"The numbers show that layoffs in the U.S. are roughly at or below levels from before the pandemic," reports the Washington Post, "although they are higher than in 2022 when businesses snapped up workers as the economy roared back to life... "A different measure that accounts for the growing U.S. workforce shows that layoffs affected about 1.2% of employed people in March, a number that has been steady for years outside of the pandemic..." In the technology industry, where Meta and other companies are regularly announcing job cuts, the layoff picture is complex. There has been a marked increase in layoffs in recent months in what the Labor Department calls the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and other tech workers. But Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at the research and consulting firm Oxford Economics, noted that hiring has also increased in that category, which includes media and entertainment. The combination of hiring minus layoffs in the information industry is effectively a wash, Martin said. Layoffs at Big Tech companies like Meta and other high-profile employers don't necessarily reflect what is happening in the country, Martin said, and draw far more attention than what may be slow and steady workforce growth. "There's a lot more headlines about job cuts than there are [about] expansion plans by businesses," he said. In his view, technology companies may be pushing out some workers and replacing them with people who have different skills as they respond to the demands of AI. It's true that businesses in some industries are devoting enormous sums of money and attention to AI. It's changing how some people work and a minority of American businesses are rolling out AI tools. But it's also become a trend for bosses to blame layoffs on the productive capabilities of AI and its ability to replace workers, even when job cuts may have little to do with the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has taken note of the pattern that he and others call "AI washing," essentially a high-tech form of whitewashing... "You know something is happening all the time when they have a word for it," said Gautam Mukunda, who teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management... AI-related employment changes are tiny so far, said Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank. He pointed to a recently published analysis of Census Bureau surveys, which found more than 95 percent of businesses that use AI said it hasn't changed their staff sizes — and AI-related employment increases were more common than decreases.

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On Friday TechCrunch reported they could no longer Google the word "disregard". Google's AI Overview responded "Understood. Let me know whenever you have a new prompt or question!" below an icon for hearing the word "disregard" pronounced — then displayed several inches of blank whitespace. "The Merriam-Webster link is still in there, but you have to scroll..." Earlier this week, Google rolled out a completely new Search experience, foregrounding AI summaries and kicking the traditional "10 blue links" far down the page. But the sheer scale of Google Search means there are lots of edge cases that the company doesn't seem to have considered... Google has been catching some flack on social media for this, and it's easy to see why... For most users, that single reply is the only thing you'll see. And crucially, the AI response serves no conceivable value to a user searching the word "disregard." It's just a broken tool. Google appears to have fixed the issue — sort of. Now Googling the word "disregard" brings up a list of news stories about how Google's AI Overviews misinterpreted the word disregard in search queries.

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The Washington Post looks at arguments that "AI's coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans". But they also look at some of the alternatives: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually "our current economic setup will no longer make sense," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized." Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon... But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper... Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers. Key quotes from the article: Elon Musk said in an X post that "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI." "I think it's a marketing tactic" responded Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate and is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. He argued to the Washington Post that Musk's comment is "trying to thread this needle of, 'I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.' And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you're still going to get money, everything will be great it's just you won't have to work anymore...." The article also cites a recent commentary from Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and VP of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. "The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Billboard: Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a licensing deal for recorded music and publishing rights, enabling Spotify to launch generative AI music models in the future. With this deal, Spotify's models will allow fans to create covers and remixes of their favorite songs from participating artists and songwriters signed to UMG. The new deal was announced on Thursday (May 21) as part of Spotify's Investor Day presentation, and the company touts that it will open up additional revenue streams on top of what artists already earn on Spotify and will provide new discovery opportunities for participating UMG talent. These AI products will eventually become available to premium users as a paid add-on. It is unclear when they are set to launch. "We recognize there's a wide range of views on use of generative music tools within the artistic community," the announcement read. "Therefore, artists and rightsholders will choose if and how to participate to ensure the use of AI tools aligns with the values of the people behind the music." Spotify also announced a feature called "Reserved" that will set aside concert tickets for Premium subscribers it identifies as an artist's most dedicated fans. "Getting concert tickets today can feel like a race you're set up to lose," Spotify wrote in a post on Thursday. "You show up at the right time, refresh endlessly, and still miss out. Too often, the experience is stressful, unpredictable, and disconnected from what should matter most: whether real fans actually get tickets. We think there's a better way."

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Trump called off a planned AI executive order just hours before a signing ceremony because he said he was worried the framework could slow America's lead over China. "We're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead," Trump told reporters. The Associated Press reports: The order would have established a framework for the government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems before their public release, according to a person familiar with the White House's deliberations with the tech industry but not authorized to speak about it publicly. The directive was being characterized as a voluntary collaboration with participating U.S.-based tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, the person said. There are competing factions within the administration, said Serena Booth, a computer science professor at Brown University and former AI policy fellow in a Democratic-led Senate committee. "We do see this kind of public fighting," she said. "'We will release an executive order. No, we won't. We're going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled.' I think this whiplash is because we're seeing these fractures.'" Some of those divides are balancing what Booth said is a "reasonable idea" to test the most capable AI models before their public release, with a concern that government scrutiny, if it takes too long, could burden AI developers. "It does come at a potential very large cost to innovation and speed of development," she said. "There is, I think, a real risk here and I do see both sides." [...] "They don't want to do it because it's politically risky in a million different ways," said Dean Ball, now at the Foundation for American Innovation. Ball said he would welcome an executive order that would get those companies working more closely with the government on cybersecurity but "ultimately, I'm fine with them taking time to get this right."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI claims its new reasoning model has produced an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because this isn't the first time OpenAI has made such a bold claim. Seven months ago, the AI giant's former VP Kevin Weil posted on X: "GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erds problems and made progress on 11 others." It turns out, GPT-5 didn't actually solve those problems; it just found solutions that already existed in the literature. Taunts from rivals like Yann LeCun and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis followed, and Weil promptly took down his premature post. Today, at least, it seems OpenAI didn't make the same mistake twice. Alongside the announcement, the company published companion remarks (PDF) in support of the disproof from mathematicians like Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, and previously called Weil's post "a dramatic misrepresentation." [...] The proof, per OpenAI, came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, not a system specifically designed to solve math problems or even this problem in particular. OpenAI says this is significant because it means AI systems are now more capable of holding together long, difficult chains of reasoning and connecting ideas across fields in ways researchers may not have previously explored. That has implications for biology, physics, engineering, and medicine.

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OpenAI s’apprêterait à déposer confidentiellement son dossier d’introduction en Bourse aux États-Unis, avec une IPO potentiellement prévue dès septembre 2026, rapporte Reuters le 20 mai 2026. Une opération historique qui pourrait raviver la rivalité entre Sam Altman et Elon Musk, alors que SpaceX prépare elle aussi son arrivée sur les marchés.

Le 20 mai 2026, OpenAI a affirmé qu’un de ses modèles d’IA avait contribué à réfuter une conjecture mathématique formulée par Paul Erdős en 1946. Le problème consiste à déterminer combien de paires de points peuvent être placées exactement à distance 1 dans un plan.

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