When Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce — co-founder Jack Dorsey "pointed to AI as the culprit," writes Entrepreneur magazine. "Dorsey claimed that AI tools now allow fewer employees to accomplish the same work."

"But analysts see a different explanation: poor management." Block more than tripled its employee base between 2019 and 2022, growing from 3,835 to 12,430 workers. The company's stock had fallen 40% since early 2025, creating pressure to cut costs. "This is more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI," Zachary Gunn, a Financial Technology Partners analyst, told Bloomberg.

The phenomenon has earned a nickname: "AI-washing," where companies use artificial intelligence as cover for traditional cost-cutting. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that AI is eliminating only 5,000 to 10,000 jobs per month across all U.S. sectors, hardly enough to justify Block's massive cuts.
"European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told lawmakers in Brussels last week that ECB economists are monitoring for signs that AI is causing job losses," reports Bloomberg, "and are 'not yet seeing' the 'waves of redundancies that are feared'..." And "a recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that while AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realized."

Even a former senior Block executive "is questioning whether AI is truly the reason behind the cuts," writes Inc.: In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Aaron Zamost, Block's former head of communications, policy, and people, asked whether the layoffs reflect a genuine "new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable," or whether artificial intelligence is "just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing." Zamost acknowledged that the answer is unclear and perhaps unknowable, even within Block itself...

Looking more closely at the layoffs, Zamost argued that the specific roles affected suggest more traditional corporate cost-cutting than a sweeping AI transformation... Many of the responsibilities being eliminated, he argued, rely on distinctly human skills that AI systems still cannot replicate. "A chatbot can't meet with the mayor, cast commercial actors, or negotiate with the Securities and Exchange Commission," Zamost wrote. "Not all the roles I've heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines."

Ultimately, Zamost suggested that the sincerity of companies' AI explanations may not really matter. "It matters less whether a company knows how to deploy AI and more whether investors believe it is on track to do so," he wrote.
Indeed, whatever the rationale for Dorsey's statement, " Wall Street didn't seem to mind..." Entrepreneur magazine — since Block's stock shot up 15% after the announcement.

Cornell University makes an announcement. "Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like 'synergistic leadership,' or 'growth-hacking paradigms' may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals." Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric... Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous - but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence." He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the "business savvy" of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders...

The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it.

Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by "visionary" corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.

First, Hyundai "is discontinuing its most affordable electric sedan after just three years on the market," reports USA Today. After being introduced in 2022, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 "quickly gained the admiration of automotive critics because of its affordable pricing and capable performance specs." But now, Hyundai "is axing the most affordable versions of the EV, leaving consumers with only one Ioniq 6 option." Hyundai will continue to produce the Ioniq 6 N performance trim, which is the quickest and most powerful iteration of the Ioniq 6. It's also the most expensive. The South Korean automaker is getting rid of lower Ioniq 6 trims due to "disappointing sales and tariff considerations," according to Cars.com. Hyundai sold 10,478 Ioniq 6 models in 2025, dropping 15% from 12,264 units in 2024, a company sales report stated. Hyundai's Ioniq 6 is mainly produced in South Korea, so it faces high import tariffs.
Sales increased for their earlier IONIQ 5 model, reports the EV blog Electrek, "up 14% through the first two months of 2026, with 5,365 units sold... Meanwhile, IONIQ 6 sales slid 77% with only 229 units sold in February."

Elsewhere they report that Kia's EV6 and EV9 "didn't fare much better with sales down 53% (600 units sold) and 40% (819 units sold), respectively." Now a Kia spokesperson tells Car and Driver that the 2025 EV6 GT and 2026 EV9 GT "will be delayed until further notice." They attributed the move to "changing market conditions," but added that this delay "does not impact the availability of other trims in the EV6 and EV9 lineups."

More from Electrek: The news comes after Kia already said it was delaying the EV4, its entry-level electric sedan, "until further notice." It was expected to arrive in the US this year alongside the EV3, Kia's compact electric SUV that's already a top-seller in the UK, Europe, and other overseas markets.

While Hyundai didn't directly say it, since the EV3, EV4, EV6 GT, and Hyundai IONIQ 6 are built in Korea, the Trump administration's import tariffs and other policy changes are likely the biggest reason to blame here. Kia and Hyundai, like many others, are hesitant to bring new EVs to the US due to the changes. The IONIQ 6, EV6 GT, and EV9 GT join a string of other models that have either been postponed or canceled altogether.

Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this report from Agence France-Presse: Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson's and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months.

Pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma said it received the green light for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, its Parkinson's disease treatment that transplants stem cells into a patient's brain. Japan's health ministry also gave the go-ahead to ReHeart, heart muscle sheets developed by medical startup Cuorips that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function, media reports said. The treatments could be on the market and rolled out to patients as early as this summer, reports said, citing the health ministry, becoming the world's first commercially available medical products using induced pluripotent stem cells...

In a statement, Sumitomo Pharma said it had obtained "conditional and time-limited approval" for the manufacture and marketing of Amchepry under a system which is reportedly designed to get these products to patients as quickly as possible. The approval is a kind of "provisional license", the Asahi newspaper said, after the safety and efficacy of the treatment was judged based on data from fewer patients than in ordinary clinical trials for drugs.

A trial led by Kyoto University researchers indicated that the company's treatment was safe and successful in improving symptoms. The study involved seven Parkinson's patients aged between 50 and 69, with each receiving a total of either five million or 10 million cells implanted on both sides of the brain... The patients were monitored for two years and no major adverse effects were found, the study said. Four patients showed improvements in symptoms.
The article notes that "Worldwide, about 10 million people have the illness, according to the Parkinson's Foundation," while also notes that today's current therapies "improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression..."

In a tweet that's been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI's head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they "care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together," so this "wasn't an easy call," but offered this reason for resigning: AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.

This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.
"To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined," explains a later tweet. "It's a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed." And when asked how many OpenAI employees had left after OpenAI signed their new Pentagon deal, the roboticist said... "I can't share any internal details."

The roboticist previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, reports Engadget: OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski's resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have "strong views" about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn't support the issues that Kalinowski brought up. "We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the OpenAI statement read.

"Seagate says it is now shipping its Mozaic 4+ HAMR-based hard drives at up to 44TB per drive," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "with production deployments already underway at two hyperscale cloud providers.

"The company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording [HAMR] implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from today's 4+TB per disk toward 10TB per disk, eventually enabling 100TB-class drives." In a one-exabyte deployment, Seagate estimates Mozaic could improve infrastructure efficiency by roughly 47% compared to standard 30TB drives, cutting both footprint and energy consumption... HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface during writes, allowing higher recording density without sacrificing stability. With most major cloud storage providers reportedly qualified on the Mozaic platform, Seagate is positioning spinning disks, not flash, as the long-term answer for cost-effective AI-scale data growth.

"Reservation holders, it's finally time to get ready," writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. The EV news site Electrek reports: Aptera Motors, "the little startup that could," announced another important milestone... completing the first example of its flagship solar EV on its validation assembly line in Southern California...

While the validation line at its headquarters remains a low-volume assembly process, its successful operation represents the startup's transition from hand-built validation SEVs to a more structured assembly line process that will be fine-tuned for mass production... With low-volume assembly now being validated, Aptera is starting to publicly utter encouraging terms like "EPA certification" and, better yet, that holy grail of "initial customer deliveries." Before then, however, the Aptera Solar EVs built on this low-volume validation line will be used for testing programs such as thermal validation, brake performance, and "some destructive testing." Aptera shared that its assembly and integration team has grown to become the largest at the startup, "reflecting the beginning of its transition from engineering development to testing and production execution"...

As of March 2026, Aptera says it has over 50,000 reservations totaling over $2 billion in sales if all were to solidify following the launch of a deliverable vehicle.
Clean Technica notes the vehicles' "generous cargo space that comes out to 60% more storage than a Honda Accord and 20% more storage than a Prius, according to the company." "Built with recyclable materials, this eco-friendly vehicle features a lightweight carbon fiber structure and no-welding assembly for maximum cost and production efficiency," Aptera adds. The emphasis on lightweighting supports the goal of engineering a car that can travel on the electricity provided by its onboard solar panels.

The company currently advertises that the vehicle can travel 40 miles on solar power alone, with the battery providing extra juice as needed. Ideally, the car can keep recharging itself with sunlight, further elongating the time between charging sessions... [Its range is up to 1,000 miles with plug-in charging.] The new autocycle could also appeal to drivers who enjoy the challenge of hypermiling, which involves deploying a suite of driving techniques to minimize fuel consumption. Hypermiling can apply to gas-powered cars, but the magic really kicks in with the regenerative braking capability of EVs. Aptera's onboard solar panels add another dimension to the fun.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: A popular predictions market app will not pay out the $54 million some of its users believed they were owed after correctly forecasting the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a report.

Kalshi, which allows players to gamble on real-world events, offered customers favorable odds on Khamenei, 86, being "out as Supreme Leader" in response to the announcement of joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran in the early hours of Saturday morning. The company promoted the trade on its homepage and app and tweeted [last] Saturday: "BREAKING: The odds Ali Khamenei is out as Supreme Leader have surged to 68 percent." It continued: "Reminder: Kalshi does not offer markets that settle on death. If Ali Khamenei dies, the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death." Khamenei was later confirmed dead in the airstrikes and the company clarified in a follow-up post: "Please note: A prior version of this clarification was grammatically ambiguous. As a customer service measure, Kalshi will reimburse lost value due to trades made between these clarifications...."

While the company has offered to reimburse any bets, fees or losses from the trade placed prior to its clarification message, it has nevertheless attracted a firestorm of complaints on social media.
A Kalshi spokesperson told Reuters they'd reimbursed "net losses" out of pocket "to the tune of millions of dollars". But a class action lawsuit was filed Thursday saying Kalshi had failed to pay $54 million: Kalshi did not invoke a "death carveout" provision until after the Iranian leader was killed to avoid paying customers in Kalshi's "Khamenei Market" what they were owed, the lawsuit said... The language specifying that Khamenei's departure could be due to any cause, including death, was "clear, unambiguous and binary," the lawsuit said, describing Kalshi's actions as "deceptive" and "predatory."
"In a notice filed Monday, the company proposed standardizing the terms of all its markets that implicitly depend on a person surviving..." reports Business Insider. "The update comes after Kalshi paid $2.2 million to resolve complaints from users who were confused by the way it divided the $55 million wagered on Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ouster after his targeted killing by Israel and the US."

Their article cites a DePaul University law professor who says "There's now sort of this nascent, but bipartisan movement against prediction markets. I think Kalshi's feeling the heat." For example, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told the Washington Post, "People shouldn't be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet."

The Global Times reports: China's first domestically developed quantum computer operating system, Origin Pilot, has been made available for online download, the Global Times learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center on Wednesday. A Chinese scientist said while several quantum computing operating system efforts are underway worldwide, this is the first developed in China where it is seen as part of China's broad effort to achieve technology independence and to achieve technology advance in quantum computing.

The center said the release marks the world's first open-source quantum computer operating system available for public download, which is expected to lower development barriers and support the growth of China's quantum computing ecosystem. Developed by Hefei-based Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co, the company behind China's third-generation superconducting quantum computer, Origin Wukong, Origin Pilot was first launched in 2021 and has gone through multiple rounds of iteration and upgrade.

The developer describes it as an integrated quantum-classical-intelligent computing operating system compatible with major hardware approaches, including superconducting qubits, trapped ions and neutral atoms. It is now deployed on the company's Origin Wukong series and is available to external users, the company said. Guo Guoping, chief scientist of Origin Quantum and director at the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, told the Global Times that a quantum operating system is the "soft heart" of the quantum computing ecosystem. He said the decision to make Origin Pilot available globally marks a shift in China's quantum computing industry from closed-door tech innovation to broader open-source ecosystem development. Dou Menghan, head of the research team, said: "Users can quickly integrate with quantum chips of multiple physical types and, using autonomous programming frameworks such as QPanda, execute quantum computing jobs across different physical quantum chips to support both research and commercialization needs."

Smart ring maker Oura has acquired Doublepoint, a Finnish startup specializing in gesture recognition technology for wearables. Engadget reports: The Finnish startup uses smartwatches and wristbands as examples of products that benefit from its technology, but Oura will clearly be looking to incorporate it into its rings, in theory allowing you to control your connected devices with hand movements.

Oura said in a press release that the deal sees it inherit an "exceptional team of AI architects and builders from Doublepoint," including Doublepoint's four founders. The newly-acquired company will remain in its native Helsinki, where it will work with Oura's international teams.

It added that Doublepoint's expertise in helping devices register subtle hand movements will be key, as nobody wearing a smart ring is going to engage with gesture control if they have to thrash their hand around like a conductor.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform's Chinese parent organization ByteDance. ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That's not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the U.S. with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States. Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, "This app is unavailable in the country or region you're in." The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its U.S. operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can "distribute, maintain, or update" any app majority-controlled by ByteDance "within the land or maritime borders of the United States."

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the U.S. and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple's and Google's app stores in the U.S.. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for U.S. audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hayden AI, a San Francisco startup that makes spatial analytics tools for cities worldwide, has sued its co-founder and former CEO, alleging that he stole a large quantity of proprietary information in the days leading up to his ouster from the company in September 2024. In a lawsuit filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court but only made public this week, Hayden AI claims that former CEO Chris Carson undertook what it called "numerous fraudulent actions," which include "forged board signatures, unauthorized stock sales, and improper allocation of personal expenses." [...] Hayden AI, which is worth $464 million according to an estimated valuation on PitchBook, has asked the court to impose preliminary injunctive relief, requiring Carson to either return or destroy the data he allegedly stole. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that Carson secretly sold over $1.2 million in company stock, forged board signatures, and copied 41GB of proprietary company emails before being fired in September 2024. The complaint also claims Carson fabricated key parts of his resume, including a PhD and military service. It's a "carefully constructed fraud," says Hayden AI.

"That is a lie," the complaint states. "Carson does not hold a PhD from Waseda or any other university. In 2007, he was not obtaining a PhD but was operating 'Splat Action Sports,' a paintball equipment business in a Florida strip mall."

A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for illegally trafficking thousands of Microsoft certificate-of-authenticity labels used to activate Windows and Office. Prosecutors said she bought genuine labels cheaply from suppliers and resold them without the accompanying licensed software, wiring over $5 million during the scheme. TechRadar reports: The indictment details how [52-year-old Heidi Richards] purchased tens of thousands of genuine COA labels from a Texas-based supplier between 2018 and 2023 for well below the retail value, before reselling them in bulk to customers globally without the licensed software. "COA labels are not to be sold separately from the license and hardware that they are intended to accompany, and they hold no independent commercial value," the US Attorney's Office wrote.

Richards was found to have wired $5,148,181.50 to the unnamed Texas company during the scheme's operation. Some examples include the purchase of 800 Windows 10 COA labels in July 2018 for $22,100 (under $28 each) and a further 10,000 Windows 10 Pro COA labels in December 2022 for $200,000 ($20 each). Ultimately fined $50,000 and given a near-two-year sentence, prosecutors had sought to get Richards to pay $242,000, "which represents the proceeds obtained from the offenses."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 80 Level: Microsoft has officially confirmed development of its next-generation Xbox console, currently known internally as Project Helix. While concrete details remain limited, early information suggests the company is positioning the device as a hybrid between a traditional console and a gaming PC, capable of running both Xbox titles and PC games. The codename was revealed recently by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who reaffirmed Microsoft's continued commitment to dedicated gaming hardware despite speculation that the company might shift entirely toward cloud or platform-based ecosystems. According to Sharma, Project Helix represents the next step in Xbox's console strategy.

Although official specifications have not yet been announced, early reports indicate the system will likely rely on a new AMD system-on-chip combining Xbox hardware with PC-style architecture. The device is expected to emphasize high performance while maintaining compatibility with existing Xbox game libraries. [...] If the concept holds, Project Helix could mark a significant shift in how console ecosystems are structured, moving away from tightly closed hardware platforms toward something closer to a unified PC-console environment. Sharma wrote in a post on X: "Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox, including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console. Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!"

The Pentagon has formally designated Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," ordering federal agencies and defense contractors to stop using its AI tools after the company sought limits on the military's use of its models. In a written statement, the department said it has "officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately." Politico reports: The designation, historically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, will likely require companies that do business with the U.S. military -- or even the federal government in general -- to cut ties with Anthropic.

"From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes," the Pentagon said in the statement. "The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk."

A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company said last week it would fight a supply-chain risk label in court.

An anti-corruption group has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that transferred TikTok's U.S. operations to a group of investors tied to the administration. The suit claims the arrangement violates a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest and alleges the deal financially benefited Trump allies while leaving the platform's algorithm under Chinese ownership. NBC News reports: The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise the "reputational cost of corruption in America," argues the deal violates a law intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and has enriched Trump's allies. That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said that TikTok couldn't be distributed in the United States unless the Chinese company ByteDance found an American-based corporate home by the day before Donald Trump returned to office. The law was upheld by the Supreme Court.

"The law was clear, but it was never enforced," says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law." The plaintiffs in the suit are two software engineers from California: One is a shareholder in Alphabet Inc., YouTube's parent company; the other is a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Inc., which is Instagram's parent company. Both say they suffered financially due to the non-enforcement of the law. "The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences," said Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor. "The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means that it can censor the content that it doesn't like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and it can censor the information that it doesn't like. Really it's a situation that's going to be terrible for users, and terrible for free speech on the platform."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling "Ryzen AI"-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processing units (NPUs) suitable for running language and image-generation models locally, rather than on some company's server. But so far, AMD's desktop chips have lacked both these higher-performance NPUs and the Ryzen AI label. That changes today, at least a little: AMD is announcing its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops using its AM5 CPU socket. These Ryzen AI 400-series CPUs are direct replacements for the Ryzen 8000G processors, rather than the Ryzen 9000-series, and they combine Zen 5-based CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, and an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This makes them AMD's first desktop chips to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which enables a handful of unique Windows 11 features like Recall and Click to Do.

The six chips AMD is announcing today -- the 65 W Ryzen AI 7 Pro 450G, Ryzen AI 5 Pro 440G, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 435G, along with low-power 35 W "GE" variants -- all bear AMD's "Ryzen Pro" branding as well, which means they support a handful of device management capabilities that are important for business PCs managed by IT departments. At this point, it doesn't seem as though AMD will be offering boxed versions to regular consumers; the Ryzen AI desktop chips will appear mainly in business PCs that don't need a dedicated graphics card but still benefit from more robust graphics than AMD offers in regular Ryzen desktop CPUs. Like past G-series Ryzen chips, these are essentially laptop silicon repackaged for desktop systems. They share most of their specs in common with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, despite their Ryzen AI 400-series branding. The two chip generations are extremely similar overall, but the Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs include slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.

OpenAI today released GPT-5.4, an upgraded ChatGPT model designed to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate for workplace tasks. The update also introduces tools that let ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and Google Sheets. Axios reports: GPT-5.4 is designed to be less error-prone, more efficient and better at workplace tasks like drafting documents, OpenAI said. The new model can create files in fewer tries with less back-and-forth than prior models, the company said. GPT-5.4 outperformed office workers 83% of the time on GDPval, an OpenAI benchmark measuring performance on real-world tasks across 44 occupations.

The model can also solve problems using fewer tokens, OpenAI says -- which can translate to faster responses and lower costs. The company is also debuting OpenAI for Financial Services, a set of new tools that includes the version of ChatGPT that runs inside spreadsheets and new apps and skills within ChatGPT. Partners include FactSet, MSCI, Third Bridge and Moody's.

As part of Epic's settlement with Google over the Play Store, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney agreed to stop criticizing Google's app store practices until 2032 and even publicly support the revised policies. The deal also prohibits Epic from pushing for further changes to Google's platform rules. The Verge reports: On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic's rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google's app store polices. He can't criticize Google's app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them. The contract states that "Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same."

He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out. And while Epic can still be part of the "Coalition for App Fairness," the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now. "Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we've settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!," Sweeney wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is not happy -- perhaps predictably so -- with OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In a memo to staff, reported by The Information, Amodei referred to OpenAI's dealings with the Department of Defense as "safety theater." "The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DoD's deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses," Amodei wrote.

Last week, Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) failed to come to an agreement over the military's request for unrestricted access to the AI company's technology. Anthropic, which already had a $200 million contract with the military, insisted the DoD affirm that it would not use the company's AI to enable domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry. Instead, the DoD -- known under the Trump administration as the Department of War -- struck a deal with OpenAI. Altman stated that his company's new defense contract would include protections against the same red lines that Anthropic had asserted.

In a letter to staff, Amodei refers to OpenAI's messaging as "straight up lies," stating that Altman is falsely "presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker." Amodei might not be speaking solely from a position of bitterness, here. Anthropic specifically took issue with the DoD's insistence on the company's AI being available for "any lawful use." [...] "I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI's deal with the DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!)," Amodei wrote to his staff. "It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees."