A Mysterious Nonprofit Run by SpaceXAI's Top Lawyer Is Paying the Salaries of Government Workers The National Design Studio has been something of a successor agency to DOGE. A WIRED investigation finds some of its members are on loan from a nonprofit run by SpaceXAI's general counsel. Following billionaire Elon Musk's departure from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in late spring 2025, several of the group's members found a new home within the federal government: the National Design Studio . Led by Joe Gebbia, a cofounder of Airbnb, a former member of DOGE, and currently the chief design officer of the US, the NDS is nested in the Executive Office of the President and has been tasked with redesigning government websites and services. As with DOGE before it, who exactly is a part of NDS--and what they're working on--often remains opaque.

'AI is creating some of the fastest growing, highest paying jobs in the global economy. Women are just strikingly underrepresented.' 'AI is creating some of the fastest growing, highest paying jobs in the global economy. Women are just strikingly underrepresented.' The AI industry is booming. T here's a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the "permanent underclass", a phrase describing the fate of those who won't have upward mobility in the age of AI.

It Should Be Harder to Apply for a Job. Thanks to a dwindling supply of open roles, "one-click" applications, and the rise of artificial intelligence, it's easier than ever to apply for a job. Three years ago, Andrew Stockwell had his hiring routine down to a science. As head of people for the software-buying company Vendr, Stockwell posted a listing, waited a few days, and then reviewed a few dozen applications--up to 100, if he was lucky. Recruiters identified other potential candidates, adding a few more applicants to the mix.

LinkedIn recently began testing a dedicated reporting tool for AI slop. After only a few weeks, the company says it's already improving the quality of the posts people see in their feeds. The "seems like AI slop" button has been used more than a million times since its launch, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan shared in an update. "Members are now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop from just a few weeks ago," he wrote. The company has so far been cagey in sharing exactly how it's using user-generated reports to weed out supposed slop.

LinkedIn's new Crosscheck feature lets premium subscribers test competing AI models for free The feature is a blind taste test for AI models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and other companies. You can now use LinkedIn to test out some of the latest AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and other companies without having to worry about token limits or paying for an extra subscription. The professional network is experimenting with a new feature that allows people to test AI platforms' latest offerings within LinkedIn. It's called Crosscheck, and it's rolling out now to anyone with a LinkedIn Premium subscription in the United States. The feature is meant to be a kind of blind taste test for AI models, according to the company's Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Reid Hoffman Wants Silicon Valley to'Stand Up' Against the Trump Administration The LinkedIn cofounder and frequent Trump target has a simple message for his peers: "Just speak up about the things that you think are true." Reid Hoffman doesn't do much in half measures. He cofounded LinkedIn, of course, and helped bankroll companies including Meta and Airbnb in their startup days. He has also fashioned himself, via books, podcasts, and other public appearances, as something of a public intellectual--a pro-capitalist philosopher who still insists that tech can be a force for good. Most recently, Hoffman has emerged as one of Silicon Valley's most prominent defenders of artificial intelligence . His newest book, 2025's, makes the case that AI won't diminish human capacity but will instead amplify it. Hoffman even relied on AI to make one of the most unconventional--and perhaps uncomfortable, depending on your view of AI-generated creativity--Christmas gifts I've heard of lately. Whatever you think of Hoffman's utopian views on AI, credit where due: He's also a very outspoken critic of President Trump--a rare trait in a tech world that's grown increasingly quiet, or cozy, when it comes to the cruelties of the US administration. Hoffman's overt political views haven't been without consequence: Trump has twice threatened to launch investigations into him, most recently calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to dig into Hoffman's ties to Jeffrey Epstein . He has subsequently called for the government to release the Epstein files in full.) Despite those threats, Hoffman isn't pulling punches: When we sat down to tape this episode in mid-December, he readily called out the administration for degrading American government, criticized his peers for keeping their heads down, and urged Silicon Valley to stop pretending that neutrality is a virtue. If only more billionaires were saying it. So glad to have you here. I'm glad to be here. We like to start these conversations with some very fast questions. What's the hardest lesson you've ever had to learn? Probably when to give up.

The best-known manufacturer of autonomous vacuums declared bankruptcy this week, and no one should be surprised. The home-vacuum robot began, like most things, with war. In August 1990, the same month and year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, three MIT roboticists incorporated the company that would eventually become iRobot, the maker of the Roomba. In its first decade, iRobot began to assemble a small-droid A-team for the theater of combat. The Ariel defused mines; the PackBot handled bomb disposal.

This paper presents the first large-scale field study of the adoption, usage intensity, and use cases of general-purpose AI agents operating in open-world web environments. Our analysis centers on Comet, an AI-powered browser developed by Perplexity, and its integrated agent, Comet Assistant. Drawing on hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions, we address three fundamental questions: Who is using AI agents? How intensively are they using them? And what are they using them for? Our findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in adoption and usage across user segments. Earlier adopters, users in countries with higher GDP per capita and educational attainment, and individuals working in digital or knowledge-intensive sectors -- such as digital technology, academia, finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship -- are more likely to adopt or actively use the agent. To systematically characterize the substance of agent usage, we introduce a hierarchical agentic taxonomy that organizes use cases across three levels: topic, subtopic, and task. The two largest topics, Productivity & Workflow and Learning & Research, account for 57% of all agentic queries, while the two largest subtopics, Courses and Shopping for Goods, make up 22%. The top 10 out of 90 tasks represent 55% of queries. Personal use constitutes 55% of queries, while professional and educational contexts comprise 30% and 16%, respectively. In the short term, use cases exhibit strong stickiness, but over time users tend to shift toward more cognitively oriented topics. The diffusion of increasingly capable AI agents carries important implications for researchers, businesses, policymakers, and educators, inviting new lines of inquiry into this rapidly emerging class of AI capabilities.

Are tech companies using your private data to train AI models? Leading tech companies are in a race to release and improve artificial intelligence (AI) products, leaving users in the United States to puzzle out how much of their personal data could be extracted to train AI tools. Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp), Google and LinkedIn have all rolled out AI app features that have the capacity to draw on users' public profiles or emails. Google and LinkedIn offer users ways to opt out of the AI features, while Meta's AI tool provides no means for its users to say "no, thanks." Anthropic's AI hacking claims divide experts Posts warned that the platforms' AI tool rollouts make most private information available for tech company harvesting .