Snap Inc blames AI as it lays off 1,000 workers

Snapchat’s parent company plans to lay off 16% of its employees, around 1,000 people, citing “rapid advancements in artificial intelligence”, the social media company told staff on Wednesday in an internal memo. The staff reduction is part of a wave of tech industry layoffs in the past year, with many firms blaming AI for the cuts.Snap Inc’s layoffs follow demands last month from Irenic Capital Management, an activist investor whose portfolio manager wrote a letter to the Snap Inc CEO, Evan Spiegel, calling on him to reduce costs and headcount while criticizing the company’s current strategy. In Spiegel’s memo to staff, he claimed that the layoffs would move Snap towards profitability and suggested that artificial intelligence could fill the lack of human labor.“While these changes are necessary to realize Snap’s long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote

Amazon enters agreements for nine Australian renewable projects to power datacentres

Amazon has entered power agreements with nine new renewable projects in New South Wales and Victoria, as the technology company seeks to source renewable power for its datacentre operations in Australia.The nine deals, including one windfarm and 10 solar and battery projects, will take the amount of renewable energy Amazon is sourcing in Australia from 430MW to nearly 1GW.The power purchase agreements are contracts between energy providers and datacentre operators to meet the expected demands of their centres. Amazon has entered into agreements for more than 20 projects in Australia as it aims to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040.These include power from Victoria’s Golden Plains 2, the largest windfarm in Australia, which began operating in 2024

MacBook Air M5 review: Apple’s best consumer laptop speeds up

Apple’s latest MacBook Air is its most powerful yet, comes with double the starting storage and is better than ever for getting work done and as the benchmark for a consumer laptop. But this year the new lower-cost MacBook Neo has muddied the waters.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more

China now the ‘good guy’ on AI as Trump takes ‘wild west’ approach, MPs told

China is now the “good guy” on AI rather than Donald Trump’s US, where the technology is being pursued in a dangerous “wild west” manner, a former UN and UK government adviser has told MPs.Prof Dame Wendy Hall, who was a member of the UN’s AI advisory board and co-wrote a review of AI for Theresa May’s government, told the House of Commons business and trade committee that China was backing multinational attempts to introduce global governance of AI, in contrast to America, which had set up a race between profit-hungry companies that relied on hype.“China is doing some amazing work in AI, and in fact, at the moment they’re acting as the good guys because the US is totally against any regulation and talk about global governance,” said Hall, who is director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. “It’s all Maga. It’s all: we’re going to win at all costs

Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’

Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.For Ken, the problem started after his company’s CEO laid off several of his colleagues and mandated that remaining workers use AI chatbots, saying it would boost their productivity

AI companies make powerful tech – but they’re also savvy marketers

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, the Guardian’s US tech editor, writing to you from my happy village in Pokopia.Artificial intelligence companies make powerful products. They also make outlandish claims.Last week, Anthropic released Claude Mythos, an AI model focused on cybersecurity, which has inspired widespread thrill and panic over how capable it is said to be