default for software developers, and for good reason: According to Hiring Lab data published on Wednesday, the number of job openings for software developers has risen by 15 percent since Anthropic released Claude Code in February 2025, while openings for all other jobs have fallen by seven percent over the same timeframe.
Still, young college graduates in a variety of career fields report not being able to find a job, so the tool could be of use to anyone with the willingness to reconfigure it for a different career field. AI companies, fintechs, and Silicon Valley heavyweights might be programmed into A-J by default, but they can be freely added, removed, and reconfigured as desired.
It’ll probably take some work to get Autopilot-Jobhunt configured for your particular needs, but if you’re having trouble landing a role, giving it a shot can’t hurt. ®
Weekend Open Thread: High Hopes
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