8:27 PM
Today in brief.
AI's fastest-growing users are lawyers and recruiters, not engineers
a16z's data shows Codex adoption since February grew 108x in legal and 41x in sales and recruiting - the power users are showing up outside tech entirely.
💼 Business
MrBeast went back to AI thumbnails, and the Pixar slop ads are everywhere
A year after the backlash over replacing human thumbnail artists, MrBeast is using AI thumbnails again - while AI-generated Pixar-style Ozempic ads flood feeds.
Humanoid robots just broke the human world records in the 400m and the 1500m
At the World Humanoid Robot Games, Tiangong ran a 38.15 400m and a 2:21.6 1500m - both faster than any human has ever run - and Galbot's robot rallied 100+ tennis shots autonomously.
🤖 AI
Hugging Face is exploring a $13 billion sale
The default home of open-weight AI - the place every model you download lives - is reportedly shopping itself for $13B.
🤖 AI
54% of 2026 layoffs blamed AI, and most hadn't actually deployed it yet
205,832 workers cut across 322 layoff events this year, 54% citing AI - but 77% of those were anticipatory and 60% of companies were using AI as cover for ordinary cost-cutting.
🤖 AI
Sam Altman says the bottleneck isn't the models anymore, it's us
Altman attributed slow AI progress to economic inertia rather than capability limits, and separately admitted he overhyped GPT-4's AGI timeline to help raise money.
Someone spent $266 on four AI models to un-brick their own tablet
Amazon kept remotely shutting down a tablet the owner had paid for, so they paid four frontier models to reverse-engineer it into something they actually own.
🔬 Science
The AI Scientist got a paper through peer review, and Nature published the result
Sakana's automated research system produced a machine-learning paper that passed peer review in 15 hours for about $140, and the write-up on it is now in Nature.
🏛️ Policy
Europe put €125M on the table to grow its own frontier labs
SPRIND launched a €125 million challenge to fund ten teams and build at least three European frontier AI labs with 24 months of compute and infrastructure.
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