Over 200 contractors who work on improving Google's AI products, including Gemini and AI Overviews, have been laid off, sources say. Workers enter a building on the Google headquarters campus on July 23, 2025, in Mountain View, California. More than 200 contractors who worked on evaluating and improving Google's AI products have been laid off without warning in at least two rounds of layoffs last month. The move comes amid an ongoing fight over pay and working conditions, according to workers who spoke to WIRED. In the past few years, Google has outsourced its AI rating work--which includes evaluating, editing, or rewriting the Gemini chatbot's response to make it sound more human and "intelligent"--to thousands of contractors employed by Hitachi-owned GlobalLogic and other outsourcing companies.

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Efforts by a group of OpenAI executives and investors to reinstate Sam Altman to his role as chief executive officer reached an impasse over the makeup and role of the board, according to people familiar with the negotiations. Resolution could come quickly, though talks are fluid and ongoing. Altman, who was fired Friday, is open to returning but wants to see governance changes, including the removal of existing board members, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. He's also seeking a statement absolving him of wrongdoing, they said. After facing intense outrage over the ouster, the board initially agreed in principle to step down, but have so far refused to officially do so.

Late Friday afternoon, the famed artificial intelligence company OpenAI made a shocking announcement: Effective immediately, its board of directors was firing CEO Sam Altman, both from his leadership position and from the OpenAI board. CTO Mira Murati will assume Altman's duties as the company oversees a "leadership transition" and seeks a "permanent successor" for the top job. In addition, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is "stepping down as chairman of the board," but will remain at the company and report to Murati during her tenure. In a tweeted statement, Altman wrote: "i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. It's a heckuva pre-weekend news dump from what is perhaps the best-known and most influential A.I. company of the decade, if not the century. After all, OpenAI's late-2022 releases of its generative-text bot, ChatGPT, and its automated imagemaker, DALL-E 2, did more than anything else to ...

Programming a computer is, if you squint, a bit like magic. You have to learn the words to the spell to convince a carefully crafted lump of sand to do what you want. If you understand the rules deeply enough, you can chain together the spells to force the sand to do ever more complicated tasks. If your spell is long and well-crafted enough, you can even give the sand the illusion of sentience. That illusion of sentience is nowhere more strong than in the world of machine learning, where text generation engines like GPT-3 and LaMDA are able to hold convincing conversations, answer detailed questions, and perform moderately complex tasks based on just a written request.

Care and Feeding is Slate's parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? I'm currently attending college, and to help pay for various expenses I got a summer job at a daycare. A few weeks ago, a parent accused me of making an inappropriate hand gesture at them during pick up. I didn't do it; I've never had so much as a conversation with this woman.

Microsoft's planned $68.7 billion purchase of video game giant Activision Blizzard is, literally, one of the biggest deals ever. By raw dollars and cents, it appears to be the biggest acquisition an American tech behemoth has ever made. It dwarfs not just any deal Microsoft has done, but also anything struck up by Apple, Amazon, Google, or Facebook. It makes Microsoft's $26.2 billion LinkedIn shopping spree in 2016 look small. And it's notable not just for its size but for its timing: The deal comes in the midst of months of uproar at Activision Blizzard over its treatment of workers, many of whom have alleged a toxic, sexual harassment–filled culture at the game publisher. The companies expect the deal to close some time in the 2023 fiscal year, but it'll take longer than that to sort through all its ramifications.

TOKYO--Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco Co., a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group Corp., kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster."

Margaret Mitchell was the co-leader of a group investigating ethics in AI, alongside Timnit Gebru, who said she was fired in December.

For the second time in three months, a prominent woman researcher on ethics in artificial intelligence says Google fired her. On Friday, researcher Margaret Mitchell said she had been fired from the company's AI lab, Google Brain, where she previously co-led a group working on ethical approaches to artificial intelligence. Her former co-leader of that group, Timnit Gebru, departed Google in December. Gebru said she had been fired after refusing to retract or remove her name from a research paper that urged caution with AI systems that process text, including technology Google uses in its search engine. Gebru has said she believes that disagreement may have been used as a pretext for removing her because of her willingness to speak out about Google's poor treatment of Black employees and women.