San Francisco's AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms "996" and "grindcore" entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn't taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she'd given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn't you rather be wearing slippers? "If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working," says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action.

Plus: Huntington's disease has been treated successfully for the first time. Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project after the Bible: There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400 even more obscure ones are being developed. But many of these smaller editions are being swamped with AI-translated content. Volunteers working on four African languages, for instance, estimated to that between 40% and 60% of articles in their Wikipedia editions were uncorrected machine translations. This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems learn new languages by scraping huge quantities of text from the internet.

Before Ibtihal Aboussad was fired by Microsoft for protesting the company's work with the Israeli military during a celebration of the firm's 50th anniversary, she sent two emails. The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft's contracts to provide cloud computing software and artificial intelligence products to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). She sent the second to the "Muslims at Microsoft" email list. With her email, Aboussad told the Guardian, she wanted Muslim staff of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon to stop regarding the question of whether they organize against their employer's work with the IDF as an issue of secular or professional ethics. It was a question of Islam, of their faith, she argued.

If the next president favors our bosses' interests over our own, the consequences could be dire for all working people in this country and many others. We know how to fight back against a future Trump administration because we have been there before. What's less clear is whether and to what extent we can count on a Harris administration to be our ally. On stage at the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Harris vowed to center the concerns of working people over those of corporate America. If she stays committed to that path in the face of Silicon Valley's well-funded opposition, she will find dedicated allies in tech workers.

No one can make that choice for you. But I can say with confidence born of experience that such choices can be more easily made if workers know what exactly the companies they work for are doing with militaries at home and abroad. And I also know this: those same companies themselves will never reveal this information unless they are forced to do so--or someone does it for them. For those who doubt that workers can make a difference in how trillion-dollar companies pursue their interests, I'm here to remind you that we've done it before. In 2017, I played a part in the successful #CancelMaven campaign that got Google to end its participation in Project Maven, a contract with the US Department of Defense to equip US military drones with artificial intelligence.

During the torture ritual that was doing my taxes this year, I was surprised to find myself giddy after reading these words: "You are now chatting with IRS Representative-1004671045." I had gotten stuck trying to parse my W-2, which, under "Box 14: Other," contained a mysterious 389.70 deduction from my overall pay last year. I tapped the chat button on my tax software for help, expecting to be sucked into customer-service hell. Instead, a real IRS employee answered my question in less than two minutes. The program is not TurboTax, or any one of its many competitors that will give you the white-glove treatment only after you pony up. It is Direct File, a new pilot program made by the IRS.

So far, 2024 is off to a start that looks a lot like 2023--with a week full of job cuts from tech companies. Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contractors earlier this week, citing artificial intelligence as part of the reason. Twitch announced a cut of 500 people, and its parent company, Amazon, also made moves to lay off hundreds of employees across Prime Video and MGM Studios on Wednesday. Google followed, also laying off hundreds of employees working on its Google Voice assistant, with additional reorganization affecting its hardware teams working on augmented reality, the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches, and the Nest thermostat. On Thursday, Discord said it would lay off 17 percent of its staff after hiring too quickly in recent years.

Silicon Valley churns out new products all the time, but rarely does one receive the level of hype that has surrounded the release of GPT-4. The follow-up to ChatGPT can ace standardized tests, tell you why a meme is funny, and even help do your taxes. Since the San Francisco start-up OpenAI introduced the technology earlier this month, it has been branded as "remarkable but unsettling," and has led to grandiose statements about how "things will never be the same." But actually trying out these features for yourself--or at least the ones that have already been publicly released--does not come cheap. Unlike ChatGPT, which captivated the world because it was free, GPT-4 is currently only available to non-developers through a premium service that costs $20 a month.

With the boom in artificial intelligence (AI), robots and'smart' everything, it would be fair to assume that life in Silicon Valley is pretty sweet right now. Only last year, tech workers were posting enviable'Day In The Life' videos showing off buffet lunches, happy hours and arcade games in their offices. But fast forward 12 months and things have turned sour. In the first 33 days of 2023 alone, the likes of Paypal, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's parent company Alphabet have announced a total of 42,000 lay-offs. Add that to 40,000 from other tech companies – plus the 160,000 employees who were let go last year – and the mass exodus nears a purge of some quarter of a million staff.

The answer to this question may surprise you: AI is more Republican than Democrat. The study found that, when it comes to political values, AI is more closely aligned with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Specifically, the study found that AI is more likely to value individual liberty and free markets over government intervention and regulation. Additionally, AI is more likely to support traditional values such as patriotism and religion. Of course, it's important to remember that AI is not a person and cannot vote.