Meta previously announced it will cut 10% of its staff next month.
Meta's HR chief told staff in a meeting that she can't promise further layoffs won't happen.
She added that the business is strong and acknowledged that morale has been affected at Meta.
Meta plans to lay off around 10% of its staff next month, and it told staff it's not ruling out deeper cuts.
That's what Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer, told employees in an internal meeting on Thursday, according to three sources on the call.
"Will there be more layoffs? The question always comes up. I'd love to say that there are no more layoffs, but I can't say something we can't deliver," Gale said during the meeting. "While the business is strong, priorities change, competition is fierce, and we will continue to manage our costs responsibly."
She said this means that Meta will "continue to evolve teams as needed" and "try to redeploy talent." She pointed to how Meta is investing in its Applied AI organization.
Gale added that some organizations would be more affected by layoffs than others, though she did not specify which.
Meta leaders also said during the meeting that AI token usage would not be considered as a factor for the layoffs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also addressed the layoffs at the meeting, saying that AI automation is not the driving factor behind them. He said that AI has made small teams far more efficient.
During the call, Zuckerberg also addressed Meta's plan to monitor employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to improve its AI models. He said humans are not actually watching what the staff are doing and that this data is abstracted and used to improve AI.
Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang also appeared at the meeting, sporting a camouflage-pattern T-shirt featuring multiple deer, according to a photo seen by Business Insider. During the Q&A, he praised Meta's latest AI prowess, notably the recent release of its Spark model.
Meta declined to comment for this article.
Reuters reported in March that Meta plans to cut about 20% of its total staff this year.
Given the looming layoffs, Gale said at the meeting that they hit morale at Meta, and the company tries to make tough situations like that "the best version possible." She added that Meta has tripled COBRA healthcare coverage to 18 months.
Meta CFO Susan Li previously said during its first quarter earnings call on Wednesday that she "doesn't really know" the ideal size of the company's head count, which runs at above 77,000. Meta announced that its infrastructure spend, largely for AI, is doubling this year, to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion.
A personal injury lawyer apologized for filing court documents with fabricated quotations.
The lawyer told the judge that he had begun using software from a venture-backed startup called Eve.
The episode highlights a growing risk for the startups selling artificial intelligence to lawyers.
Lawyers keep getting burned by artificial intelligence that invents cases and makes up quotes. Now, some attorneys are naming the software they used.
Last month, a Louisiana personal injury lawyer apologized after submitting briefs that cited a real court decision but quoted passages that didn't exist. The mistakes appeared in two filings in the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge and were flagged by opposing counsel.
"I'm trying to understand how I made this mistake," Ross LeBlanc, a partner at Dudley DeBosier, wrote in a private letter to Judge William Jorden on March 27. Earlier this year, he said, he began using an artificial intelligence program called Eve to draft pleadings. At first, he checked the citations often. "They were always correct when I checked them," he wrote.
That consistency gave him confidence, and eventually, he stopped checking, he said.
"I never thought this could happen to me," LeBlanc wrote, adding that he could not be sure whether the mistake involved Eve's software or if he copied and pasted something too hastily.
Jay Madheswaranm, Eve's chief executive, told Business Insider on Thursday that after a close audit of the case with Dudley DeBosier, the company confirmed Eve "did not hallucinate any case citations in this matter," including any fabricated quotations.
Courts have slapped sanctions on attorneys for filing briefs with errors created by artificial intelligence — often called "hallucinations." Last week, Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the country's oldest and most elite law firms, apologized to a federal judge over a similar slip-up.
What's new here is the blame game. When an attorney names the tools involved, the companies behind the software are put in the spotlight and could face reputational repercussions.
Legal software companies like Harvey, Legora, and Eve have raised billions of dollars on the promise that they can make lawyers faster — and offer firms a level of reliability that general-purpose tools can't match. If their software starts to embarrass customers in court, that trust erodes.
Damien Charlotin, a French researcher who tracks hallucinations in court filings, estimates that fewer than 10% of cases identify the software used. Many lawyers, he suspects, keep that part private because they're relying on free chatbots like ChatGPT or other off-the-shelf tools that may not be authorized for client work.
Last year, a Latham & Watkins lawyer defending Anthropic in a copyright lawsuit made headlines after citing an article that does not exist. The lawyer said the mistake stemmed from using Anthropic's own chatbot, Claude, which fabricated an article title and authors.
Eve cofounders David Zeng, Jay Madheswaran, and Matt Noe.
Eve
Eve builds software for plaintiff-side lawyers using large language models, helping them draft documents, map out medical histories, and send and respond to discovery requests. The company was valued at $1 billion after it raised a $103 million funding round about a year ago. Madheswaranm said Eve now processes more than 200,000 documents and other results a month — up around 100-fold from a year ago.
LeBlanc told the judge that he had been wary of the technology generally because of the "horror stories" about hallucinated case law. He said he was persuaded after Eve pitched the tool to his firm and assured attorneys it had safeguards to reduce errors. He believed the risk was limited as long as he conducted his own legal research and directed the software to rely only on approved sources.
Then, opposing counsel in the personal injury case pointed out his mistakes.
LeBlanc's apology surfaced this month in a separate case involving a trip-and-fall at a Lowe's store. The opposing counsel found hallucinations in a brief filed by Dudley DeBosier and included LeBlanc's letter in a request urging the court to expand its inquiry into possible sanctions.
Dudley DeBosier has filed a motion to strike opposing counsel's request because it says the cases are unrelated. The firm also indicated that a lawyer used Claude to help draft the brief in the Lowe's case.
It's a view widely shared across software companies and law firms that artificial intelligence can assist in research and drafting, but responsibility for the final product remains with the human who signs the filing.
Madheswaran said Eve makes that explicit in its contracts and onboarding with new customers. The software also includes features designed to catch errors before they reach a courtroom, though they don't always work. Some errors are harder to spot than others, he said. Confirming a case exists is easier than verifying a quote is exact.
As the legal profession races to adopt artificial intelligence, mistakes are more likely to be caught. Courts are getting wiser to the technology, and opposing counsel are adjusting their tactics. Instead of only attacking legal arguments, lawyers are scanning filings for errors that could undermine the other side's credibility.
Chad Dudley, a founding partner of Dudley DeBosier, a firm with about 40 attorneys, said it trains its lawyers to carefully review generated results and requires them to agree to use the technology responsibly.
For his part, LeBlanc said he hopes other lawyers learn from his mistake. He told Business Insider on Thursday that Eve helped him move faster under time pressure, but after the errors surfaced, he felt "sick to my stomach" and couldn't sleep.
"I'm responsible for checking everything, no matter what technology comes along," he said.
He doesn't blame Eve for the blunder. Still, he's setting the tool down for now.
"I feel like, given what happened," he said, "it's fair to have a cooling off period, you know, touch grass."
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been bullish on the company's Trainium chips.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Google and Amazon have ambitions to sell AI chips to customers.
That could make things awkward with Nvidia, which the two tech giants also rely on.
Taking on Nvidia won't be easy, but one analyst said the process is now "irreversible."
Two of Nvidia's biggest customers might be turning into its biggest threat.
For three years, Nvidia's stock has defied gravity on the premise that the AI industry needs its chips. On Wednesday, when Google and Amazon reported their Q1 earnings, both signaled ambitions to sell their own custom AI chips directly to customers.
So far, Google's TPUs and Amazon's Trainium chips have only been available through Google and Amazon's cloud services. Customers can pay to use them, but they don't own them.
Nvidia is the undisputed leader in AI chips right now. While that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon, recent remarks from Google and Amazon suggest they are ready to challenge Nvidia's throne.
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, laid down the gauntlet to Nvidia in his annual letter to shareholders earlier this month.
"Virtually all AI thus far has been done on Nvidia chips, but a new shift has started," Jassy wrote, adding that it's "quite possible" that Amazon could start selling its chips directly to customers.
He put a timeline on this plan on the company's Wednesday earnings call, saying "there's a good chance" Amazon will start offering full racks of Trainium chips beyond its own cloud "over the next couple of years."
Google gave an even stronger commitment — and a nearer timeline.
On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai publicly said for the first time that the company plans to deliver TPU chips to a "select group of customers" in their own data centers this year, but said the "vast majority" of revenues from those sales won't be realized until 2027.
Pichai said there was a big opportunity for Google's semiconductor business, which would also help fund the next generation of chips. That flywheel could create a mammoth business for Google. Morgan Stanley said in a December research note that selling 500,000 TPU chips could add roughly $13 billion in revenue to Google's balance sheet in 2027.
The company said in its 10-Q filing that it had so far signed a "limited number of agreements" to supply TPUs to customers.
It's also where things could get awkward. Google and Amazon are also big customers of Nvidia. They purchase Nvidia's chips to lease to their customers in their own data centers. Amazon and Google have both said that they will continue to work with Nvidia.
Nvidia shares were down more thean 4% on Thursday. The company didn't immediately respond to a Business Insider request for comment.
'Concerned but not worried'
Breaking into Nvidia's chip dominance will not be easy, analysts told Business Insider.
"Nvidia should be concerned but not worried," said Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at Forrester. Nvidia has built a strong ecosystem of hardware, software, and support that has made it easy for customers to choose them, he said.
"Selling products is very different than access to them," he said, adding that Amazon and Google would need to provide services like education and support to enterprises looking to buy their chips.
Google and Amazon's chip racks are also "very bespoke and proprietary" and customized for their own respective data centers, said Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy. That poses a challenge for reaching mass adoption, he said.
Plus, the chip market isn't a zero-sum game. AI companies are increasingly diversifying and using chips from multiple suppliers simultaneously. OpenAI, for example, has chip deals with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, among others.
However, custom silicon is becoming an "increasingly important part of the AI story" for Google and Amazon, Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote in a note on Thursday. Both companies are pitching their chips as being more cost-effective than Nvidia's.
That opportunity is also opening up as the needs of the AI industry shifts. Earlier this month, Google announced a new TPU chip specifically for inference — the process of running the models once they're trained — which is becoming more critical as more companies bring AI agents online.
Beatriz Valle, a senior analyst for enterprise technology & services at GlobalData, called the decision by Google and Amazon an "extraordinary move" that will diversify the chip sector — and reduce cloud providers' dependence on Nvidia chips.
"This process will take years but it is irreversible now," she said.
Around 600 Google employees urged CEO Sundar Pichai to reject classified Pentagon AI deals.
They said they want to see AI benefit humanity, not be used for autonomous weapons or surveillance.
Google and the Pentagon are in talks to use Gemini in classified settings, per a recent report.
Around 600 Google employees sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday, urging him not to let the company's AI technology be used by the US military for classified operations.
The letter, signed by employees in Google's DeepMind and Cloud divisions, cited a recent Information report that Google and the Pentagon were negotiating the use of Google's Gemini AI in classified settings.
"As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes," the employees wrote in the letter. "We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses."
"Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads," employees continued in the letter. "Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them."
Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Google has not yet responded to the letter, said Jane Chung, the founder of Justice Speaks, a communications firm representing the workers. Bloomberg first reported on the letter.
Google has long faced internal pushback to its efforts to work with the US military. In 2018, it decided not to renew Project Maven, a Department of Defense contract to integrate AI into military operations, following pressure from hundreds of employees. Palantir later picked up the deal.
The same year, Google established a set of AI principles, including a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance. Last year, it updated those AI principles to remove wording around weapons and surveillance.
The company also secured new contracts with the Pentagon last year to use its AI and cloud products. In March, the company said it would provide the Pentagon with AI agents in a non-classified setting. It also told Google DeepMind employees during a January meeting that they should expect more of these types of deals.
In the letter, Google employees raised concerns that classified work would lead to a lack of oversight into how the company's technology is used.
"We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways," the employees wrote. "This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond."
Read the full letter below:
Dear Sundar,We are Google employees who are deeply concerned about ongoing negotiations between Google and the US Department of Defense. As people working on AI, we know that these systems can centralize power and that they do make mistakes. We feel that our proximity to this technology creates a responsibility to highlight and prevent its most unethical and dangerous uses.Therefore, we ask you to refuse to make our AI systems available for classified workloads.We want to see AI benefit humanity; not to see it being used in inhumane or extremely harmful ways. This includes lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance but extends beyond. Currently, the only way to guarantee that Google does not become associated with such harms is to reject any classified workloads. Otherwise, such uses may occur without our knowledge or the power to stop them.Making the wrong call right now would cause irreparable damage to Google's reputation, business, and role in the world. At this very moment, the safety of our own workforce and critical infrastructure are under active threat. Human lives are already being lost and civil liberties put at risk at home and abroad from misuses of the technology we're playing a key role in building.We know from our own history that our leaders can make the right choices, for ourselves and for the world, when the stakes are high.Today, we call on you, Sundar, to act according to the values on which this company was built, and refuse classified workloads.
The ABC host drew the ire of Melania Trump after joking Thursday on his late-night show that the first lady "had a glow like an expectant widow." Kimmel told the joke days before a gunman entered the building hosting the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night.
"Kimmel's hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country," Melania Trump wrote on X on Monday morning. "His monologue about my family isn't comedy- his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America."
The first lady added that "people like Kimmel shouldn't have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate."
"Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC's leadership enable Kimmel's atrocious behavior at the expense of our community," Melania Trump's post continued.
Nexstar and Sinclair, which each own hundreds of local TV stations, initially refused to air "Jimmy Kimmel Live," though they eventually agreed to let their ABC affiliates show it.
Leaders at ABC and Disney, its parent company, now must decide whether to take any action against Kimmel and risk another boycott, or stand behind the comic.
Streamer N3on used to pay clippers to post bad PR about him to help grow his audience.
John Sciulli/Getty Images for Global Gaming League
Livestreamer N3on pays an army of "clippers" to post snippets of his content on social media.
Clipping is one of his top expenses: He paid out over $1.4 million in a recent five-week period.
The clipping economy can expand a streamer's audience and also incentivize inflammatory content.
You may have never tuned into N3on's livestream. Thanks to "clipping," he might have popped up in your social feeds anyway.
The top-10 Kick streamer, 21, belongs to a group of livestreamers who have gained mainstream attention in recent months thanks to clipping, where people are paid to post grabby moments from longer videos or podcasts on social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
An hourslong stream might only get 40,000 live viewers, but a successful clip can fetch millions of views, helping a streamer land partnerships with brands and celebrities.
Streamers like N3on have helped create an elite class of professional clippers who command high prices. Clipping is one of N3on's largest expenses. In a recent five-week period, he paid out over $1.4 million to 303 clippers, according to a document his team shared. In any given month, he estimated that he's paying at least one clipper upward of $100,000.
"I feel like my life is clipping now," he said.
N3on, whose real name is Mikyle Rafiq, said he has a network of around 1,000 clippers. About half belong to a group he and fellow streamer Adin Ross built. The rest are paid by Kick.
Other top creators also have clippers who post on their behalf. YouTuber MrBeast has his own clipping platform, Vyro, that helps promote his content.
Rates for clippers can vary depending on factors such as a streamer's level of fame. Rafiq pays clippers on the higher end of the market for a big Kick streamer — $40 per 100,000 views, or $50 if he especially wants to incentivize them.
Clipping has its defenders and critics
Clipping can help a creator reach a wider audience that might not be watching their livestream or podcast — and get them into the center of internet discourse.
On the other hand, the clipping economy can incentivize creators to create inflammatory moments and stretch the truth.
"A lot of it is staged," said Mustafa Aijaz, VP at SoaR Gaming, a digital entertainment company and creative agency. "Audiences will call it out as clip farming. But people will still watch it."
Rafiq, who's been trying to reform his negative public image, said he used to do "crazy stuff" and even paid clippers to post bad PR about him to keep his name relevant.
He said sometimes eye-catching clips can come from subpar streams.
One of his most-viewed clips came from a stream he and former rapper Iggy Azalea did from a yacht that ran into technical problems and was barely seen.
"The clippers made it seem like it was this insane, crazy stream," Rafiq said. "No one actually watched the stream. They just saw the clips, and they're like, 'Wow, N3on and Iggy had a great time on this yacht.'"
"If you're going fishing, you've got to put a worm on the hook," said Storm Duncan, the founder and managing partner of Ignatious, a tech boutique investment bank, in an interview with Business Insider. "What's my other option? Not being in it?"
The offer comes as Anthropic's valuation on secondary markets soared to $1 trillion, driven by investors who have been wowed by its torrid revenue growth and momentum around its AI-powered coding assistant, Claude Code, Business Insider reported this week.
Duncan, who lives primarily in Jackson Hole, Wyo., also owns other properties, but he decided to list this one because he thought it would be especially attractive to Anthropic employees.
Duncan's 13-acre, fully furnished Mill Valley estate features sweeping views of San Francisco, an infinity-edge pool, and a spa.
"It's a 20-minute commute to the Anthropic offices in the city," he said. "No one from Anthropic probably wants my Miami or Jackson Hole place."
By offering the property, Duncan hopes to get on the radar of employees who have legitimate shares to sell and own a goldmine of Anthropic stock they can't sell until after the company goes public.
Duncan says he has received multiple offers since posting the deal this week. "Some of them are [Anthropic] employees, and some of them just happen to have invested early," he said. "I believe they're serious, but it's a complex transaction."
"There's probably a decent number of people who are sitting in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco even though they're earning $400,000 a year and are worth a $100 million," he said. "But they can't access that because their stock is so illiquid, so this gives them an opportunity to diversify."
It's not the first time there's been an unconventional way to secure shares in pre-IPO tech companies. In 2005, artist David Choe chose Facebook stock over $60,000 in cash to paint murals at Facebook's first office. That choice led to an estimated windfall of about $200 million once Facebook went public in 2012. In the dot-com era, some real estate owners asked startups for company stock in exchange for leasing space in San Francisco.
Storm Duncan is the founder and managing partner of Ignatious.
Storm Duncan
Some on X have dismissed Duncan's offer as a publicity stunt or a sure sign of the top of a bubble. Others have made cracks about the only thing being more precious than Anthropic shares is Bay Area real estate.
Duncan insists the offer is real and he is not seeking attention. As for why he does not simply buy shares in the company, he says a small investor like him would never be able to secure stock directly.
"Anthropic can't spend time with people like me," Duncan said. "They're looking for people who can write $100 million in a single check." (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
The alternative is to buy shares from early employees or investors on secondary markets, but Duncan says those deals are often increasingly dubious.
He said the scarcity of shares on the secondary market has made sellers offer deals that can be rife with high fees and opaque ownership structures.
Duncan already owns shares in Anthropic that he acquired in its 2024 funding round, when it was much easier to obtain shares. He says he was recently convinced he wanted to double down after being wowed by the results of his firm's implementation of Claude Code.
"It's probably going to triple our throughput and reduce our costs by 50%," he said. "As I started to implement the platform at my own firm, I said I would like to have more exposure to this."
Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast, is best known for high-production spectacles like "Beast Games."
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Prime Video
MrBeast's next growth act may come from AI-produced videos.
Jimmy Donaldson's company is looking for someone to lead a production team with AI at the foundation.
MrBeast has been expanding his company while looking for ways to save.
YouTube's biggest star, MrBeast, is looking for a leader to help his company create "AI-native" productions.
A job posting says that Beast Industries wants to build a new production capability in which AI is "not a tool but the foundation."
It calls for someone who can help define "what AI-native entertainment looks like, develop original formats, and build systems that enable content to be conceived, produced, and scaled with AI at the core."
MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, wouldn't be the first creator to delve into AI. Fellow superstar creator Steven Bartlett has been making fully AI-animated shows since last year.
Still, as YouTube's top creator with 479 million subscribers, Donaldson's moves in the space will be closely watched by the entertainment community.
Many production studios are adopting AI across production, marketing, and visual effects, and startups are raising millions on the promise of helping legacy Hollywood transition to the AI era.
So far, entirely AI productions are largely the realm of animation, podcasts, and short-form video.
In the micro drama space, apps including TikTok's Pine Drama and Vigloo have character-driven dramas generated by AI. These AI dramas account for 10% of Vigloo's library, a spokesperson said. The Beijing-based startup StoReel recently raised $34 million to make AI micro dramas.
AI-driven productions would solve some problems for Donaldson.
He is famous for his viral, high-budget challenge and giveaway videos, though the company has been tightening up spending. One of the job's listed expectations is to use automation to make more content, faster.
Making AI-driven videos also directly addresses the risk any creator faces when they build a company that relies on their time and persona. As Donaldson expands his company to consumer products and services, it limits his bandwidth to star in his own videos. He recently hired former NBCU unscripted executive Corie Henson to head his studio division and is looking to broaden the company's video franchises. He said this week his company now has 750 employees.
Donaldson himself has shared concerns about AI's risk to his industry.
After OpenAI released Sora 2 last fall, Donaldson mused on X about what AI's advancement will mean for creators, adding, "Scary times."
He also released — and then removed — a tool that used AI to generate video thumbnails last year, after receiving backlash from creators.
Meta told staff on Thursday that it planned to eliminate 10% of its workforce.
Inside the company, employees are bracing for weeks of limbo as they wait to find out who will be cut.
Meta employees responded internally with a mixture of questions, concerns, and jokes.
Welcome to "28 days of hell."
That's how one Meta employee characterized the tech giant's announcement that thousands of jobs will be cut on May 20. Employees flooded internal forums with similar posts, many of which were filled with anxiety, dark humor, and questions as they wait to learn who will be out of a job.
"How are you motivating yourself to work for the next 1 month with layoffs confirmed?" one person posted on the anonymous workplace app Blind, in a section just for Meta employees.
Someone else replied, "I'm motivating myself to do stuff that I can put on my resume for my next job lol."
In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, Meta said it shared some layoff details earlier than usual because the news had already leaked. The company plans to cut around 10% of employees next month and close 6,000 open roles.
"I know this leaves everyone with nearly a month of ambiguity, which is incredibly unsettling," wrote Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale.
For some Meta employees, the fact that company leadership acknowledged layoffs brought some relief. The layoffs had been so widely discussed internally that the announcement helped ease some uncertainty, according to one employee who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.
One of the top comments under Gale's internal Meta post was a picture of an elephant, a reference to leadership addressing the elephant in the room. Reuters first reported Meta was planning sweeping layoffs in March, and employees have been speculating on the extent of the cuts in the weeks since.
"elephant addressed!" commented another employee. Another posted a picture of an envelope that read: "Addressed to: "ELEPHANT."
Others said that having to wait almost a month to find out who would be affected created anxiety. One person posted that this was their first week at the company. "It might be goodbye for me," they wrote.
Another employee told Business Insider that the announcement added pressure for them to deliver results over the next month because it's unknown which teams will be affected by the cuts.
"I'm a little stressed about making impact in the next month," they said.
Despite a sense of added pressure, it's not the employee's first go-around with cuts at the company. The worker said they're going to continue working as usual, assuming the worst while trying to make the most of the next month as they wait for further updates.
"I assume I'm always two months away from being laid off, no matter what leadership says, so I'm going to continue to operate as usual," the employee said.
Employees also commented on Gale's internal post with questions.
One person asked if Meta staff would receive their August 15 stock payouts, which are part of some employees' compensation packages. Gale said that impacted employees would have a termination date prior to the August vest and would therefore not receive it.
"Because of the timing of the notifications, we will have just had the May 15 vest. There are some instances, based on work location, where people will remain employed through the August 15 vest," Gale wrote. Another employee thanked Gale for the clarification.
Another employee asked if travel would be restricted the week of May 20. "We are not restricting travel company-wide. VPs will share team-specific guidance," Gale responded.
'I feel more anxious about surviving'
On the Meta employee section of Blind, some users asked why Meta couldn't offer voluntary buyouts. Microsoft on Thursday offered one-time early retirement buyouts to thousands of its long-time employees, and Google has extended the same offers to staff across some orgs.
Many posts were from users asking others for information about which groups might be affected.
In a longer post, one user said the downside might be surviving the cuts.
"I feel more anxious about surviving this layoff," they wrote, recalling several rounds of layoffs at the company since 2022.
"Because we all know it's just gonna get worse for those of us who are left behind and have to absorb even more work, amongst other declining factors in this sad fearful company," they wrote.
AI has turned a corner in Hollywood as major studios increasingly adopt it to gain efficiencies in production, marketing, and visual effects.
Elsewhere, AI startups have been raising millions of dollars from venture capital firms on the promise of changing the legacy Hollywood film and TV business.
The tools they are building are being used across the production cycle. Some, like Moonvalley, are enhancing special effects. Others are promising to help with marketing, content distribution, and content discovery.
It's a challenging time for Hollywood. Budgets generally aren't what they used to be, and studios know they need to do what they can to make projects faster and cheaper. Enter AI.
Netflix and Amazon have talked about how they're using AI to pull off elaborate special effects and improve the viewing experience. Lionsgate is partnering with startup Runway to train an AI model on its library. Others in Hollywood are using AI but not talking about it.
At the same time, many are worried about tech giants using AI to appropriate their IP. Studios have taken issue with OpenAI's Sora generating videos that encroach on their copyrighted characters. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney, accusing it of using tech to rip off Star Wars, Minions, and more.
Studios must also be sensitive to talent's fears of being supplanted by AI as well as audiences' attitudes. A YouGov survey in early October found viewers were mixed on the use of AI. People were most accepting of AI being used to translate subtitles into other languages (64% for), but least accepting of the idea of AI characters replacing human actors (65% against).
How are AI founders pitching investors and Hollywood insiders on their vision of the future?
Business Insider has interviewed the founders of startups behind tools to disrupt traditional TV and filmmaking. They shared the pitch decks they used to raise capital.
Read 9 pitch decks AI startups used to raise millions to disrupt Hollywood:
Khartoon Weiss, the lead exec for TikTok's North American ads business, is exiting the company, four people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
Weiss, who pitched TikTok's suite of ad products to marketers onstage at its NewFronts event last month, joined the company almost six years ago from Spotify. She oversaw TikTok's global agency and accounts teams before being promoted to lead the North America division of the global business solutions team in March 2025, following the departure of advertising head Blake Chandlee.
Weiss' exit is the latest in a string of advertising and marketing team departures at TikTok.
Zuber Mohammed, TikTok's global head of consumer marketing, left the company in March. Sofia Hernandez, the global head of business marketing and commercial partnerships, and Rema Vasan, who headed up business marketing in North America, left the company last quarter.
Other teams at TikTok have also seen leadership changes this year, including the company's content division, which lost its global head of creators, Kim Farrell, in January.
Some of the executive exits have shifted control of North America teams to leaders from Singapore or China. When Chandlee left last year, oversight of the sales team, known as global business solutions, moved to Singapore-based executive Will Liu, for example.
TikTok's US team restructured in January while forming a new joint venture to transfer certain work, like US user data management, to a separate group that includes Oracle and investment firms MGX and Silver Lake. Its advertising and marketing teams remain under the control of parent company ByteDance.
As part of the structural change, Adam Presser, a trust and safety executive, became CEO of the US joint venture. Presser appeared alongside Weiss at TikTok's March NewFronts presentation to assure advertisers that the company's ads experience would not be disrupted amid internal changes.
The latest example is Tommy Harper, a prolific film producer whose credits include "Star Wars" and "Top Gun: Maverick."
Harper is going small for his next act. He's launching VeYou, an app for the made-for-mobile soaps that originated in Asia and have taken off among women viewers.
Harper raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding for VeYou from lead investor S32, a venture firm led by Google Ventures founder Bill Maris, whose other investments have included 23andMe, Impossible Foods, and Nest.
Harper wants to make VeYou the 'HBO' of micro dramas
Micro dramas — also called verticals and mini dramas — are known for being low-budget productions with wild plotlines.
Newer entrants like Harper are trying to evolve the format, using AI-driven special effects to lend a cinematic feel.
VeYou plans to offer action, romance, and drama titles, both licensed and originals made by Harper's own studio, Tiny Verticals. The first original will be "Love Under Fire," an action romance starring vertical drama star Kasey Esser, who wrote the series alongside Harper.
"We're going to ramp up the quality level and the storytelling," Harper said. "We're going to be your HBO in the space."
VeYou has secured distribution on Google TV and Google Play, with distribution on Apple's iOS to follow. It'll also use marketing channels like TikTok and Meta's platforms to attract audiences.
VeYou is adopting the low-cost, viewer-pay model common in the vertical space. The series will cost $100,000 to $250,000 to make. Harper said licensed series will cost viewers $4.99 apiece and originals will be $10.99. Other payment options and advertising will follow.
How VeYou plans to compete
Harper is aware of the challenges facing micro dramas. They cost a fraction of a traditional feature-length movie, but often lose money because of the high cost of marketing. VeYou is a startup without massive financial backing.
"I'm competing with the big Chinese companies that are throwing tons of money at this, so we have to be very, very strategic, and we have to make things that are good quality," he said.
Harper plans to work with people with large social followings to help market VeYou. He's also in talks with brands to fund verticals and help market them in exchange for product placement.
Other Hollywood players have delved into micro dramas, which streaming consulting firm Owl & Co. estimates generated $1.4 billion in the US in 2025. Fox Entertainment invested in Holywater, a Ukrainian company behind the micro drama app My Drama, while Disney gave micro drama app DramaBox a spot in its accelerator program.
Harper sees micro dramas as a chance for more Hollywood jobs
Harper said he was excited about verticals' ability to test concepts that could turn into TV shows or films, while helping employ talent as traditional Hollywood work becomes scarcer.
"It is extremely hard for young talent to get involved in TV and film right now," he said. "And this is a place for them to do it."
Harper knows some in Hollywood look down on micro dramas. He said he got similar reactions when he started working in TV. He believes attitudes will change as new players get involved.
"I had people call me going, 'I don't understand why you're doing television. You know, you do big movies,'" he recalled. "I know we have to make better stories on this platform. That's what we're going to do."
Here are select slides from the pitch deck Harper used to raise his seed round, shared exclusively with Business Insider:
VeYou wants to elevate the micro drama format.
VeYou
Its pitch deck lays out the opportunity.
VeYou
VeYou says micro dramas are poised to become a $26 billion industry globally by 2030.
VeYou says micro dramas have an image problem.
VeYou
The slide reads:
The format works, but the stories don't fit the culture.
Dramatic storytelling drives compulsive spending — but 57% of viewers say there's too much violence.
The content carries a real stigma and social sharing is low because of that.
VeYou wants to expand the format's appeal.
VeYou
Founder Tommy Harper has had a successful career in Hollywood.
VeYou
The slide calls Harper one of Hollywood's highest-grossing producers, with films that have made more than $4 billion at the global box office and include some of the industry's biggest franchises.
VeYou plans to use AI to improve its series.
VeYou
This slide lays out the VeYou formula:
Premium content at scale: Made for a global audience with our network of production partners. Licensed series, dedicated studio & producer partners, and originals with AI-assisted production
Discovery: Free episodes get fans invested Existing fan communities, talent & social media, Google TV + app store feature + distribution deals
Watch & binge: Episodic: Unlock · Share
AI learns: Scene analytics inform marketing, UX & greenlight decisions
Franchise IP: Expansion for breakout properties — films, TV & books
Netflix is asking its subscribers to pay more for the second time in a little over a year.
Christopher Saunders/Netflix
Netflix just raised prices again, following in the footsteps of Disney+, HBO Max, and Peacock.
Steady price increases from paid streamers may be helping fuel the growth of free services like YouTube.
Netflix will still deliver viewers solid value on a cost-per-hour basis after the hike.
Netflix is fully aboard the stream-flation bandwagon.
The streaming giant just raised prices for its three plans, a little over a year after it last asked subscribers to pay more.
Netflix's standard ad-free plan now costs $19.99 a month, up from $17.99, while the premium 4K plan also got a $2 increase to $26.99 a month. The ad-supported Netflix subscription rose by a dollar to $8.99 a month.
While Netflix customers may complain about higher prices, most other major streamers have also steadily gotten more expensive.
Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Apple TV+ all raised prices last year following Netflix's January 2025 hike. Disney has raised the price of its flagship streaming service in each of the past four years.
Hollywood is trying to squeeze more money out of each streaming subscriber to improve or achieve profitability.
Free streamers like YouTube have become increasingly popular in recent years, growing in viewership share on US TVs, as measured by Nielsen. Increased costs could be driving some consumers toward free streaming services ranging from the Roku Channel to Fox's Tubi.
The good news for Netflix is that it still looks like a solid deal for consumers after its latest round of price hikes.
Netflix's ad plan is cheaper than comparable plans for Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, and Peacock (it's the same price as Paramount+ and the stand-alone version of Amazon's Prime Video).
Netflix also offers a far larger library than most of its rivals and is watched more frequently than its peers. That made Netflix the best value by hours watched, UBS analysts wrote last year.
Still, the new price hike won't quiet the critics who said Netflix's failed pursuit of WBD was a sign the streamer was running short on avenues for organic user growth.
Meta has set goals for some employees on how much they should use AI.
They include targets for using AI code assistants, agents, and other tools.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants the company to be "AI-native."
Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be "AI-native." An internal document shows one way the company's CEO plans to get there.
The company has set goals for how much some employees should use AI tools for tasks such as coding.
Meta employees created a document to collect information about these goals from across different organizations, according to a copy seen by Business Insider. It includes goals set late last year and for 2026.
The document states that Meta's creation org, which is responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences, set a goal for the first half of 2026 that 65% of engineers are expected to write more than 75% of their committed code using AI. Committed code is code that has been saved and tracked in a project.
Meta's Scalable Machine Learning org, which focuses on AI models and infrastructure, had a goal for February 2026 to achieve 50% to 80% AI-assisted code, the document said. It cited a comment alongside this goal from a senior engineering manager that said: "We are not tracking this via metrics."
The document also listed several companywide goals for Q4 2025 for central products — a horizontal org spanning Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other major products. One target is for 80% of mid to senior-level engineers to adopt AI tools such as DevMate, Metamate, and Google's Gemini,with a note that the focus is on "tool adoption" rather than the percentage of code written by AI.
It said that 55% of code changes from software engineers across the central product orgs should be "Agent-Assisted."
It is not clear whether the goals listed in the document are tied to performance reviews.
"It's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work," a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. They said that Meta's performance program is focused on rewarding impact from AI tools, not just usage.
Here's a breakdown of Meta's goals in the memo:
Companywide Q4 2025 Goals (Central Products)
55% of software engineers' code changes should be agent-assisted.
80% of mid to senior-level engineers should adopt general AI tools.
Scalable ML Team Goal (Feb 2026)
Target: 50% to 80% AI-assisted code.
Creation Org H1 2026
65% of engineers should write more than 75% of their committed code using AI.
(Note: Some technical terms have been rephrased for clarity)
Mark Zuckerberg's AI odyssey
Zuckerberg is aggressively trying to make Meta what he has called an "AI-native" company. Meta has started tying employee performance to their AI usage, Business Insider reported last year, and staff are using Meta's internal AI bot to write reviews for their peers.
More recently, the company rebranded some employees within a division of Reality Labs with one of three titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."
The change comes as Meta is adopting smaller teams and moving toward a flatter organizational structure.
"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," read a memo about the changes, which was reviewed by Business Insider. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."
Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, told staff on Tuesday that he would take charge of Meta's "AI for Work" initiative, which is designed to boost the company's internal adoption of AI tools, according to a memo reviewed by Business Insider and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Meta laid off several hundred employees across Reality Labs and other orgs this week.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. The bank recently rolled out new objectives for its software engineers to boost productivity and coding quality using AI.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
JPMorgan software developers say the bank is raising its expectations for AI use.
Internal company communications reveal the bank's new AI targets.
The updated objectives affect members of its global developer workforce.
JPMorgan Chase's message to its global armada of software developers is clear: embrace AI or risk falling behind.
Internal company documents seen by Business Insider and posted to JPMorgan's intranet for employees lay out a series of new expectations for the bank's software engineering workforce, who comprise the majority of its 65,000-person-strong Global Technology division. The newly listed objectives, published on the intranet earlier this month, say all software and security engineers are expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI and "contributing to initiatives that improve productivity, speed, scalability, and impact."
One document authored by the bank's human resources leaders laid out two core objectives for software engineers: step up their coding game, and start harnessing AI to save time and get more done. The new language about objectives "will be added automatically and will appear by the end of March," an image of the document on the intranet showed — a reference to upcoming changes to employees' goals expected to take effect at the end of this month. The firm also instructed workers to develop clear goals with their managers that align with the bank's new objectives.
"Demonstrate measurable improvement in code quality, speed and productivity through regular use of approved AI coding assist tools, contributing to the team's overall efficiency targets," read one goal written by HR. "Engage in identifying, implementing and optimizing AI-driven automation opportunities within technology lifecycle management (TLM) processes to drive efficiency and support capacity unlock initiatives, ensuring all enhancements leverage current technology assets before considering new solutions."
A spokeswoman for JPMorgan declined to comment.
JPMorgan is among Wall Street's biggest spenders on technology and artificial intelligence, with projected tech investments reaching roughly $20 billion in 2026 — far exceeding peers like Goldman Sachs. Across corporate America, companies including Meta and Google have begun pushing employees to adopt AI tools and, in some cases, evaluating their use.
Business Insider spoke to five engineers across the bank who said the push to adopt AI has been felt far and wide — in managerial conversations, in intranet posts, and through dashboards that display who's using certain AI tools, and who's not. They added that discussions about productivity and AI adoption have become more frequent in recent weeks. It all comes as developers get ready for a pilot of Anthropic's Claude Code to be rolled out as soon as April, said a longtime IT developer in the Global Technology group. Claude Code would be made available alongside the four other large language models coders are already using: two from OpenAI's ChatGPT, and two from Anthropic's Claude.
'Anxiety' among developers
The developers Business Insider spoke to said they've been encouraged to use AI tools for a wide range of tasks, from writing code to preparing presentations. One dashboard that tracked adoption and usage of the bank's GitHub Copilot appeared to show details as granular as which employees had installed it and identified individuals as "light," "heavy," or "non" users.
For some, the message has added pressure inside a firm that has drawn scrutiny in recent years for its use of internal monitoring tools and performance tracking. Business Insider published a series of reports on the firm's Workforce Activity Data Utility in 2022, a program that collected data points about how employees were spending their day — from the length of video calls to how long they spent drafting emails to where they were sitting in the office.
"There's a lot of anxiety in the environment right now," the longtime IT developer said. Those who don't use AI risk being seen as underperforming, the developer said. Another developer said their manager said in a recent meeting that availability of the new AI tools comes with an "expectation" that velocity and output should show "a noticeable increase" quarter over quarter.
Three of the five developers Business Insider spoke to said the tools are helpful, despite discomfort over the tracking.
New performance dimensions
The updated guidance on AI use comes as the bank implements other adjustments to how it ranks workers' success on the job. Going forward, the bank said on the intranet portal, it's streamlining some of the primary "dimensions" it uses to grade employees, pivoting to using two categories: "what you achieve" — business outcomes — and "how you achieve it," including adherence to the firm's behavioral principles.
According to screenshots from the bank's intranet, JPMorgan will segment workers into three buckets: "stand out" for those who exceed job standards, "achiever" for the majority of employees, and "needs improvement" for those who require "additional support" and have struggled to perform consistently.
Another page Business Insider reviewed listed skills non-managers working in software engineering were expected to display across "all performance dimensions." One is "Data Fluency," noting that the skill is applied by those who develop and drive "adoption of new tools or methodologies to leverage data in the flow of work." "Rate of adoption" is cited as one measurement of the employee's impact toward exhibiting the skill in practice.
The documents from the JPMorgan intranet echo the firm's long-standing culture of internal monitoring and data collection, making clear that continuous performance tracking is vital for keeping workers on target throughout the year.
"You and your manager will use your objectives to track your progress during the year, recognize impact, and streamline your annual review," the firm wrote on an internal page tied to goals.
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X has had a tempestuous relationship with advertisers since Elon Musk bought the company in 2022.
Josh Edelson/Getty Images
A court dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk's X that had accused advertisers of illegally boycotting the platform.
The Texas federal judge cited a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state a claim.
The defendants included Mars, Lego, and Nestlé.
A court tossed out a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X that accused big advertisers like Mars, Lego, and Nestlé of illegally boycotting the platform.
A US District Court judge in Texas dismissed the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X's failure to state an antitrust claim.
X sued several major brands in August 2024, alleging their participation in an ad industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM, was tantamount to a conspiracy to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising" from X after Musk's takeover of the company, then known as Twitter. It later added other brands to the suit.
X claimed the alleged boycott made it less competitive than other platforms in winning advertisers and user engagement.
Other plaintiffs named in the suit were the World Federation of Advertisers, CVS Health, Ørsted, Twitch, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, Tyson, and Shell.
WFA shut down GARM, its initiative, after the suit was filed, citing limited resources.
The suit was partly spurred by an investigation by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, into whether advertisers were illegally banding together to demonetize conservative platforms and voices in violation of antitrust law.
The plaintiffs fought back, calling the lawsuit "an attempt to use the courthouse to win back the business X lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers."
X's relationship with advertisers has been fraught since Musk bought the platform in 2022. Advertisers left en masse as X loosened moderation and account-verification rules and reinstated the banned accounts of some provocative figures.
EMARKETER, Business Insider's sister company, estimated its revenue would reach $2.2 billion in 2026, below its pre-acquisition level of $4.5 billion.
X has tried to win back advertisers by underscoring its commitment to brand safety and promoting its use of block lists that let advertisers avoid showing up around certain topics.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Elon Musk said that he is looking at xAI's interview history to scan for missed talent.
Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX would collaborate on a moonshot Terafab chip-building project.
Tesla has posted its first Terafab roles in California and Texas, and is offering a wide salary range.
SpaceX is also ramping up hiring at its silicon division as it looks to bring chip production in-house.
Tesla and SpaceX are ramping up semiconductor hiring as Elon Musk's ambitious plans for a Terafab take shape.
Tesla is hiring Terafab engineers in Palo Alto and Austin, according to job listings on the company's website, after Musk said the company would collaborate with SpaceX to build what could be the largest chip manufacturing plant in history.
In California, the EV giant is looking for module process engineers with expertise in lithography, the highly technical discipline that uses ultraviolet light to etch chip designs onto silicon wafers at a molecular scale. It is offering a base salary of $88,000 to $240,000, depending on experience and other factors.
Applicants need to have at least 10 years of experience in cutting-edge semiconductor development.
The job listing suggests they would also need to be comfortable with Tesla's famously intense work culture, with expectations including a willingness to be on-call to "support 24/7 manufacturing operations" and respond rapidly to "critical production issues."
At the Terafab announcement on Saturday, Musk said the facility would create lithography masks — the quartz or glass template that contains the chip design imprinted onto the wafer — in-house, allowing Tesla and SpaceX to quickly iterate and improve chip designs.
"To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't exist anywhere in the world," said Musk, who added that the companies were exploring "some very interesting new physics" to make the project work.
Tesla's Terafab division is also hiring process integration engineers to build advanced logic chips, with base salaries ranging from $88,000 to $338,280. Musk has said Terafab will combine logic and memory chip production under a single roof, something that is highly unusual in the chipmaking industry.
The wide salary range is in line with Tesla's approach to compensation. Business Insider previously reported that the company offers lower base salaries than its tech giant rivals, but includes substantial stock grants.
Tesla is also advertising open roles for silicon engineers in Austin, and is looking to recruit a technical program manager with a proven track record of running "$100 million-plus capex projects" to oversee the design and construction of the fabs. Neither job listing includes base salaries.
Tesla faces talent scramble over Terafab
Recruitment will be one of the biggest challenges facing Musk's ambitious goal of building one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers from scratch. The industry relies on specialized knowledge that is carefully cultivated within leading companies like TSMC. It's also facing a global shortage of skilled workers.
SpaceX is scaling up its semiconductor hiring as the rocket maker prepares to launch up to one million orbital data centers, powered by AI chips built by Terafab that are specially adapted for the icy wastes of space.
The company has around 60 open positions in its Silicon division, according to SpaceX's website, though it's unclear which of these roles — if any — are directly related to Terafab.
They include assembly and packaging engineers at its Starlink factory in Bastrop, Texas, where the company invested $280 million last year to expand its semiconductor R&D and packaging facilities, as well as engineers in Washington and California to develop "cutting-edge" specialist chips for deployment in space and on Earth.
"In true SpaceX fashion, Starlink is taking the next step in vertical integration by bringing integrated circuit packaging and assembly in-house for development and manufacturing," read the descriptions on the Bastrop job listings, which do not include salaries.
SpaceX and Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
A large division within Meta Reality Labs is undergoing an overhaul to become fully "AI-native."
The unit is now organized into "pods" made up of "AI builders" and "AI pod leads."
This new push and the latest layoffs at Reality Labs are unrelated, Meta said.
Meta is rebranding some employees as "AI builders" and organizing them into AI-native "pods," according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.
The memo described an overhaul of roles, titles, and team structures across a 1,000-employee team within Meta's Reality Labs. It's part of a broader, aggressive push by Meta to adopt small teams and use AI.
The pilot program was announced last month within the Reality Labs team that builds developer tools. Everyone in the division will now have one of three titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, or AI Org Lead. That's to encourage a shift toward a flatter organization, a structure that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated.
"Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality," the memo reads. "To achieve this, we're fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other."
When asked for comment, Meta referred Business Insider to comments earlier this year from Zuckerberg that 2026 is the year AI will begin to "dramatically change the way we work," with projects that once required large teams potentially handled by one, "very talented" person.
According to the memo, each pod consists of a small group of AI builders focused on specific outcomes, often working across disciplines. For example, engineers could take on design work, depending on the task. Some Meta employees have already begun referring to themselves as AI builders on LinkedIn, Business Insider previously reported.
These pods are led by Pod Leads, who oversee day-to-day operations. They are, in turn, overseen by Org Leads, who also manage performance reviews and oversee promotions — processes that will be supported by unspecified "AI systems."
The memo said that the overall team size will remain the same under the new structure.
Meta laid off hundreds of staff on Wednesday, and this cut affected staff in Reality Labs, among other teams. A Meta spokesperson said the reorganization is not related to the cuts.
Arm CEO Rene Haas announced the company's AGI CPU at the Arm Everywhere conference on Tuesday.
Arm
Arm announced its own AI chip, the AGI CPU, and is partnering with OpenAI and Meta.
The new Arm AGI CPU aims to address energy efficiency and memory constraints in AI data centers.
Despite strong growth prospects, Arm faces competition from established players like Nvidia and AMD.
Arm has long run its business as an architect behind the scenes, designing chips that power almost all the world's smartphone and making money off royalties from the chips it designs for customers.
Now, Arm is changing it up by announcing its own AI chip, the Arm AGI CPU.
Arm CEO Rene Haas said Tuesday at a company conference that this massive pivot wasn't just an internal strategy shift—it was a direct plea from the world's most powerful AI giants. The company name-dropped OpenAI and Meta as major partners for this chip.
"The biggest reason we're doing this is that our partners have asked for it," Haas said Tuesday.
With energy constraints and memory shortages, the AI boom has created a massive bottleneck in data centers. Faced with this demand, Arm stepped up with an AI chip that it says is more energy-efficient. Arm says it sees a $1.5 trillion market opportunity as it moves into AI chips for cloud, edge, and physical AI.
Arm stock was up by more than 18% on Wednesday. Mizuho analysts wrote that they see "strong growth opportunities" for Arm in AI infrastructure and the automotive industry. Bank of America research analyst Vivek Arya wrote in a note to investors that the company's outlook could be "too ambitious."
Meta and OpenAI partner with Arm
Meta has been building out data centers at a massive scale to power its apps and its latest superintelligence ventures. Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, said Tuesday onstage that its coming "Hyperion" cluster could draw 5 gigawatts of power, enough to power 50 towns the size of Palo Alto.
"If we met the performance, we couldn't get the power. If we got the power, we wouldn't get the performance," Janardhan said.
This sparked an engineering project within Meta, where engineers were "working 'round the clock" to port its systems to Arm in three months, said Paul Saab, a Meta engineer.
"I didn't even ask my boss here for permission to buy these machines or even start the project," Saab said onstage.
While Saab says he saw major performance benefits, at the time, there wasn't an Arm chip available to buy.
OpenAI faced a similar problem. Its compute demand has grown massively as it trains and runs its ChatGPT models, its AI coding tool Codex, and more.
"That is one of the most common things I hear inside OpenAI. I need more compute," Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for science, said onstage, adding that it needed chips that were energy-efficient.
Arm said it expects this chip to generate $15 billion in revenue by fiscal 2031.
The chip market is 'getting very crowded'
Arm faces the risk that the CPU market is "getting very crowded," Arya wrote in his analyst note. Other competitors, such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, have more CPU products and more established customers. Notably, both Meta and OpenAI also work with AMD and Nvidia, which could leave "limited" opportunity for Arm's new CPU, Arya wrote.
"Moreover, the bigger AI grows, the more pressure ARM's smartphone/consumer markets would have from limited memory supplies," Arya wrote.
That said, the increasing demand has led many customers to turn to chip companies beyond Nvidia for their computing needs. Both Meta and OpenAI also work with Broadcom to build AI chips.
The rise of AI agents has also led to greater demand for inference, or how AI models draw conclusions and make predictions. While Nvidia's core AI chips, the GPUs, dominate AI training, CPUs like Arm's AGI CPU can also help with inference. Nvidia also recently made moves into this market.
Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Salesforce is skipping raises for director-level and above employees this year, according to an internal memo.
The company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals."
Employees will find out about their pay during reviews, which start at the end of this month.
Salesforce isn't offering raises this year to employees at the director level and above, according to an internal email viewed by Business Insider.
"We have decided to focus merit increases at the Senior Manager level (grade 8) and below," states the email, sent by the company's human-resources team.
Instead of giving raises, the company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals" among upper-level employees, calling it part of an "investment in performance and long-term growth."
Employees will learn about their compensation during performance reviews, which begin at the end of March.
Salesforce's decision could reflect a broader shift in how Big Tech is paying senior talent. Instead of increasing base pay, some companies are increasingly tying compensation to stock performance and equity, preserving cash while still incentivizing top leaders. Meta just announced this week that it created a lucrative incentive system for stock for a number of its C-suite executives.
Salesforce stock is down about 37% over the past year. CEO Marc Benioff recently downplayed fears about AI's threat to software-as-a-service companies. Those fears have prompted recent sell-offs of software stocks.
The email stated that 10% more directors and senior directors are getting stock grants, that the average stock grant increased, and that 80% of directors and senior directors who received "highly successful" or "exceptional" performance ratings received a 20% to 40% bigger grant.
The pool for bonuses "is funded at 103%," the email stated. Most eligible directors and senior directors received 100% or more of their bonus, and all of the directors and senior directors who received the top performance ratings got 115% to 140% of their bonuses.
The e-commerce giant is testing a new delivery system that breaks the day into 10 distinct windows spanning 24 hours, according to internal documents obtained by Business Insider.
That's a meaningful expansion from Amazon's traditional delivery hours, which typically run from 6 am to 10 pm. The new structure effectively turns delivery into a rolling, all-day cycle, with faster options carrying premium fees.
The initiative, led by Udit Madan, Amazon SVP of worldwide operations, began as a pilot program with plans to potentially expand across the network later this year, according to the documents.
Selling speed
If successful, it would mark one of the most significant changes to Amazon's delivery model in years, shifting the company from offering fast shipping as a default to selling speed as a premium product.
As part of the effort, Amazon has explored charging extra fees for fast delivery options, including 45-minute and 2.5-hour services, according to the documents.
By expanding delivery hours and introducing paid upgrades for faster service, Amazon is trying to turn the final and most expensive stretch of its logistics network into a new source of profit.
According to internal projections, Amazon projects the new delivery fees and higher sales volume will ultimately make faster shipping a meaningful profit driver, even as it expects hundreds of millions of dollars in near-term costs.
"Explore avenues to monetize (charge ship-fee) on the last 1-hr of delivery," one of the documents stated.
Starting as a small pilot
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the company is conducting a "small pilot in a few US locations" to test a new delivery structure that will "introduce shorter delivery windows" and provide customers with "more frequent delivery options throughout the day."
Amazon has not decided on the future rollout of the new program and is evaluating customer response before deciding whether to expand it more broadly, the spokesperson added.
This is unrelated to last week's launch of 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options, the spokesperson also said. That built on a limited 30-minute ultrafast service introduced last year.
"We are always innovating on behalf of customers and continue to find new ways of offering them lower prices, greater selection, and more convenience," the spokesperson said in an email statement.
Slicing up a day
Under the new system, Amazon divides the day into named, overlapping windows, each roughly three hours long.
The windows span early-morning slots like 3 am to 6 am through evening and overnight periods such as 8 pm to 11 pm and 11 pm to 4 am, each with internal codenames ranging from "Sunrise" and "Coffee" to "Nightowl."
The new system also gives Amazon tighter control over how delivery options are presented.
According to the documents, Amazon wants to show customers specific arrival times, making delivery feel precise and predictable, not just fast. For example, it wants to say the package "arrives in 45 minutes," instead of a window range, the documents showed.
The Amazon spokesperson said the company already provides delivery estimates like "arrive by," and, in some cases, more precise timing as it continues to improve accuracy over time. Amazon is not moving to "exact, minute-by-minute scheduling," the spokesperson added.
Amazon believes a steady, deliberate rollout of the new delivery service will help it better learn and measure the impact before expanding across the full network, according to one of the documents.
Speed is expensive
The plan to charge for faster delivery marks a broader shift for Amazon. For years, the company bundled new perks into Prime at no extra cost. Now it's increasingly charging for premium features, from ad-free Prime Video and Whole Foods deliveries to services like One Medical.
For the faster delivery fee, Amazon benchmarked similar services from Walmart, Instacart, DoorDash, and UberEats, one of the documents showed.
The Amazon spokesperson said this is not a shift away from "fast, free delivery" or "a change in approach." The Prime membership continues to offer "significant value, including fast, free delivery on millions of items, alongside optional faster delivery options in some cases," the spokesperson added.
The push for all-day delivery and speed, however, comes at a cost.
One estimate, based on expanding the service to all sites by July, projects more than $330 million in costs this year and over $780 million next year. A slower rollout, reaching full scale by September 2026, would bring next year's costs closer to $490 million, according to the documents.
At the same time, Amazon expects faster shipping to drive higher order volume and revenue, with the goal of ultimately making the model pay for itself.
The company projects the fully scaled program will increase sub-same-day delivery volume by at least 40 million units this year alone, helping offset the added costs through higher sales and new revenue streams, including premium delivery fees. Those fees are expected to generate at least $20 million in incremental revenue this year, according to the documents.
Over time, Amazon expects the model to turn profitable, projecting about $40 million in operating profit this year and roughly $260 million in 2027 if fully rolled out by September 2026, the documents added.
That helps explain why Amazon is moving quickly to expand all-day delivery. The company wants to "blitz scale" the model across its network this year after the current pilot test, according to one of the documents.
"Clipping" marketing, a practice where creators get paid to repost video clips, is taking off.
Top-tier clipping creators can now earn thousands of dollars a month, with guaranteed pay.
Clipping has gained popularity among podcasters, Kick streamers, and YouTubers like MrBeast.
There's a new class of creators moving from side hustlers to in-demand pros.
Dubbed "clippers," these creators are paid to post snippets of podcasts, livestreams, movies, or songs on TikTok and other social apps, creating the impression that they're trendy.
Even if you haven't heard of "clipping," you've likely seen this emerging social-media strategy in the wild.
YouTubers, podcasters, and Kick streamers are early adopters of the tactic, which is performance-based and usually only pays out if a video gets significant views.
The clipping community is filled with side hustlers who are happy to earn $200 from a viral video. However, as the category has matured and attracted larger budgets, a new professional class of high-performing clippers has emerged. These clipping all-stars can still get performance-based pay, but they're also being offered guaranteed retainers of $500 to $1,500 a month to ensure they get to work, according to one "elite clipper" application viewed by Business Insider.
"An elite clipper is someone who runs hundreds of pages, and across those hundreds of pages, multiple have millions of followers or a minimum 100,000 followers," said Evan Stanfield, cofounder of the clip-marketing agency Clipping Culture. "If we're paying a monthly retainer, we can ask them to post 20 or 30 times a month, instead of whenever they feel like it."
These "top 1% of clippers" can earn five figures a month, Stanfield said.
Clipping is gaining popularity at a moment of flux in the world of social media marketing. As algorithmic feeds become more personalized, hiring influencers to post sponsored content doesn't necessarily translate into views (unless you're a superstar). Marketers who post clipping campaigns only pay when their content performs.
YouTuber MrBeast recently launched his own clipping platform, Vyro, which he uses to promote his channel, according to the company's website.
"The clippers that we're talking about are not like influencers," said Johnny Cloherty, CEO of the marketing-agency Genni. "You're getting people that are like you and me, or maybe some college kids that are just looking for some extra dough."
Clippers can sign up for campaigns in Discord servers, side-hustle sites like Whop, or marketing platforms like Genni. While they're often paid to clip footage, at other times the task is to add a brand's logo to a viral video clip or to embed a song beneath a post.
They're typically offered between $1 and $4 per 1,000 views, marketers told Business Insider, though some agencies offer higher rates when creators reach thresholds like 100,000 or 1 million views.
To promote the launch of Beast Land, MrBeast offered creators $2 for every 1,000 views on clips they posted about the pop-up theme park, for example. A Vyro promotion for a November boxing match between Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jr. offered the same rate. One of Clipping Culture's recent briefs asked clippers to promote footage from Sabrina Carpenter and María Becerra's Lollapalooza Argentina appearance for around $1 per 1,000 views.
"It is a little bit of a roll of the dice for the clippers, but it's a super low lift for them," Cloherty said. "These clippers have become an ecosystem and a community out there that kind of know what they're doing, and know the pros and cons of it."
José, the new humanoid robot at San Josè Mineta International Airport.
San Josè Mineta International Airport
San José airport starts testing an AI robot called José to assist travelers.
The pilot test launched on Tuesday amid travel chaos at many US airports.
Some TSA workers have stopped coming into work due to a government shutdown.
One of Silicon Valley's main airports just made its newest hire, a robot named "José."
San José Mineta International Airport is turning to artificial intelligence to ease the strain of modern air travel, debuting "José," a humanoid robot, as some US airports grapple with staffing shortages and widespread delays.
Developed by Silicon Valley startup IntBot, José is designed to greet passengers, answer questions, and provide real-time updates while autonomously navigating busy terminals.
The robot will be stationed in SJC'sTerminal B as part of a four-month pilot, "singlehandedly running his own gate," according to an email previewing the test that referred to José as the airport's "newest hire."
Airport officials said the launch highlights San José's roleas a testing ground for emerging technologies to improve customer service.
"By piloting IntBot, we're exploring how artificial intelligence can enhance the passenger journey while reinforcing SJC's role as the gateway to Silicon Valley," said SJC Director of Aviation Mookie Patel.
The timing is notable. Airports across the US have been hit by long security lines and travel chaos, driven in part by many Transportation Security Administration workers not reporting to work during a partial government shutdown. With TSA agents going unpaid at the height of the spring break season, some airports have struggled to maintain normal operations.
José the robot represents a broader push to automate parts of the airport experience, from passenger assistance to information delivery.
SJC officials said the pilot will help evaluate how multimodal AI, combining vision, audio, and language, performs in real-world environments.
The future of air travel may include a robotic helping hand — and it can't come fast enough for weary vacationers stuck in long lines.
At law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. But timekeeping is a pain.
The startup PointOne says it's using AI to help lawyers auto-complete timesheets and bill more time.
PointOne raised $16 million in a funding round led by the venture capital firm 8VC.
Tracking hours is part of how lawyers get paid. It's also the bane of the profession.
A startup called PointOne wants to eliminate the most tedious part of a lawyer's job. It says its AI-powered platform passively tracks a lawyer's computer activity and uses it to complete timesheets.
The company grew revenue tenfold since July, says PointOne cofounder Katon Luaces, after signing up dozens of law firm customers, ranging from a global 1,200-lawyer outfit to solo practitioners.
Investors are taking notice. After making a small earlier investment, the Joe Londsale-founded venture firm 8VC is leading a $16 million Series A round for PointOne, Luaces tells Business Insider. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator also participated.
Founders are flooding into legal tech, betting they can turn large language models into products law firms will trust — and competing for attention in an estimated $1 trillion industry.
Jack Moshkovich, an 8VC partner, said the market is crowded with companies trying to help lawyers do work faster. That leaves more whitespace, he said, on the operational side of the business.
Luaces isn't a lawyer. In 2019, he was a computer science major and a Google intern as the company's researchers were laying the groundwork for modern large language models.
He saw legal work as a natural target for the technology because so much of it is repetitive and text-heavy. By 2023, he and his roommate, Jeremy Ben-Meir, along with a third cofounder, Adrian Parlow, started sketching out an idea for a legal startup. (Parlow left PointOne last year and joined legal-tech giant Legora.)
When Luaces asked lawyers which part of the job they hated most, he kept hearing the same answer: timekeeping. At most law firms, the billable hour is the standard way to charge clients. Lawyers log the work they do for each client — often in six-minute increments — then tally those hours and bill accordingly. Many still track their hours in a spreadsheet or by hand on a legal pad.
PointOne's platform runs in the background as lawyers move between apps, then fills in time entries with the client, matter, a description of the work, and standardized legal codes.
Security and confidentiality are essential for law firms. Clients trust them with trade secrets and other closely held information, leaving little room for error from any software vendor.
When asked how lawyers feel about software watching them work, Luaces said their dislike of timekeeping helps overcome any discomfort. PointOne says it encrypts stored sensitive data, does not train models on firm data, and gives firms the option to use models in a private Azure environment.
For lawyers, "this is like magic beans," Luaces said.
Time savings aren't the point
Law firms are still working out how to use artificial intelligence to work faster without hurting their economics. Software that saves time can also reduce the number of hours a firm can bill.
PointOne, however, is not pitching itself as a way to save lawyers' time. Instead, it says it can help firms capture time that would otherwise go unbilled.
Some share of legal work never makes it into timesheets. Junior lawyers may undercount how long a task took, either because they're still learning or because they're embarrassed. More often, Luaces said, lawyers skip billing for small tasks because logging them takes almost as long as the work itself.
A lawyer might spend four minutes writing a client email. "I can either spend the next four minutes creating the time entry for it, or I can do more work," Luaces said. "Nine out of 10 times, everyone chooses to do more work."
He says the company's software can increase revenue by capturing billable time that would otherwise be lost.
PointOne isn't the only company making such promises. Its biggest competitor, Laurel, provides professional services firms with analytics about their operations, including time. It's raised over $150 million in funding since 2016, compared to PointOne's $20 million total.
PointOne wants to position itself for a broader shift in how legal work gets priced. Corporate clients are pushing back on soaring legal bills, and as artificial intelligence threatens to trim billable hours, firms are under pressure to test alternatives to hourly billing, including fixed fees for certain matters. Luaces said PointOne's data can help firms better understand the labor behind a matter, which in turn can help them price that work more precisely.
Palmer Luckey's Spotify includes heavy metal, Celtic punk, and lots of Kelly Clarkson.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% to buy Anduril shares.
The steep markup reflects a two-tiered class for accessing stock in the hottest startups.
Data from Caplight highlights a supply imbalance, with buyer demand surging to 97% while sellers' demand is at 3%.
Anduril hasn't even finalized its next funding round, and investors are already eager to pay up like it's a sold-out concert. As marquee venture firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz line up to back the defense tech startup at a reported $60 billion valuation, others shut out of the deal are scrambling to buy shares on secondary markets at steep premiums.
"Demand is so significant that buyers who have FOMO are willing to pay huge premiums for access," said Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge Global, a private marketplace exchange for shares of private companies like Anduril. "The company hates when this happens, but it happens."
The frenzy around investing in Anduril reflects the growing divide in private markets: access to the hottest startups is split between the VC firms that get in at a certain price and everyone else, forced to pay up on the sidelines. Anthropic has also seen a premium for secondary shares, though not as significant, said Rodriques.
Those investors shut out of the company's fundraising round are forced to buy via secondary markets, with existing stock in the company being sold by current or former employees or early investors. The rush for shares reminds Rodriques of buying tickets to see Taylor Swift on Stubhub when her concert sells out in minutes.
"It's scalping," he said.
Interested buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% above the $60 billion valuation to buy Anduril shares, according to Rodriques and Greg Martin, managing director and co-founder at Rainmaker Securities, another private marketplace exchange. The deals are not yet finalized because a willing seller and the company's blessing are still required.
"The magnitude of the premium is unusual," said Martin. "Usually we see premiums in the 5% to 15% range."
"If I were an investor looking at this 'opportunity,' I'd run for the hills," Grimm posted in December. "Secondary markets are rife with fraud and bad actors, and it pains me to see these bottom feeders profiting off Anduril's growth while fleecing retail investors through unreasonable or opaque fee structures."
The founders have tightly controlled Andruil's stock, requiring would-be sellers to offer the company a first right of refusal to buy back those shares or assign the sale to a buyer of Andruil's choosing. The limited supply is a major reason shares have been among the hardest to obtain for any startup since last year, driving investor "frenzy."
Data from Caplight highlights a massive supply imbalance in the secondary market for Anduril stock, with buyer demand surging to 97% of total volume compared to just 3% from willing sellers—a stark shift from a 69-to-31 split in February.
If demand for Anduril shares is so high, the obvious question is: Why doesn't the company raise its share price to avoid leaving money on the table?
To explain, Rodriques went back to the analogy of a Taylor Swift concert or Nike shoes. Just because some people are willing to pay more does not mean the company wants to set its prices so high.
"It's the same reason Nike doesn't sell sneakers for $2000 if there's a secondary market for a hard-to-get sneaker," Rodriques said. "It's not in their best interest to charge their customers $2000 for a pair of shoes."
Similarly, Anduril would prefer to raise capital from its chosen VCs.
"The company has gotten to a $60 billion valuation by doing a very detailed and thorough job of working with some of the best investors in the world," he said.
Caleb Hammer says he doesn't see Americans' overspending woes going away anytime soon.
Caleb Hammer via YouTube
YouTuber Caleb Hammer drags people for their poor financial decisions on his show "Financial Audit."
He revealed the one mistake he sees people make the most — and why it's not entirely their fault.
He also shared what he splurges on, having paid down his own debt.
YouTuber Caleb Hammer has built a career digging into people's poor money decisions on his show, "Financial Audit."
He says there's one mistake he sees most consistently.
"It's the cars," he said during a wide-ranging interview with Business Insider. "People are obsessed with getting whatever big truck or SUV that has the new year on it. And they say it's the safety features, because, you know, we were making cars one year ago that were just killing everyone. So you've got to get the 2027 Ford F-150 Turbo edition."
Hammer, who also sells a budgeting app, Dollarwise, and financial education courses, conceded that it's not entirely people's fault that they fall into the car trap.
"You need to have a car to have a job, and you need to have a job to have a car," he said. "We have that endless loop because we have horrible public infrastructure in this country. We built everything around the car. So people are stuck in that loop."
Still, he said, people will also try to justify spending beyond their means on their "dream car."
"It doesn't make sense," he continued.
Hammer, 31, speaks from experience. He once racked up $120,000 in debt by paying for college, a car, and some impulse buys. He taught himself about money management, which inspired him to start his show.
Now, he has a mortgage and a modest amount of debt, and has shifted his priorities. He spends on the occasional dinner out, his dogs, and hiring good people for his company.
"I still love McDonald's," he said. "I try not to get it, and my girlfriend doesn't want me to because it's bad for me. But at least I can afford it."
Hammer said he doesn't see the financial situation of everyday Americans improving anytime soon, especially with the rise of buy-now-pay-later services.
"With Klarna being baked into everything and Afterpay, unfortunately, I have a feeling the show's going to be going till I'm done," he said.
Andrey Khusid, Founder & CEO, Miro, on People Summit stage during day one of Web Summit 2025 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images
Miro's CEO says the company is plowing cash into AI subscriptions to help employees level up.
"Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," Andrey Khusid said.
AI adoption is accelerating, and with it come questions about the technology's ROI.
Plenty of companies are still debating whether costly AI subscriptions are worth it. Miro has gone the other way.
Andrey Khusid, cofounder of Miro, the maker of a popular online whiteboard platform, says the company gives employees essentially unlimited access to the latest AI tools as a way to speed up how quickly they learn and work.
That approach is possible, he said, because Miro has been profitable since 2016. The company has raised $476 million to date, and Khusid suggested it does not expect to need more capital.
Khusid framed the spending as a core part of more traditional workplace training. "Our L&D budget is unlimited tooling," he said.
Rather than asking employees to learn on their own time or pay out of pocket, he said, Miro wants that experimentation to happen inside the company, as a shared effort. He later added that there should still be a clear business case for buying any tool.
Miro's strategy is part of a wider shift in tech, where AI adoption is moving from optional to expected. A new study from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish, based on data from more than 700 companies, found that 64% now produce a majority of their code with AI assistance. Tech giants like Google are pushing employees to use AI tools more aggressively, and Microsoft has begun tying AI usage to performance evaluations. As a result, AI fluency is quickly becoming a core workplace skill rather than a nice-to-have.
Still, Khusid says many executives ask the wrong question about AI ROI. Rather than judging the tools on individual productivity gains or subscription costs, he said Miro is trying to focus on whether the company is moving faster overall.
The company tracks projects through what he described as a "discover, define, deliver" process and measures how long it takes to move from one stage to the next. The goal is to compress that timeline as much as possible.
"The most important metric from my perspective is velocity of innovation," Khusid said. "If you don't innovate fast enough, you're out of the game."
Khusid said he doesn't think the way companies use AI today is necessarily the end state. He said it will take at least until the end of this year, or even next year, to see what a workplace shaped by these tools really looks like. At that point, Miro will take a harder look at which tools are worth the price tag.
For now, he said, Miro is already seeing time savings across engineering, product, and design. That's not always the case, though. Better tools speed code generation, he said, but code reviews can still bog down projects.
"Humans have to read it," Khusid said. At least for now.
Elon Musk has said building a Terafab is critical to Tesla's future.
Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images
Elon Musk is about to unveil his most challenging project yet: a giant semiconductor factory.
The billionaire has said Tesla needs to build a "Terafab" to churn out chips for its robotaxis and Optimus robot.
One analyst said to never rule Musk out, but that building a Terafab could be harder than sending rockets to Mars.
Self-driving cars, cyborgs, and catching rockets in midair: Elon Musk can't resist the lure of the impossible.
The world's richest man has made a habit of taking on the world's most difficult engineering challenges at Tesla and SpaceX— and has often proved the doubters wrong. His latest target is a tall order even by his standards.
For several months, Musk has been talking about building a "Terafab," a mammoth factory that would churn out semiconductors critical for Tesla's ambitious rollout of robotaxis and humanoid robots.
On Saturday, he teased that an announcement was imminent. "Terafab Project launches in 7 days," Musk wrote in an X post, without providing further details.
In a January earnings call, the billionaire cited chip production as the major long-term headwind to the company's growth, suggesting that output from suppliers Samsung, TSMC, and Micron would be nowhere near enough to meet Tesla's targets as the EV giant scales its robotaxi and humanoid robot programs.
"This is definitely going to be sort of a controversial thing, but I think Tesla needs to build a Terafab," Musk told investors, adding that such a facility would also protect Tesla against geopolitical upheaval.
The Tesla CEO suggested that the company would pursue the hardest possible version of that vision, a "very big fab" that would produce and package logic and memory chips entirely in the US.
Speaking at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting last November, Musk estimated the Terafab would aim to initially produce 100,000 silicon wafers a month and could eventually grow to 1 million.
SpaceX made history by returning the Heavy Booster to its launch site.
SpaceX/Getty Images
Ahead of the Terafab announcement, Tesla has begun laying the groundwork for Musk's grand plan. The tech giant is hiring a semiconductor infrastructure manager to oversee factory design and construction, per a recent job posting. The role is based in Austin, suggesting the Terafab could be built near Tesla's gigafactory on the outskirts of the city.
However, analysts told Business Insider that Tesla would face enormous challenges — and a huge bill — as it tries to master one of the most complex technologies on the planet.
"It's Musk, so I would never count it out. But I suspect this is actually harder than sending rockets to Mars," Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior semiconductor analyst at Bernstein, told Business Insider.
Semi-impossible?
The global supply of semiconductors is almost entirely produced by a small handful of companies, many of them based in East Asia.
Manufacturing them is an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming process. Deep within hermetically sealed factories, chip designs are etched onto thin silicon wafers at the molecular level by specialist lithography machines, which are almost entirely made by one company in the Netherlands and can have a waitlist of over a year.
Rasgon said that procuring these in-demand ASML-built machineswas a critical roadblock for any would-be chipmaker.
"If you're a brand new customer, you're probably waiting a couple of years before getting your hand on one of those," he said.
Rasgon added that chipmakers usually split up production of logic and memory chips and semiconductor packaging across different factories.
Musk's suggestion that Tesla could integrate them all into one facility would make scaling the Terafab even more complicated, Rasgon said, as each product has wildly different processes and economics.
TSMC broke ground on its factory in Arizona in 2021.
: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Musk is not alone in fearing geopolitical disruption. The threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which would plunge global chip supply into chaos, has prompted companies, including TSMC, to build new chip fabs in the US.
But the road to US-produced semiconductors has been far from smooth. TSMC's Arizona expansion has faced years of delays and a total price tag of around $165 billion across multiple facilities.
The industry runs on technical knowledge that is deeply embedded within leading companies. TSMC flew employees out from Taiwan to help the Arizona facility ramp production and brought US workers to its home country to train them.
The need for specialized knowledge will make recruitment critical for Tesla's Terafab hopes, Rasgon said, adding that the semiconductor industry is already facing a worker shortage.
"These guys don't grow on trees," he said.
A 'Herculean' challenge
Analysts warned that overcoming these challenges would add to the severe cash burn Tesla is set to face in the coming years.
The company said in January it would spend $20 billion on building out its robotaxi and Optimus production lines this year, a figure which does not include the Terafab project.
Ben Kallo, a senior research analyst at Baird, told Business Insider that investors would have questions about how Tesla plans to fund such an ambitious project — especially considering Musk has also said Tesla will build around 100 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing.
"Where's the money coming from? I think that's going to be a question," said Kallo, who added that he wouldn't rule out Tesla raising outside capital for the first time since 2020 to fulfill Musk's ambitious targets.
Musk hasn't given a specific timeline for building the Terafab and producing chips, but he said in the January earnings call that he was building it to "remove a probable constraint in three or four years."
In a Tuesday note, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Andrew Percoco pointed to Micron's factory in Boise — which began construction in late 2022 but isn't expected to begin shipping chips until mid-2027 — as evidence of how long it can take to build semiconductor infrastructure in the US.
They estimated that building a factory capable of producing 100,000 wafers for cutting-edge logic chips a month could cost as much as $45 billion. A note from UBS analysts in January estimated that just getting to Musk's initial production target of 100,000 silicon wafers a month would cost $30 billion.
"Even understanding Elon Musk's history of doing difficult things, this seems like a Herculean task," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.
Serval founders Jake Stauch (left) and Alex McLeod.
Serval
Eight salespeople from ServiceNow have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months.
Two of the salespeople cited fears about AI as their reason for leaving ServiceNow.
ServiceNow's stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse.
Eight salespeople from ServiceNow and its newly acquired subsidiary, Moveworks, have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months, Business Insider has learned.
ServiceNow is a cloud computing software company whose stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse, as investors fear AI could decimate the profit margins of software giants. In an effort to stay one step ahead in the AI race, ServiceNow closed an all-cash $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks in December to create an "AI-native front door."
The same month, Serval closed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the rapidly growing AI-powered IT support startup at $1 billion. Sequoia was also an early investor in ServiceNow.
Eight employees represent a fraction of ServiceNow's 29,000-person workforce. Still, the exodus shows how difficult it can be for tech companies with falling valuations to retain talent when buzzy, well-funded AI companies come calling. A ServiceNow spokesman declined to comment.
The highest-level departure is Brad Patterson, who had been a ServiceNow sales VP for nearly two years.
"AI is really making serious moves," Patterson said in an interview. "In a similar way, market sentiment is responding; I think people are responding in the same way."
Every incumbent tech company is facing a similar talent drain, according to Jules Levy, ServiceNow's former head of enterprise generative & enterprise AI, who is also among those joining Serval.
"I don't think this is unique to ServiceNow," he said in an interview. "Many folks within those incumbents are looking to jump to AI-native platforms that will be able to move really fast and take advantage of this technological wave."
"I think everyone's trying to figure out what comes next," he added.
Serval is not specifically targeting ServiceNow employees, but when one employee leaves, it can have a ripple effect, according to Tatiana Birgisson, Serval's chief operating officer.
"If you hire really good people, other really good people in their network want to follow them," she said, citing Chris Comes, who became a Serval VP of Sales in November after more than three years at MoveWorks. "Multiple people got excited about seeing the announcement of his going to Servo."
Startups have usually offered less job security and lower cash compensation than public tech companies, but Birgisson says tech downsizing has made it easier to recruit candidates.
"Big Tech no longer feels as safe as it once did," Birgisson said. "We are starting to see more candidates who, 5-10 years ago, would not have considered working at a startup, but are now more open to it because there isn't the clear divide between 'secure' and 'risky' jobs."
Mark Rober is among several top YouTube creators who have found a new home on Netflix.
: Noam Galai/NBC via Getty Images
Netflix's co-CEO said the streamer boosted YouTuber Mark Rober's product sales.
Ted Sarandos said that Netflix's podcast and creator content push is showing promise.
He said the model for talk shows has changed with the decline of large broadcast TV audiences.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos says the streamer's push into podcasting and YouTube-born content is bearing fruit.
Sarandos specifically called out science educator Mark Rober's show as an early success. He stressed that Netflix was both allowing the YouTube star to reach a larger audience and also sell more of his science kits.
"What he saw was a big increase in his consumer product sales after this first week on Netflix, even though he reaches an enormous audience around the world," Sarandos said in a new interview with POLITICO, which, like Business Insider, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.
On "Mark Rober's CrunchLabs," which launched in November, the former NASA engineer stages science experiments and competitions in his backyard.
Sarandos said he was also bullish on Netflix's Pete Davidson interview show, as well as its official behind-the-scenes podcasts about popular shows like "Bridgerton."
"I think a video podcast is just the evolution of talk shows," Sarandos said.
YouTube, already the top US streaming TV service, has solidified its position as the No. 1 destination for podcasts. Netflix has been looking to challenge YouTube by luring some of its star creators like Rober and preschool educator Ms. Rachel. Netflix also rolled out a slate of video podcasts early this year, including Bill Simmons' show, Charlamagne Tha God's "The Breakfast Club," and Barstool Sports fare.
Some creator reps have wondered whether Netflix can turn its viewers into habitual consumers of video podcasts, and whether leaving YouTube will cost creators in audience and revenue. Netflix has sought video exclusivity with many of its podcast deals, while some YouTube creators' deals, like Rober's and Ms. Rachel's, have been nonexclusive.
Sarandos said Netflix was seeing "promising numbers" from its podcasts, which focus on subjects like comedy, sports, and true crime, areas that already do well on the platform. He didn't share specific figures.
As broadcast TV audiences have shrunk, viewership for traditional talk shows has declined, and Sarandos acknowledged the difficulty of porting the format to streaming services. Netflix has had some growing pains with talk shows, which often haven't drawn huge audiences.
"We have tried to and failed at many talk shows over the years," Sarandos said. "Much smaller audiences tune into multiple shows in the form of a podcast every day. It's a deeper relationship than it is a broad one. So, instead of trying to make one show for the world, you might have to make hundreds or thousands of shows for the whole world."
President Donald Trump and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos
Heather Diehl/Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
Netflix's co-CEO said he's asked President Donald Trump to avoid tariffs on foreign-made films and TV.
Ted Sarandos said he thinks tax incentives are a better bet to boost US production.
Global filmmaking has been a key differentiator for Netflix in the streaming wars.
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos doesn't think tariffs are the right way to boost US movie and TV production — and he thinks he's gotten through to President Donald Trump on the issue.
"He has brought up tariffs for the movie and television industry many times, and I've hopefully talked to him the way out of them," Sarandos said in a new interview with POLITICO, which, alongside Business Insider, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.
Trump has been keen on using tariffs to encourage more filming in the US. In May, he announced on Truth Social a plan to impose a 100% tariff on films produced outside the US. He hasn't implemented it so far.
Trump's plan to add tariffs on foreign movies stemmed from a desire to slow production declines in Hollywood and other areas of the US that "are being devastated" by filming incentive programs abroad, he wrote in his May announcement on Truth Social.
Los Angeles production work has been dropping off for years, and the city's media professionals are feeling the pain. Overseas filming hubs like London have been courting production work by offering big cost-saving incentives.
Sarandos said he'd prefer the US use similar tax incentives to bring filming back home.
"Healthy incentive programs attract a lot of production, and you've seen a lot of them move from California to Georgia to New Jersey," Sarandos told POLITICO. "Having the incentives versus tariffs is much better."
The tariff structure for a movie, which isn't a physical good, isn't entirely clear. A White House spokesman said in a statement shortly after Trump's announcement that "no final decisions on foreign film tariffs" had been made and that the administration was "exploring all options to deliver on President Trump's directive to safeguard our country's national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again."
A fee on foreign productions could become very expensive for Netflix, which has released a slate of international films and TV shows over the years, including "All Quiet on the Western Front," "Squid Game," and "Adolescence."
Netflix's global reach and its ability to turn a South Korean or German drama into a global hit have been key differentiators for the company, which is expected to spend as much as $20 billion on content this year.
Meta might not yet have the best AI models, but it could be winning on another crucial front.
Meta is considering major layoffs across the company, Business Insider reported.
A top analyst suggested these cuts could signal that Meta's AI transformation is underway.
Could more Meta layoffs mean the company still has bloat to trim — or could it signal its AI investments are actually starting to pay off?
A note from a top Wall Street analyst said on Monday that any head count cutting from Meta could actually be a sign that it's successfully rebuilding itself as an "AI-forward" company.
That could be bad for its rivals.
While Meta's deep investment in AI has so far not produced leading models like Google's and OpenAI's, Bernstein's Mark Shmulik said Meta's aggressive push to overhaul itself into a top-to-bottom AI company could put it ahead of competitors and trigger a "wave of panic" as competitors scramble to copy it.
Meta is pouring hundreds ofbillions of dollars into building out AI data centers and luring talent to shore up its AI research teams. Last week, Business Insider reported the company was weighing up layoffs, with some managers being asked to draw up cost-cutting plans.
Bernstein's Shmulik said this could be a signal that Meta is winning on a crucial front in the AI wars. While companies can win with world-class frontier models, they can also beat the competition by deploying AI so deeply across the core business that their competitive moat "widens beyond dispute," Shmulik wrote.
"Meta has already demonstrated the compelling returns they're seeing from deploying AI to core workloads," wrote Shmulik. "But if the company can now re-design their operations from the ground up to be AI-forward, their potential cost and performance advantage could be insurmountable."
By one metric, Zuckerberg's efficiency drive over the past three years has paid off. Revenue per employee has steadily increased over that time period, with the company overtaking Amazon last year, according to data shared in the Bernstein note this week. Pinterest was the only company with a higher ratio.
At the same time, Meta's capex and R&D spend per employee have significantly outpaced rivals, according to the Bernstein report, which could point to a reason for the potential layoffs.
Investors appeared to react positively to Meta weighing up further cuts, with the company's shares up about 2% early Monday.
AI-washing? Maybe not.
Like other Big Tech companies, Meta has moved quickly to chase AI.
It has also been aggressively driving AI adoption internally. The company said it would start grading employees on their "AI-driven impact" in performance reviews starting this year, and has tracked how some teams have been using the tools, Business Insider previously reported.
Companies including Atlassian and Block have cited AI as a reason for recent layoffs, raising the question of whether some leaders are "AI-washing" and using the technology to camouflage other reasons for cuts, such as financial problems or overhiring during the COVID pandemic.
Bernstein's Shmulik said that while AI-washing was possible in Meta and other companies' cases, he said that layoffs could now be seen as evidence that the company is seeing efficiency gains.
The company eliminated more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as Zuckerberg declared a "year of efficiency," cutting non-technical roles, flattening management layers, and lifting what had been a sagging share price.
If Meta repeats a similar cycle for the AI era, it could set the mold for what a truly AI-first company could look like, Shmulik said.
"If one major player is able to redraw the blueprint for an AI-enabled organization, others will rush to replicate it... and we wonder if this could trigger a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem," he wrote.
A few Fridays ago, I was feeling smug. I'd just sent another Tech Memo edition telling subscribers to stop worrying about AI eating tech jobs because Anthropic, the leading AI company pushing this narrative, is hiring so many engineers.
So clever! Until I got an email from a reader, Kiran Maya Sheikh. She has a computer science degree from the University of California, Irvine. It's a great school, and she graduated with an impressive GPA. And yet, she's struggling to land that all-important first full-time software engineering job.
"It's bad advice to 'not worry,'" she wrote. "AI is causing disruption in this job market. Employers are prioritizing hiring experienced workers, but not new graduates."
This week, I interviewed Kiran for Tech Memo. It was an eye-opening view into the realities of the new AI economy. Here are the highlights from our chat, edited for clarity and length.
Alistair: What did you think you were signing up for when you first chose computer science as a degree?
Kiran: After getting into UC Irvine in 2020, I took my first coding class and I really enjoyed it. The prospects at this time were that people were going into this major to get great jobs and it was very rewarding and I ended up liking the work.
What did you believe a career in computer science would give you financially, socially, and emotionally?
The dream at the time was definitely everyone was saying, "Let's go work for Google and the FAANG companies and get a six-figure salary." My motivation was just getting a stable job, getting enough money to take care of my family — what everyone wants. I expected that computer science would put me in a position to grow as a software engineer, first and foremost, and then maybe take me to more of the strategic side, the management side. The main thing that I did figure out was that I wanted financial stability and maybe financial independence as well.
Fast forward to late 2022, when ChatGPT launched. Did you see that as a tool at the time or a threat?
I was a hater at the beginning. Then, friends of mine started using ChatGPT and they're like, "Oh, you can just use it like Google. You can just text it and it'll give you the answer." And honestly, my first thought was like, "That's a bit lazy. You can get more learning out of doing the work yourself." But the more time went on, the more that people were using it, and they started using it for class. Suddenly, I was ahead in class. I was doing the assignments well and understanding more.
Was there a moment when you thought generative AI might reduce the need for junior engineers, or do you even believe that?
We all know the current job market. It's not too hot and a lot of companies are citing AI as part of the reason for layoffs — but maybe that they were going to cut those jobs anyway. At the time though, while I was in school and using ChatGPT, I honestly didn't think it would get this far. I expected AI would be integrated into software engineers' work and companies would start integrating it, but I didn't realize there would be potential for it to take over jobs that I was looking for.
I don't think I was very attentive to the job market situation at the time, and I wasn't really thinking that far ahead. More of my worries at the time were just getting that first entry-level position. And I just thought it would be simple: I just get my degree and I would find a company that's hiring. Looking back, it was my mistake to not really research the current job market and maybe what some people were predicting about AI.
I didn't see it coming either. Few people did. Anyway, describe the moment when you realized the job market had changed?
I was already graduating, so this was after June 2025. I was getting into the reality of having to find my first job, and that's when I definitely started noticing something was wrong. A lot of my classmates, I haven't really heard of them getting any opportunities. Everyone's submitting so many resumes and there's a race to use AI to enhance resumes and send them out as fast as you can. And it seemed a lot more intense than I was prepared for.
A lot of my classmates and even students I know who are still in school are not even landing internships right now. It's not looking great. It's a very tough battle right now. So many people are quitting or getting fired or pivoting and there's new grads. Everyone is bracing, and it's a bloodbath right now.
Do you feel like you're competing against AI or laid-off senior engineers or both, or something else?
My fight is definitely with AI and all the competition with entry-level graduates — especially because AI is known to take over more junior roles. So it's important that we stay more relevant and offer something that AI can't. Scrolling through LinkedIn and on my job portals, I see more offers for mid-level positions, but I don't see as many for entry-level roles. So it's like I'm fighting AI and all these other graduates for roles that don't exist yet.
This job search so far, what has it done to your confidence?
I try to be optimistic. I am lucky to have a better situation than some other people do. I'm living at home with family, so I don't have to worry as much about expenses. Still, if I weren't doing anything about my situation, I would feel pretty bummed. I'd feel kind of trapped.
But I've been trying to work on building my network, finding people I know and learning from other people, just finding communities to be involved with. That's really helped my confidence because I find professionals that are trying to help — they are aware of the job market and they know how hard it is to get that first job. The one saving grace in this tough situation is definitely the community I've found and the people I know who are helping me through it.
Did you ever question your decision to study computer science?
Yes, I did question it. But I remember that I do like computer science and I did like what I learned. I really enjoyed my classes and programming. And instead of turning to a new discipline, I think I prefer to just specialize and find out new information and stay ahead of the news. And like I said, offer something that AI can't.
Do you feel like you were trained for a version of the tech industry that no longer exists?
I am a little salty, about this, if that's the right word. During my time at school, a lot of what the degree was about was learning the basics of software engineering. You learn programming languages and you learn how to set up your development and deployment. But right now there are so many more tools and I think that's the constant thing with the software engineering and the tech industry. There's always new technology and there's a lot of learning you have to keep up with.
But with AI in particular, I felt like I graduated a bit too early. Because now AI will probably be more integrated into learning. I had so many professors that were more welcoming towards AI. I remember a really cool professor who shared a website that would let you make your own LLM. And it's really useful stuff, but it wasn't part of the curriculum. It will be now, but I won't be there to see that change.
What I'm doing to help with that, and make the amends, is volunteering and doing more work on the side that involves newer technologies to just stay fresh and relevant and use all these new AI tools and see how I can leverage it.
If a high school senior asked you today whether they should major in computer science, what would you tell them?
It depends on what interests them about computer science. If it's absolutely something they're interested, they love learning about the technology and they want to code, I would still say go for it, but I would recommend how to position yourself for after college.
You need to start much earlier now, networking and knowing how to speak with people and how to apply, how to write a resume. And those all are also much more important now at the start of college, especially getting internships, if at all possible.
So, I would definitely recommend studying computer science, but being realistic about the opportunities available and keeping up with the news and the job market.
What would you say to potential employers out there?
The focus should still be in hiring entry-level talent if possible. I know it's tough with the current market and the economy and what's going on in the world right now. But entry-level talent is still important because you need to build this generation of professionals so that the future will have people to rely on. AI is still uncertain right now. People are still figuring out how it is impactful and it doesn't help to just force it upon your company.
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