Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang during a Congressional hearing about artificial intelligence on July 18, 2023 in Washington, DC.Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Can a Fortune 500 company with 76,000 employees act like a startup?

Meta surely thinks so.

As the rest of the world hires up for an AI future, the company once known as Facebook reportedly hopes to cut about 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence unit.

Surely that’s because that $72 billion of promised AI investment in 2025 isn’t working out in terms of ROI, right? Wrong.

According to an internal memo from Scale AI CEO-turned-Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang, reductions in the company’s so-called Superintelligence group are all about that coveted agility. 

“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” he wrote.

The cuts will come down on the company's FAIR AI research team, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure teams. Its TBD Lab, which works on the company’s large language models, will be spared—and in fact continues to hire.

Meta has for some time been on a spendy AI hiring spree in a bid to grab the best talent on the market and address what CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes are lackluster results.

Will a reorg in the hottest part of the company that made the mantra “Move fast and break things” famous make the difference? We’ll find out on earnings day. —AN

It’s been a minute since we’ve had an item on quantum computing, but the great Google provides.

The Alphabet-owned company on Wednesday said a quantum computer (running on its “Willow” chip) had successfully run a new algorithm (dubbed “Quantum Echoes”) 13,000 times as fast as a conventional supercomputer.

The team’s results were published in a paper in the scientific journal Nature. Leading the charge is none other than Michel Devoret, one of three physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

The burning question for the field of quantum computing has consistently been: When is this stuff going to leave the lab and make a difference in the real world of business? 

IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others have been furiously working to close the gap. 

How quickly they’ll accomplish it has been a matter of speculation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in January that quantum wouldn’t be “very useful” for 15 to 30 years, sending related stocks tumbling; more recently, Huang said it was reaching an “inflection point.”

Though its latest achievement was born in the lab, Google says it promises to accelerate the drug discovery process in the pharma industry and the design of new building materials, among other applications. —AN

General Motors may be sunsetting the use of Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto in many of its vehicles, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t embracing the best of Silicon Valley elsewhere in the cabin.

The American automaker said Wednesday that it plans to deploy a conversational “in-vehicle artificial intelligence assistant” from Google as well as a more robust driver-assistance system in a bid to facilitate “eyes-off driving.”

The AI assistant will begin rolling out in vehicles next year. The driver-assistance system will come to vehicles in 2028 alongside “a new centralized computing platform” meant to improve over-the-air software updates, bandwidth, and “AI performance.” 

“It’s a foundation built for continuous learning and improvement,” the company said, “enabling GM vehicles to evolve long after they leave the showroom.” It’ll first come to the Cadillac Escalade IQ.

GM remains the largest automaker in the U.S., but it’s only the fifth largest worldwide. It was the global king until Toyota claimed the crown in 2008.

These days, though, it’s not M&A that threatens GM’s future—it’s the rapid rise of EV automakers, especially from China, who design vehicles more like consumer electronics than mechanical contraptions. —AN

—Reddit sues Perplexity and others for scraping the web and reselling it to AI companies.

—Apple iPhone Air sales: Not great, Bob!

—U.K. regulators label Apple and Google as having “strategic market status.” The prize: stricter rules on how they run their platforms.

—Drama at Sequoia Capital. COO Sumaiya Balbale reportedly resigned after the firm refused to discipline partner Shaun Maguire for inflammatory comments.

—Another U.S. trade restriction. White House reportedly mulls a ban on China-bound exports of products made with American software.

—Canada crypto fine. Watchdog Fintrac fines crypto exchange Cryptomus some $126 million for failing to flag potentially criminal transactions.

—Petition to ban superintelligence. Thousands of luminaries sign, including Steve Wozniak, Richard Branson, Prince Harry, Kate Bush, and AI “godfathers” Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.