In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company's corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative AI tools and agents. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy said. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce." CNBC reports: Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out "how to get more done with scrappier teams." The directive comes as Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022 and made several cuts this year. Amazon cut about 200 employees in its North America stores unit in January and a further 100 in its devices and services unit in May. Amazon had 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees in its global workforce as of the end of March, according to financial filings. The company also employs temporary workers in its warehouse operations, along with some contractors.

Amazon is using generative AI broadly across its internal operations, including in its fulfillment network where the technology is being deployed to assist with inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of warehouse robots, Jassy said. [...] In his most recent letter to shareholders, Jassy called generative AI a "once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know." He added that the technology is "saving companies lots of money," and stands to shift the norms in coding, search, financial services, shopping and other areas. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen," Jassy said.

Thousands of American investors have lost millions of dollars to sophisticated pump-and-dump schemes involving small Chinese companies listed on Nasdaq, prompting the Justice Department to declare the fraud a priority under the Trump administration's white-collar enforcement program.

The scams recruit victims through social media ads and WhatsApp messages, directing them to purchase shares in obscure Chinese firms whose stock prices are artificially inflated before collapsing. Since 2020, nearly 60 China-based companies have conducted initial public offerings on Nasdaq raising $15 million or less each, with more than one-third experiencing sudden single-day price drops exceeding 50%. In one recent case, seven traders earned over $480 million by defrauding 600 victims who purchased shares in China Liberal Education Holdings.

Tensions between OpenAI and Microsoft over the future of their famed AI partnership are flaring up. WSJ, minutes ago: OpenAI wants to loosen Microsoft's grip on its AI products and computing resources, and secure the tech giant's blessing for its conversion into a for-profit company. Microsoft's approval of the conversion is key to OpenAI's ability to raise more money and go public.

But the negotiations have been so difficult that in recent weeks, OpenAI's executives have discussed what they view as a nuclear option: accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior during their partnership, people familiar with the matter said. That effort could involve seeking federal regulatory review of the terms of the contract for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign, the people said.

According to market analyst firm Canalys, enterprise adoption of AI is slowing due to unpredictable and often high costs associated with model inferencing in the cloud. Despite strong growth in cloud infrastructure spending, businesses are increasingly scrutinizing cost-efficiency, with some opting for alternatives to public cloud providers as they grapple with volatile usage-based pricing models. The Register reports: [Canalys] published stats that show businesses spent $90.9 billion globally on infrastructure and platform-as-a-service with the likes of Microsoft, AWS and Google in calendar Q1, up 21 percent year-on-year, as the march of cloud adoption continues. Canalys says that growth came from enterprise users migrating more workloads to the cloud and exploring the use of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure.

Yet even as organizations move beyond development and trials to deployment of AI models, a lack of clarity over the ongoing recurring costs of inferencing services is becoming a concern. "Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization," said Canalys senior director Rachel Brindley. "As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators," she added.

Canalys researcher Yi Zhang said many AI services follow usage-based pricing models that charge on a per token or API call basis. This makes cost forecasting hard as the use of the services scale up. "When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios," Zhang said. "As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized." [...] According to Canalys, cloud providers are aiming to improve inferencing efficiency via a modernized infrastructure built for AI, and reduce the cost of AI services. The report notes that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud "continue to dominate the IaaS and PaaS market, accounting for 65 percent of customer spending worldwide."

"However, Microsoft and Google are slowly gaining ground on AWS, as its growth rate has slowed to 'only' 17 percent, down from 19 percent in the final quarter of 2024, while the two rivals have maintained growth rates of more than 30 percent."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to 9.86 million pounds ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

Walmart and Amazon are exploring the possibility of issuing their own stablecoins in the United States, WSJ reported Friday, potentially shifting billions of dollars in transaction volume away from traditional banks and card networks. The retail giants, along with Expedia Group and several airlines, have recently discussed launching corporate stablecoins that would allow them to circumvent the existing payments infrastructure dominated by Visa and Mastercard.

The companies' final decisions hinge on passage of the Genius Act, legislation currently moving through Congress that would establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins. These digital currencies maintain a one-to-one exchange ratio with dollars and are backed by cash or Treasury reserves, offering merchants the potential for faster payment settlement and significantly reduced processing fees compared to traditional card transactions that can take days to clear.

The United States is mounting an ambitious effort to reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China, which now has 31 reactors under construction and plans 40 more within a decade. America produces less nuclear power than it did a decade ago and abandoned uranium mining and enrichment capabilities, leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.

This strategic vulnerability has triggered an unprecedented response: venture capitalists invested $2.5 billion in US next-generation nuclear technology since 2021, compared to near-zero in previous years, while the Trump administration issued executive orders to accelerate reactor deployment. The urgency stems from AI's city-sized power requirements and recognition that America cannot afford to lose what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum calls "the power race" with China.

Companies like Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tennessee are good examples of this push, developing advanced reactor fuel despite employees working months without pay.

Shopify is launching stablecoin payments for its merchants later this year, starting with USDC in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe. Fortune reports: The publicly traded tech company lets merchants -- including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies -- set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year's hottest IPOs. "In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for," Tobias Lutke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said onstage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.

Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase's blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify's payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company's existing software stack. "I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like, 'Holy crap,'" Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange's wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune.

Flying to London, a Boeing 787 aircraft operated by Air India "crashed shortly after taking off..." reports Bloomberg, "in what stands to be the worst accident involving the U.S. planemaker's most advanced widebody airliner." Flight AI171 was carrying 242 passengers and crew. Video footage shared on social media showed a giant plume of smoke engulfing the crash site, with no reports of survivors. [UPDATE: Reuters reports one passenger jumped out of the emergency exit and survived, with a senior police officer saying "chances are that there might be more survivors among the injured who are being treated in the hospital."]

The aircraft entered a slow descent shortly after taking off, with its landing gear still extended before exploding into a huge fireball upon impact. The crash took place in a residential area, which could mean a higher death toll... The pilots in command issued a mayday call immediately after take-off to air traffic controllers, according to India's civil aviation regulator.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Denmark's Minister of Digitalization, Caroline Stage, has announced that the Danish government will start moving away from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Why? It's not because open-source is better, although I would argue that it is, but because Denmark wants to claim "digital sovereignty." In the States, you probably haven't heard that phrase, but in the European Union, digital sovereignty is a big deal and getting bigger.

A combination of security, economic, political, and societal imperatives is driving the EU's digital sovereignty moves. EU leaders are seeking to reduce Europe's dependence on foreign technology providers, primarily those from the United States, and to assert greater control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technological future. Why? Because they're concerned about who controls European data, who sets the rules, and who can potentially cut off access to essential services in times of geopolitical tension. "Money issues have also played a decisive role," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "Copenhagen's Microsoft software bill has soared from 313 million kroner in 2018 to 538 million kroner -- about $53 million in 2023, a 72% increase in just five years.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), a Dane, inventor of Ruby on Rails, and co-owner of the software developer company 37Signals, has said: "Denmark is one of the most highly digitalized countries in the world. It's also one of the most Microsoft-dependent. In fact, Microsoft is by far and away the single biggest dependency, so it makes perfect sense to start the quest for digital sovereignty there."

Apple executives defended the company's AI strategy this week after acknowledging that major Siri features announced at last year's Worldwide Developers Conference remain undelivered and were quietly pulled from development plans. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told the Wall Street Journal that the company is rebuilding Siri from the ground up, admitting that while Apple had working software for the promised features, "it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to."

The missing capabilities included Siri's ability to search through apps and respond to on-screen activities, features that were demonstrated a year ago but never shipped to users. In the upcoming iOS 26, Apple has instead incorporated more OpenAI technology, allowing users to interact with ChatGPT through camera and screenshots and generate images using OpenAI's tools. Federighi defended the strategy by comparing Apple's position to the early internet era, when the company focused on making other services accessible rather than building competing platforms.

"Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF," writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. "I, for one, welcome..."

Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 -- almost two years after Laszlo's pizzas -- a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in his window, and then a Reddit post.

"Jumping in to do my part to support the BTC economy. This may be a historic first?" Lee wrote in a post on the BitMarket subreddit, titled: "[WTS][USA] Male Fertility Evaluation." Lee was offering a 15-minute consultation to discuss fertility questions and a sperm analysis in exchange for 15 BTC, valued at $70 or so at the time. "Actual value over $100," he wrote. Within three months, he'd found a Bitcoin customer.

"The patient turned out not... so much having a burning desire to know about his fertility, but he was a Bitcoin enthusiast, and he liked the idea of participating in history, in this ritual ceremony of what could be perhaps the world's first Bitcoin medical transaction," Lee explained at a 2013 conference in San Jose. "So we chatted about Bitcoin. He taught me a lot about mining. That's how he acquired bitcoin. And we did a sperm test, and it turned out he had really good sperm ... after it was done he sent me 15 bitcoins... "

Lee changed up his strategy to only quiz his most trusted patients. There was one couple, who, on their fourth attempt at IVF, agreed to pay in bitcoin for a 50% discount, with Lee walking them through exchanging U.S. dollars for bitcoin via CryptoXChange, a now-defunct exchange operating out of Australia. The sperm stuck, leading CNN to reveal, on this day in 2013, "the world's first Bitcoin baby" -- a baby bought entirely with bitcoin. Thirty bitcoin to be exact, an amount then worth $500, or $3 million today.

The World Bank sharply reduced its global economic growth forecast for 2025 to 2.3% from 2.7%, warning that the current decade is on track to become the weakest for the global economy since the 1960s. The Washington-based lender attributed the downgrade to mounting costs from "international discord -- about trade, in particular," as Donald Trump's tariff policies create unprecedented uncertainty.

The revised forecast would mark the slowest growth rate outside full-blown recessions since 2008. Even with a modest recovery to 2.4% expected in 2026, the bank characterized the outlook as merely "tepid." Chief economist Indermit Gill said "outside of Asia, the developing world is becoming a development-free zone." Growth in developing economies has steadily declined from 6% annually in the 2000s to 5% in the 2010s, now falling below 4% in the 2020s. The bank said that "many of the forces behind the great economic miracle of the last 50 years" have reversed, with more than half of low-income countries either in debt distress or at high risk.

AI is speeding up the work of America's intelligence services, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday. From a report: Speaking to a technology conference, Gabbard said AI programs, when used responsibly, can save money and free up intelligence officers to focus on gathering and analyzing information. The sometimes slow pace of intelligence work frustrated her as a member of Congress, Gabbard said, and continues to be a challenge. AI can run human resource programs, for instance, or scan sensitive documents ahead of potential declassification, Gabbard said. Her office has released tens of thousands of pages of material related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, on the orders of President Donald Trump.

Experts had predicted the process could take many months or even years, but AI accelerated the work by scanning the documents to see if they contained any material that should remain classified, Gabbard said during her remarks at the Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington. "We have been able to do that through the use of AI tools far more quickly than what was done previously -- which was to have humans go through and look at every single one of these pages," Gabbard said.

Cisco is updating its networking and security products to make AI networks speedier and more secure, part of a broader push to capitalize on the AI spending boom. From a report: A new generation of switches -- networking equipment that links computer systems -- will offer a 10-fold improvement in performance, the company said on Tuesday. That will help prevent AI applications from suffering bottlenecks when transferring data, Cisco said. Networking speed has become a bigger issue as data center operators try to manage a flood of AI information -- both in the cloud and within the companies' own facilities. Slowdowns can hinder AI models, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said in an interview. That applies to the development phase -- known as training -- and the operation of the models, a stage called inference. A massive build-out of data centers has made Cisco more relevant, he said. "AI is going to be network-bound, both on training and inference," Patel said. Having computer processors sit idle during training because of slow networks is "just throwing away money."

An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times: Russian counterintelligence agents are analyzing data from the popular Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat to monitor people who might be in contact with Chinese spies, according to a Russian intelligence document obtained by The New York Times. The disclosure highlights the rising level of concern about Chinese influence in Russia as the two countries deepen their relationship. As Russia has become isolated from the West over its war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly reliant on Chinese money, companies and technology. But it has also faced what the document describes as increased Chinese espionage efforts.

The document indicates that the Russian domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., pulls purloined data into an analytical tool known as "Skopishche" (a Russian word for a mob of people). Information from WeChat is among the data being analyzed, according to the document... One Western intelligence agency told The Times that the information in the document was consistent with what it knew about "Russian penetration of Chinese communications...." By design, [WeChat] does not use end-to-end encryption to protect user data. That is because the Chinese government exercises strict control over the app and relies on its weak security to monitor and censor speech. Foreign intelligence agencies can exploit that weakness, too...

WeChat was briefly banned in Russia in 2017, but access was restored after Tencent took steps to comply with laws requiring foreign digital platforms above a certain size to register as "organizers of information dissemination." The Times confirmed that WeChat is currently licensed by the government to operate in Russia. That license would require Tencent to store user data on Russian servers and to provide access to security agencies upon request.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: My wife taught me something," Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. "Two things can be true at the same time," he said. Siemiatkowski said it's true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company's revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years ago, and that number now stands at around 3,000, he said, adding that as the company's salary costs have gone down, Klarna now seeks to reinvest a majority of that money into employee cash and equity compensation.

But, he insisted, this doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity for humans to work at his company. "We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing," he said, comparing it to how people pay more for clothing stitched by hand rather than machines. "So we think that two things can be done at the same time. We can use AI to automatically take away boring jobs, things that are manual work, but we are also going to promise our customers to have a human connection."

Circle Internet Group surged 168% in its NYSE debut, raising nearly $1.1 billion after pricing its IPO at $31 and opening at $69. "At one point, shares traded as high as $103.75," notes CNBC. From the report: The New York-based company priced its IPO late Wednesday far above this week's expected range of $27 to $28, and an initial range last week of between $24 and $26, valuing the company at some $6.8 billion before trading began. Trading volume by the end of the session was about 46 million, far exceeding the number of freely floating shares available for trading.

Circle joins Coinbase, Mara Holdings and Riot Platforms as one of the few pure-play crypto companies to list in the U.S. This marks the company's second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. "To realize our vision, we needed to forge relationships with governments, we needed to work with policymakers ... because if you want this to work for mainstream, it's got to work in mainstream society and you need to have those rules of the road," CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC's "Money Movers" on Thursday. "We've been one of the most licensed, regulated, compliant, transparent companies in the entire history of this industry, and that's served us well."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit's lobbyists and Donald Trump's megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the "future of tax filing" in the private sector.

Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a "free, easy, and trustworthy" piece of software that made tax filing "more efficient." About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.

But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS's Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump's massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that "ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money."

Morgan Stanley has deployed an in-house AI tool called DevGen.AI that has reviewed nine million lines of legacy code this year, saving the investment bank's developers an estimated 280,000 hours by translating outdated programming languages into plain English specifications that can be rewritten in modern code.

The tool, built on OpenAI's GPT models and launched in January, addresses what Mike Pizzi, the company's global head of technology and operations, calls one of enterprise software's biggest pain points -- modernizing decades-old code that weakens security and slows new technology adoption. While commercial AI coding tools excel at writing new code, they lack expertise in older or company-specific programming languages like Cobol, prompting Morgan Stanley to train its own system on its proprietary codebase.

The tool's primary strength, the bank said, lies in creating English specifications that map what legacy code does, enabling any of the company's 15,000 developers worldwide to rewrite it in modern programming languages rather than relying on a dwindling pool of specialists familiar with antiquated coding systems.