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New mothers working in software development are staring down an AI-pilled workplace they barely recognize. As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention. Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that.

Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search's Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates This week on, the team discusses Meta's recent layoffs and what they've been hearing from employees about the increasingly grim vibes at the company. They also talk about Elon Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI and share highlights from Google's annual conference--including an ambitious AI vision to change how people search the web. Finally, what do recent college graduates and women whose spouses work in AI have in common? Google Search Goes Agentic--and Doesn't Need You Anymore Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . We spoke to more than a dozen employees and it turns out the job cuts are far from the only reason why Meta employees are really going through it. He lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI in really as full a way as you can, as dramatically as possible. I know, Zoë, you're looking forward to talking about that. We're going to get into why young adults might be using AI, but they have very complicated feelings about it. And later in the show, we're going to hear about why women married to AI bros have had enough . This week, the company is letting go of roughly 10 percent of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees total. It's the latest round of job cuts, adding to the roughly 25,000 jobs that have been cut in the past few years as part of Mark Zuckerberg's Year of Efficiency that started in 2023 and now the latest AI-forward workplace, which he is trying to develop and impose. And while these latest cuts are not as big as some of the rounds of layoffs that have already happened, they're getting a ton of attention because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has said that the reason they're happening, in part at least, in large part, is because the company is spending so much money on AI and data centers.

Anthropic's Code with Claude showed off coding's future--whether you like it or not As tools like Claude Code get better, more and more developers are happy to hand off coding tasks to them. The way software gets built has changed for good. The vibes were strong at Code with Claude, Anthropic's two-day event for software developers in London that kicked off on May 19, the same day as Google's I/O in Palo Alto. "Who here has shipped a pull request in the last week that was completely written by Claude?" Jeremy Hadfield, an engineer at Anthropic, asked from the main stage. Almost half the people in the packed room--many sitting with laptops on their knees, coding or prompting as they watched the talks--raised their hands. Pull requests are fixes or updates to existing software that are submitted for review before they go live.

Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers' jobs around AI: 'Transfers aren't optional' As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it's radically changing some employees' jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that's building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch. Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been "selected" for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI - at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: "Transfers aren't optional." "Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI," wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. "The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best."

An Engineer's Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks workers' keystrokes and mouse activity. Meta's decision to track employee keystrokes and mouse data is causing an uproar within the company. "Selfishly, I don't want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy," wrote an engineer in an internal post seen by nearly 20,000 coworkers this week. "But zooming out, I don't want to live in a world where humans--employees or otherwise--are exploited for their training data." The message aimed to rally support for a petition circulating inside the company since last Thursday that demands an end to what Meta calls the Model Capability Initiative.

Agentic AI is helping organizations completely reimagine core banking processes and operations from the customer perspective, rather than simply making incremental improvements. Despite years of digitization, organizations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments, according to McKinsey research . That's because most big companies begin with technological capabilities and bolt applications onto them, rather than starting with customer needs and working backward to technology solutions. Not prioritizing the customer can create fragmented solutions; disjointed customer experiences; and ultimately, failed transformations. Organizations that achieve outsized results from AI flip the script. They adopt a "customer-back engineering" mindset, putting customers at the heart of technology transformation.

There's a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia--and it has nothing to do with hardware. Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I'm afraid I must talk about "moats." Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company's competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled "We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI," fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech's castle. A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models.

In 1990, three former Apple employees launched a company that epitomized the Silicon Valley dream. What they invented looked like an iPhone--more than a decade earlier. The device never came to be. Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an public. A "concept IPO," they called it. Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom--software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson--were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh. Atkinson's prolific inventions included the double click and the drop down menu.

In this episode of “Uncanny Valley,” we get into how the Elon Musk-Sam Altman trial goes way beyond their rivalry and could have major implications both for OpenAI and also the AI industry at large.