How Businesses Doubled Down on AI in May and Who Pushed Back
- Jun 5
- 2 min read
Citadel's CEO, Long Vocal That AI Was "Garbage," Has Changed His Tune
Ken Griffin, CEO of one of the world's largest investment firms and a prominent AI skeptic who once called the technology "all garbage," now says it has become "profoundly more powerful," with AI agents doing in hours or days the finance work that master's- and PhD-level staff used to take weeks or months to complete.
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Layoff Updates
A run of layoffs since the last session increasingly names AI as the reason with Groupon (400 impacted) rebuilding as "AI-native," Meta (8,000 impacted) moving ~7,000 staff into AI roles, Intuit (3,000 impacted), plus BigID, Webflow, ClickUp and a GM, raising the question of "AI washing" even as the human impact, including a rise in independent consultants, is real.
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Brands Are Bucking AI, Embracing Authenticity to Combat AI Slop
A growing roster of brands (Dove, Cadbury, Polaroid, Heineken, Aerie, and now Apple), are spending to prove their work is human made after backlash over AI generated content, showing how quickly "not AI" has become a selling point.
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Anthropic and SpaceX Partner Up to Ease Compute Limitations
To meet rising demand as more users move to Claude, Anthropic struck a deal to use all the capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center, doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits and raising Opus API limits while pledging to cover consumers' electricity price increases from its data centers, a goodwill gesture amid growing public frustration with AI.
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OpenAI Offers to Support Y Combinator Startups With a Token Donation
Sam Altman offered every startup in Y Combinator's current class of about 169 companies, $2 million in OpenAI tokens in exchange for equity, a move critics note is a sweet deal for OpenAI as inference costs fall (tokens aren't cash) and one that deepens dependence on its platform at a time when it's losing corporate business to Claude.
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OpenAI Is Coming for Services
OpenAI launched The OpenAI Deployment Company with more than $4 billion in initial investment to embed AI inside businesses, and its first acquisition - applied-AI firm Tomoro - brings roughly 150 "Forward Deployed Engineers" on day one, putting OpenAI in direct competition with the consultancies built around AI adoption.
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