Meta began notifying around 8,000 employees of layoffs on Wednesday and is shifting roughly 7,000 staff into four new AI units, the New York Times reported. Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told staff in an internal memo that the cuts are part of "continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making." Affected U.S. employees will receive 16 weeks of base pay plus tenure-based severance and extended healthcare coverage. The company had nearly 79,000 employees at the start of the year and expects capital expenditures to rise by at least 60% this year over 2025 to support its Meta SuperintelligenceSuperintelligenceAI that substantially exceeds the best human performance across virtually every domain. Several frontier labs now name it as their explicit goal, and much of the safety debate is about whether such a system could be controlled. Labs efforts, Axios reported.
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OpenAI committed more than S$300 million ($234 million) over multiple years to open its first applied AI lab outside the United States in Singapore through a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, Bloomberg reported. The company plans to grow its Singapore-based technical team to more than 200 roles over the next few years, expanding an office it first established in 2024, Channel News Asia reported. The MOU also covers a Singapore chapter of the OpenAI Academy, Codex for Teachers hackathons and collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and AI Singapore on the AIxTech program. Singapore signed a parallel AI partnership with Google at the same ATX Summit announcement.
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Samsung Electronics' union plans for 48,000 workers, mostly in the company's chip divisions, to walk off the job Thursday after the latest round of wage talks fell through on bonus payments, AP reported. Union leader Choi Seung-ho said unionized workers will begin an 18-day strike from Thursday, per WKZO. South Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-seok said the strike could cause up to 100 trillion won ($66 billion) in economic damage by disrupting Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing. Samsung said operating profit for the January-March quarter jumped eightfold to a record 57.2 trillion won ($38 billion). The union has said compensation has lagged despite the company's AI driven memory chip surge. South Korea's central bank estimated a worst-case strike could shave 0.5 percentage points off a forecast 2.0% expansion for the South Korean economy this year.
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Guidelight AI Standards, a new AI safety nonprofit cofounded by former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler and former OpenAI policy adviser Page Hedley, joined Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, Encode AI and The Midas Project on a Tuesday open letter to SpaceX investors warning of "unpriced risks" tied to xAI, Wired reported. SpaceX is preparing an IPO that could raise up to $75 billion at a private valuation over $1 trillion, after acquiring xAI last year. The signatories cite specific xAI incidents including Grok producing white genocide content and sexualized images of women and children that prompted 37 U.S. attorneys general to demand corrective steps. The letter calls on SpaceX to disclose whether xAI will continue developing frontier AI models and to publish a public safety and governance plan; the Washington Post previously reported xAI had only "two or three" people working on safety as of January.
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Dell COO Jeff Clarke said token consumption for AI reasoning is up 320x as agenticAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. systems break cloud economics, Forbes reported in coverage of Dell Technologies World 2026. Dell announced Dell Deskside Agentic AI, an on-premise sandboxSandboxIsolated computing environment where an agent can run code and use tools without touching the machine underneath for building and running AI agents locally, Computer Weekly reported. The product is powered by Nvidia NemoClaw on Dell workstations supporting models from 30 billion up to a trillion parameters. Dell senior vice president Jon Siegal said a single Dell developer recently burned through 1 billion tokens in 24 hours, racking up a $3,400 cloud bill in one day. Dell also said Google Gemini models will run on-premise via Google Distributed Cloud on Dell PowerEdge servers. Parallel partnerships will bring Palantir Foundry and SpaceX AI's Grok on-premise.
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