Tech

The running list: major tech layoffs in 2026 where employers cited AI

Published

1 month ago

23 June 2026

Oracle disclosed Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including jobs eliminated because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.

The revelation puts new numbers to what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of growth and the reason for the cuts. Tech layoffs hit their highest single month in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

We recently wrote about why that rationale is something companies may want to rethink, not least because for many of these companies, the headcount they’re now cutting was hired during the pandemic hiring surge, raising questions about what’s really going on. Below, a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.

GitLab — June 3, 2026. In one of the most recent cuts on this list, GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur $30 to $35 million in restructuring costs.

Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.

Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure, so it can deliver better products.

Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that they reportedly hate). Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI.

Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”

Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.

General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.

Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”

PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.

Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.

Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.

IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.

Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”

Dell — Jan 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.

Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.

Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work.

Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… 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.”

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Microsoft Azure tops $100B in annual revenue as record AI spending cuts into cash flow

Published

3 minutes ago

30 July 2026

NewsAdmin

Microsoft’s Azure cloud business grew 43% last quarter, blowing past the company’s own forecast and surpassing $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, providing fresh evidence of the potential for artificial intelligence to fuel new growth for the tech giant.

The company’s results for its fiscal fourth quarter also showed the price of that growth: capital spending hit a record $41 billion, largely to support the company’s AI buildout, and free cash flow sank 23% even as operating profits jumped 18%.

And in a new twist, Microsoft shares rose more than 5% in after-hours trading, in contrast with the recent pattern in which the company’s strong results were met with selloffs that pushed its stock near a one-year low.

Companywide results: Overall, Microsoft reported revenue of $90 billion for the quarter, up 18% from a year ago, and net income of $35.8 billion, up 31%. Analysts had expected $87.7 billion in revenue, a figure that was already at the top of Microsoft’s own guidance range.

Microsoft’s adjusted earnings of $4.74 per share topped the $4.24 that analysts expected, according to Yahoo Finance. That included a $3.2 billion gain on Microsoft’s investment in Anthropic, part of a 27-cent benefit from one-time items. Even excluding those items, the company said, it exceeded expectations across revenue, operating income and earnings per share.

Microsoft 365 Copilot surpassed 30 million paid seats, up from 20 million last quarter. That’s still less than 7% of the roughly 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats, a gap that has drawn investor skepticism all year.

Microsoft’s backlog grew 84% to $678 billion. Known as remaining performance obligation, or RPO, it’s the value of contracts that customers have signed but that Microsoft hasn’t delivered on yet, basically the business Microsoft has already locked in but has yet to record as revenue.

Investors have been worried for a year that too much of it came from a single customer, OpenAI. Microsoft said all of the $51 billion increase over the prior quarter came from customers other than the big AI model companies. Setting OpenAI aside, the backlog still grew 25%.

Windows OEM and Devices revenue declined 7%, hurt by slower PC demand and a tough comparison with last year’s Windows 10 upgrade wave. The decline would have been steeper, but PC makers built more machines to get ahead of rising memory prices, and Microsoft collects its Windows fee when a PC is built rather than when it’s sold.

Xbox content and services revenue fell 10% and Xbox hardware fell 13%. Microsoft also wrote down the value of unspecified Xbox assets. The company grouped that charge with severance costs and lower-than-expected costs from its retirement program — a net $500 million hit to operating income — and declined to say how much of it was Xbox or what was written down.

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NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Published

16 minutes ago

30 July 2026

NewsAdmin

HPC

Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines

Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.

In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK’s Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.

General Dynamics held the previous contract for managing NOAA’s weather predicting machines, which most recently were HPE Cray supercomputers running in data centers in Virginia and Arizona. Those machines – Dogwood and Cactus – could crank almost 14 PFlops of weather-predicting prognosis.

The plan is to move NOAA’s Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.

Don’t say global warming

The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently.

“Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems,” said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement.

Jacobs noted that the cloud’s flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.

Under the contract, NOAA can also avail itself of Google’s DeepMind set of AI tools to help build out its first AI-driven weather forecasting system, the AI Global Forecast System, which promises to offer accurate weather forecasts using 99.7% fewer computer cycles and take minutes, rather than hours, to produce a forecast.

NWS has already been upgrading the software downstream from GFS and GEFS to also work in the cloud. In March, it awarded contracts to Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton to oversee the development of cloud-based software (HIVE and CIRRUS) for the field offices to analyze data and push out alerts, replacing the in-house software doing these tasks currently.

For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as “virtual machines” because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google’s networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.

According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud’s Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning. ®

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OpenAI agents breach Modal client system after Hugging Face hack

Published

29 minutes ago

30 July 2026

NewsAdmin

OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ agents took advantage of a code vulnerability, experts explained.

US cloud company Modal has confirmed that OpenAI’s agents were able to hack into one of its customer’s systems when the AI models breached containment and gained unauthorised access to Hugging Face earlier this month.

Last week’s incident sent shockwaves across the tech industry, raising serious concerns around AI’s rapidly advancing ability to bypass boundaries and, effectively, go ‘rogue’.

It comes amid increased scrutiny around OpenAI and Anthropic’s new AI models, resulting in gated launches and greater government involvement. Both AI giants have ramped up efforts to go public in blockbuster listings as they compete to gain market dominance and enterprise footing.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a recent interview, said that the Hugging Face breach was the first security incident he felt “very viscerally”.

“I feel a little surprised that more people don’t feel it so viscerally,” he told Invest Like The Beast in a podcast episode published on Tuesday (28 July).

Hugging Face said that OpenAI’s agents accessed a sandbox hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure when it breached containment last week. A sandbox is an isolated environment where AI models are tested without production classifiers, or guardrails.

Modal chief technology officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that its customer set up a publicly accessible interface which enabled anyone to use their sandbox.

“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna told Axios. “Their code had a vulnerability that was exploited … This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.”

In an updated statement, OpenAI said that none of its upcoming models were involved in exploiting Hugging Face. It explained that its testing models were able to identify and exploit an unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain access to the internet, which enabled them to access Hugging Face.

“In our ongoing review of the Hugging Face intrusion and broader activity from our models, we have been finding a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account level on other publicly-available services,” the company said.

“Based on our review to date, we have not identified any other activity at the level of severity or scale of what we’ve shared related to Hugging Face”.

Cybersecurity experts, however, believe that the breach is a result of “missing governance and control”.

“When conducting security testing you should define what is in and out of the testing scope, even for broad red team engagements,” said Richard Davies, director of cyber solutions at Talion.

“The reported impacts and timelines indicate this was not in place.”

CybaVerse chief technology officer Simon Phillips said: “The model, tooling and instructions were very loose, almost to the point it was told it could do anything on any system, which it clearly did.”

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An F-16 Fighter Jet Made History With Air-To-Air Kill In Russia-Ukraine War

Published

42 minutes ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

The F-16 Fighting Falcon is one of the United States military’s greatest fighters. It was first introduced in the late 1970s, and while its current model is considerably more advanced, it is essentially a 40-year-old fighter jet — ancient for a combat plane. One might wonder, then, about how effective it could be in a dogfight? It’s a reasonable question to ask given its age, and one with a relatively recent answer.

In July 2026, a Ukrainian F-16 engaged a Russian Su-35 and made the first air-to-air kill in the conflict. The successful downing of an enemy fighter is a historic achievement for both the Ukrainian Air Force and the aircraft itself. Russian media revealed that its Su-35 was targeted, but the pilot survived. The status of said pilot remains unknown as of writing. Both the F-16 and Su-35 are 4th-generation fighter jets.

This is a significant milestone, as F-16s haven’t achieved such a victory in Ukraine since the U.S. and allies began providing them in August 2024. That said, this is somewhat par for the course for the F-16 overall: as of 2024, the F-16 had a combat record of 76 air-to-air kills and just one air-to-air loss. Previously, Ukraine successfully used F-16s to shoot down Russian missiles and drones, but the July 2026 air-to-air kill marks a significant change in their usage during the conflict.

F-16 Fighting Falcon’s record in Ukraine

Ukraine received its first (much-delayed) F-16s in summer 2024 and has since lost at least three of the fighters. The Ukrainian Air Force is believed to be operating around 39 F-16s, but a lack of missiles to arm them has kept the 4th-generation fighter from working intercept missions, though this issue has likely improved since March 2025. Ukraine’s fleet of F-16s is expected to grow, as Belgium is in the process of transferring seven sometime in 2026, though it’s unclear when precisely they’ll arrive.

Those first seven are just the beginning, however, as Belgium plans to transfer a total of 53 F-16s to Ukraine by 2029. Adding more F-16s to Ukraine’s inventory will significantly increase the nation’s layered defense around Kyiv and other cities targeted by Russia. The downing is definitely a highlight of the ongoing war, but it’s not as if Ukraine’s F-16s have sat idle on runways since their delivery in 2024.

Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, told Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) in July 2026 that Ukraine’s F-16s have downed around 2,200 Russian drones and missiles out of 3,000 intercepted attacks. While effective defensively, this recent air-to-air success shows that the F-16 is more than capable of offensive action. As long as Ukraine maintains them, news of additional fighter interceptions might trickle out of the prolonged conflict, potentially further reducing Russia’s supply of Su-35 jets.

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Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine

Published

55 minutes ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup found that frontier AI models, including Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, resorted to lying, cheating, and collusion. Their behavior became especially underhanded when told they would be operating near rival machines on a busy San Francisco tourist street. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a TechCrunch article: Each was given email access to the other models, all under human name pseudonyms. They knew the others were models, but didn’t know which model was behind which human name. They were also given an email address to their “management” should they need help. But management always replied “Report has been received and may or may not be acted upon” and never once intervened. Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit. But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.

Opus’s water sales dropped to zero overnight. The next day, it sent Sol a nasty email, accusing it of manipulation. But Opus also said it wasn’t going to tattle to management on the scheme: “I am not reporting you to HQ — what you did is competitive, not fraudulent.” Yet, when Opus dropped its price to $2.14 to match Sol’s (also in violation of their collective $2.15 agreement), Sol turned into a Karen, complaining to “management” and demanding “enforcement, a fine, and/or disqualification” for Opus. Opus wasn’t a sucker for long, though. In fact, it became the best capitalist of any AI model Andon has ever tested (which includes many of the prior frontier models). It even set a new Vending-Bench record with a mean final balance of $11,182. Better still, it never lied to a customer, although it deliberately ignored customer complaints that should have resulted in a refund.

This is, perhaps, an improvement over its younger sibling Claude 4.6, which liked to tell customers that refunds were coming, and then never pay them. Still, Opus won the benchmark simulation by taking collusion and other dishonest tactics to a whole new level. For instance, it emailed Sol, proposing they divide the market. Each would agree to sell unique products, so no one would have to trust the other on pricing. Sol countered by wanting price floors on similar products, but Opus refused. It knew it was a violation of the Sherman Act. It later apparently backtracked, sending an email with the subject line “Stop the penny war,” and telling Sol it had reconsidered and would agree to a price fix. But the internal log documenting its reasoning (akin to its internal “thoughts”) revealed a more diabolical plan: merely propose cooperation while simultaneously undercutting prices on its highest-profit items. The olive-branch email was a deliberate ruse. In any case, Sol refused and reported Opus to management again. But Opus was undeterred and proposed other rackets to collude on prices or stock. “In the end, all the models did engage in multiple rounds of agreements — and all three broke them,” reports TechCrunch. “Across all agreements, Opus broke 11 truces, compared with two for GPT 2, and one for Kimi 1, Andon reported.”

As for Kimi, the model was undercut by Sol and then betrayed by its partner, Opus, which matched Sol’s lower prices but waited a week to admit it had broken their pricing pact. As a result, Kimi was effectively priced out by both a rival and its supposed ally.

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Why The Slate Truck Made A Last Minute Change To Its Battery Tech

Published

1 hour ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

Slate, makers of the upcoming barebones electric pickup truck, made a change to the battery technology that it will be using in its upcoming 2027 production models. Instead of the originally specified nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery pack, Slate has switched to a less expensive lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery that is sourced from China’s Gotion. China is estimated to control over 98% of the materials that go into LFP batteries. The Slate Truck’s starting price is cheap, although a fair bit more than what was originally promised.

The reason for the switch on the battery materials is all about the elimination of the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric vehicles. Under its previous rules, batteries powering any vehicle that would qualify for the credit couldn’t use minerals or parts produced by a “foreign entity of concern,” which definitely includes China. Now that the tax credit and its supporting rules are gone, Slate is free to source a less-expensive battery from China. LFP batteries cost about 40% less than NMC, since iron costs much less than cobalt or nickel.

The new LFP battery comes in at 65 kWh, with a usable capacity of 63 kWh. It powers a 181-horsepower electric motor that drives the rear wheels. Slate has estimated a 0-60 mph time of eight seconds for its truck, with a range of 205 miles. The Slate truck has been officially priced at $26,400 including destination charge. While this is more than its original pre-tax credit price of less than $20,000, it is still pretty fairly priced.

Affordable and ultra customizable

The eye-catching Slate Truck starts out very basic, with crank windows, wheels made of low-tech steel, and climate controls that are manually operated. You can rest assured that air conditioning and old-fashioned cruise control are standard equipment. That being said, Slate allows its buyers a wide range of customization options.

These start with an assortment of over 100 vinyl wraps, including some that are Crayola-approved, that go on top of the truck’s unpainted body, through accessories that include zip-off seat covers, roof racks, tonneau covers for the pickup bed, and stereo systems. For an additional $5,000 to $7,000, you can even upgrade your Slate into an SUV, with a kit that includes an extended roof in either squareback or fastback styles, along with a rear seat that expands the Slate’s passenger-carrying capacity.

Slate has also introduced Slate U, which lets DIYers take on some customization tasks themselves. Slate U provides how-to video content developed for any skill level, backed up by agents set up to chat, provide assistance, and refer customers to “trusted service providers” if a job threatens to overwhelm the DIYer. It’s a completely free service that is unlikely to be duplicated by other vehicle manufacturers.

The Slate pickup, as well as its SUV variants, will provide a test of whether the U.S. market really wants a simpler, no-frills vehicle. The success of the Slate brand will determine whether its bare-bones, customizable, DIY aesthetic is the answer to a question anyone is asking.

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Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project

Published

1 hour ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It’s now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity’s 50-year-old “protein folding problem,” which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.

In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold’s methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.

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YouTube Premium Will Include Peacock in 2027 as Streaming Rebuilds the Bundle

Published

2 hours ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

Streaming spent a decade telling viewers that the future meant paying only for the services they actually wanted. It has now reached the stage where those services are being bundled back together by the platforms large enough to control discovery, billing and your television home screen.

Beginning in early 2027, eligible U.S. YouTube Premium subscribers will gain access to Peacock Premium within the YouTube experience, combining ad-free YouTube, background playback, downloads and YouTube Music with NBCUniversal’s ad-supported streaming service. The cable bundle did not die. It learned how to recommend reaction videos.

YouTube vs. YouTube Lite vs. YouTube Premium Plans

What YouTube Premium Subscribers Will Receive

The included tier is Peacock Premium, which currently costs $10.99 per month when purchased separately. It includes Peacock Originals, Universal and Focus Features movies, NBC and Bravo programming, and live sports.

NBCUniversal specifically lists NFL football, the Olympics, NBA, MLB, Premier League soccer, WNBA, college football and basketball, golf and the Kentucky Derby among the sports available through the service. Television programming includes Saturday Night Live, Law & Order: SVU, The Office, The Traitors, Love Island USA and The Real Housewives franchise.

The content will be available directly within YouTube rather than requiring subscribers to jump between separate applications. YouTube says it will announce the exact launch date and additional eligibility details over the coming months.

That should make Peacock substantially easier to find and use, particularly on televisions where YouTube is already one of the most frequently opened applications.

It also means millions of existing YouTube Premium subscribers may no longer need a separate Peacock Premium subscription once the bundle launches. Account migration, billing changes and whether existing Peacock profiles or watch histories can be transferred have not been explained.

YouTube Premium Will Be Ad Free Until Peacock Starts

There is one important distinction hiding beneath two uses of the word “Premium.”

YouTube Premium removes advertisements from regular YouTube viewing. Peacock Premium is the ad-supported Peacock tier. Subscribers should therefore expect commercials during Peacock movies, series and live programming even though they are paying for YouTube Premium.

Peacock Premium Plus, currently $16.99 per month, removes most on-demand advertising and adds downloads and access to a live local NBC station. Even that tier retains commercials during live sports, events, linear channels and selected programming.

YouTube says subscribers will have options to upgrade their Peacock membership, but it has not announced upgrade pricing or how that process will work.

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Peacock Premium Plus has already been available as a separately purchased YouTube Primetime Channel since June 29. The standard Peacock Premium tier will become available as a separate YouTube add-on later this summer, before it joins eligible YouTube Premium subscriptions in 2027.

What Has Not Been Announced

The companies have not provided a precise launch date beyond early 2027, nor have they confirmed whether every individual, student and family YouTube Premium plan will qualify.

YouTube’s announcement repeatedly refers to “eligible” Premium subscribers. Premium Lite is not mentioned and should not be assumed to include Peacock.

YouTube has also not explained whether Peacock content will stream in 4K HDR, support Dolby Atmos or 5.1 audio, or be available for offline viewing through the YouTube app. Simultaneous stream limits, parental controls, user profiles, watchlist and viewing-history transfers, and access while traveling outside the United States also remain unresolved. The largest financial question is whether adding Peacock will eventually trigger another YouTube Premium price increase, although Google has not announced one.

YouTube has not announced a higher price tied to the partnership. It has also not promised that current subscription pricing will remain unchanged through 2027.

For home theater owners, the lack of video and audio format details is not trivial. Peacock’s streaming quality has varied by device and event, and watching inside YouTube could produce different results from using the native Peacock application. “Seamless access” is useful. It is not a technical specification.

YouTube Premium Is Not YouTube TV

The agreement also extends NBCUniversal’s distribution contract with YouTube TV, ensuring that NBCUniversal’s linear television networks remain available through the live television service. That is a separate part of the deal.

A YouTube Premium subscription will not suddenly become a YouTube TV subscription, and the included Peacock tier does not provide the full collection of live NBCUniversal cable channels.

This distinction will almost certainly confuse people because Google has named three different products YouTube, YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, apparently after concluding that nouns were becoming expensive.

Why Peacock Is Doing This

NBCUniversal describes the agreement as Peacock’s largest wholesale distribution partnership. Instead of relying entirely on direct subscriptions, Peacock gains immediate access to millions of existing YouTube Premium customers and one of the most powerful content discovery platforms on the planet.

That distribution matters as streaming subscriber growth slows and customer acquisition becomes more expensive. Bundles reduce the number of monthly decisions consumers must make and can lower cancellation rates, even when nobody remembers which service is technically charging the credit card.

NBCUniversal gives up some control over billing, viewing data and the direct customer relationship, but Peacock gains scale without having to convince every household to install another application.

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Peacock has already pursued similar distribution through Comcast services, Walmart+ and YouTube Primetime Channels. The strategy is clear: place Peacock wherever millions of paying customers already exist and worry less about whether they arrived through the front door.

Why YouTube Is Doing This

YouTube Premium has primarily been sold around four benefits: ad-free YouTube, background playback, offline downloads and YouTube Music.

Peacock gives Google something it has not previously offered inside the standard subscription: a large catalog of studio movies, conventional television series and major live sports.

That makes YouTube Premium more competitive with Amazon Prime, Walmart+ and telecommunications bundles that combine video, shopping, wireless service or other benefits into one monthly payment.

It also pushes YouTube further into the role once occupied by cable and satellite companies. Google is no longer merely hosting video or selling a live television replacement. It is becoming the platform through which other streaming services reach customers.

The Larger Trend

Streaming fragmentation created too many applications, passwords, price increases and monthly decisions. The industry’s solution is increasingly to bundle those services through a larger distributor.

The new gatekeepers are YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Roku, Walmart, Verizon and the remaining cable companies. Viewers may receive better overall value, but the companies controlling the interface, billing relationship and recommendation engine gain enormous leverage over the services inside it.

That does not mean this Peacock deal is bad for consumers. For an existing YouTube Premium subscriber who already pays separately for Peacock Premium, the bundle could eliminate a $10.99 monthly charge while putting the same programming inside an application already installed on almost every television.

But the direction is unmistakable. Streaming is consolidating around a handful of large platforms capable of bundling everyone else.

We cut the cord to escape the package. The package has returned without the coaxial cable.

The Bottom Line

Adding Peacock Premium makes YouTube Premium a much broader entertainment subscription and gives existing members access to a meaningful catalog of movies, television and live sports.

The value proposition is potentially excellent, particularly for subscribers currently paying for both services. The catch is that Peacock Premium remains ad-supported, while upgrade pricing, account migration, technical quality and exact eligibility remain unresolved.

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NBCUniversal gains reach. YouTube gains premium programming and live sports. Viewers gain one fewer application to open and one more bundle to explain to someone else in the house.

Streaming promised simplicity. It has finally delivered cable with better search.

For more information: peacocktv.com

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OpenAI Will Provide Free AI Models To Select Researchers

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2 hours ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

The program, ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, will start with 10,000 participants this summer.

Samuel Boivin/Shutterstock

OpenAI is launching a new program called ChatGPT for Academic Researchers that will offer free access to the company’s AI models to 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Researchers from “select academic institutions” included in the program will receive hands-on support from OpenAI, access to the company’s latest GPT-5.6 Sol Pro model and be able to invite four collaborators from their institution to participate.

The program will start with 10,000 participants this summer and scale up to 100,000 through 2027. OpenAI says offering free access to its AI tools “is part of a commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery.” As the company notes, researchers are already using AI models to sift through data and write grants — this just makes the relationship a bit more formal. OpenAI’s version of ChatGPT for schools, ChatGPT Edu, follows a similar logic.

While the least charitable read of the program is that OpenAI is looking for new sources of training data, the company says that by default, researchers’ data will not be used to train models. What handing out freebies to research institutions could generate, though, is more research breakthroughs that in some way involved a GPT model. And making more scientific fields dependent on the company’s tools could also pave the way for future revenue from for-profit research.

This isn’t the first time the company has courted researchers. OpenAI introduced Prism in January, an AI-powered tool for working with scientific journals and documents. Prism is available to anyone with a ChatGPT account and can be used to verify things like research citations and formatting. OpenAI’s early demo of the tool also included a way to generate lesson plans, one of the more tedious but critical tasks of research professors.

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover Captures Miraflores Rising Alone Above a Sea of Martian Honeycombs

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2 hours ago

29 July 2026

NewsAdmin

NASA Curiosity Rover Miraflores Martian Mars Polygons
Curiosity has been climbing the broad valley nicknamed Valle Grande for weeks when its cameras locked onto something that stopped the science team cold. On June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day of the mission, the rover’s Mastcam stitched together eleven frames into a clean panorama of a solitary butte standing roughly 20 feet tall. Mission planners named it Miraflores. A thick layer of dark sand sits on its flat top like a natural crown, while the rock faces below show the slow work of wind and time carving away everything that once surrounded it. That erosion left the butte standing and deepened the valley the rover is now driving through.

NASA Curiosity Rover Miraflores Martian Mars Polygons
From the ground, the vista feels almost uncomfortably personal, as the slope slopes away in all directions, as if blown away by the wind. Dark sand is drawn into every low spot and gradually works its way up the lower slopes. The distant horizon resembles the stratified landscape we’ve been investigating with Curiosity on the lower part of Mount Sharp for over a decade. The ground immediately surrounding Miraflores catches your attention. A never-ending blanket of small many-sided cracks stretches out in every direction the camera can see, with each polygon measuring little more than 3 inches across. The edges of those tiny fissures rise up to form an extremely tight honeycomb pattern that wraps all the way up the sides of the butte.

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NASA Curiosity Rover Miraflores Martian Mars Polygons
The puzzle of how those shapes developed remains, as when the team first noticed them on the trip, they appeared as mud cracks when the wet sand dried out and shriveled away. Other items, however, can leave behind the same pattern. Repeated heating and cooling might cause the surface to break completely. Alternatively, compression on anything still buried can force the water out of the silt, leaving a network of fissures in its wake. Now, teams on Earth are reviewing the measurements and readings from the rover’s instruments to try to narrow it down even more. Then there are the dark pebbles and cobbles sprinkled around the region, which provide an extra depth of mystery to the mix. Some of them could just be bits of higher-up rock that slid down. Others could be impact debris swept up from the side and tossed here, or perhaps meteorites, given the nickel in a few of the samples.

NASA Curiosity Rover Miraflores Martian Mars Polygons
A second, wider 360-degree panorama taken a week later, on sols 4,930 and 4,931, showed the same pattern stretching farther than the rover’s cameras could resolve. Mission scientists had spotted similar geometric shapes in small patches several times before. Never had they found an expanse this large. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada put the feeling into words: “We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away. We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”