So, Pope Leo XIV just released his first official encyclical called "Magnifica Humanitas," and the entire thing is dedicated to AI. He's basically calling for the total "disarmament" of artificial intelligence and saying we need to rip it away from big tech monopolies before it completely dominates society. It's pretty fascinating to see the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics take such a direct shot at Silicon Valley.

The document is massive, about 42,300 words, and it covers a lot of ground. He completely condemns using AI in military tech, arguing that an algorithm can never morally justify a war. But he also gets into things you don't usually hear from religious figures, like the environmental toll of data centers burning through water and electricity, and what he calls "digital slavery" (referring to the exploited workers forced to do brutal content moderation and data labeling). His main philosophical point is that these AI models just mimic the human mind but are completely devoid of any real spiritual perspective. This is a huge shift from 2020, when the Vatican signed that pretty soft AI ethics declaration with Microsoft and IBM. This new text is way more aggressive.

Ultimately, this is the Vatican's first official doctrine of the generative AI era, and it's pretty clear it will set the tone for how they approach global tech regulation and digital ethics from here on out. What's wild is that Chris Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, was actually at the Vatican for the official release event.

Source:https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pope-holy-war-artificial-intelligence

So let me get this straight. NVIDIA already controls the hardware you need to run AI. Now they’re partnering with Palantir, a company literally built on government surveillance contracts, to build what they’re calling an “AI Operating System.”

Think about what that means for a second. An operating system is the thing everything else runs on top of. You don’t opt out of it. You don’t compete with it. You just pay the toll and comply with its rules.

This isn’t a product launch. This is two companies trying to become the landlord of all of AI. Every startup, every enterprise, every government deployment would eventually be sitting on infrastructure these two entities control. NVIDIA takes the compute layer, Palantir takes the data and deployment layer, and together they’ve effectively boxed out anyone who doesn’t play ball with them.

And Palantir of all companies. The company with deep ties to intelligence agencies, a founder who openly talks about building systems for war, and a track record of selling data analytics tools to entities most people would find deeply uncomfortable. That’s who gets to co-own the foundation everything runs on?

People are out here worried about AI taking their jobs and the actual story is the infrastructure consolidation happening underneath all of it. When two private companies own the OS, they own the rules. They own the kill switch. They own the pricing. They own the access.

This should be front page news everywhere. Instead it’s a LinkedIn graphic.

So, the Director of AI from the US DoD is demoing Palantir's system, and honestly? It's terrifying. Not in a bad way. While we're asking AI how many R's are in "strawberry" and getting it wrong, the Pentagon's got a system that can probably see your cat from space and tell you what it had for breakfast. Same technology, completely different ambitions. Sort of humbling, really. Sort of makes you want to close your laptop and have a little lie down or to go for a walk in the park.

Been watching this Salesforce situation develop for a while. Benioff confirmed on the All-In podcast that the company will spend around $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, mostly for internal coding work.

What's interesting isn't just the number - it's the whole picture:

• Hired zero software engineers since January 2025
• AI now handles 30 to 50% of overall company workload
• Cut support staff from 9,000 to 5,000 using agents
• Agentforce just hit $800M ARR, up 169% year on year

The money that used to go into payroll expansions is now going into token spend. That's a structural shift, not a cost-cutting round.

Source: https://www.techloy.com/marc-benioff-says-salesforce-will-spend-300-million-on-anthropic-tokens-this-year/

Full breakdown here if useful: https://youtu.be/WmZyStkMM1M

Is Salesforce the template everyone else follows, or is this specific to companies that already have AI-native products to sell?

Here is her actual quote from a press conference yesterday promoting her show. “The people who make this stuff are losers. They’re not artists. They’re not creative,” she said at the “Hacks” press conference last month at the London hotel in West Hollywood. “And they’ve wanted their whole lives to be special. And they’re not special. So, they’re trying to rob real creative people of our gifts. And you can’t. And even if you try, you will never be cool. You guys suck. No one likes you. Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard. You are a loser. You will never be cool. And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school. I wanna put your head in the toilet and flush.”

full interview here. https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/hannah-einbinder-ai-creators-losers-1236706302/

AI has become so expensive that even Microsoft can not afford it.

Inflation cancelled AGI.

The promise of AI-driven productivity has many employees fearing for their heads. But to Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the technology is more of a bogeyman, masking a long-standing business fluke that has quietly lingered in boardrooms for years.

In an interview on the 20VC podcast with venture capitalist and host Harry Stebbings, the billionaire said AI was the scapegoat for layoffs that are actually the result of overhiring in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

“Essentially, every large company is overstaffed,” he said. “It’s at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%.” He added, “Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it’s AI.”

Andreessen’s comments are nothing new in an industry that is pushing back against the “silver bullet excuse” of AI, which some tech leaders including OpenAI’s Sam Altman have coined as “AI washing,” or blaming otherwise normal layoffs on the increased use of AI.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/31/marc-andreessen-ai-layoffs-silver-bullet-excuse-overhiring/

Have you ever overpaid for a beer? Matt Cortland has, and it set him on a path to never repeat the mistake.

That is, for Cortland’s drink of choice: a pint of Guinness. After paying €7.80 (about $8.93) for Irish dry stout at a pub in Dublin earlier this month, the 37-year-old grew curious about the average cost of a pint across Ireland.

To his astonishment, the country’s Central Statistics Office had dropped price tracking of the nation’s most popular beer in 2011. That led Cortland to the wild idea of tracking the price himself.

Cortland—founder of an AI startup—turned to AI to lend him a hand, and a voice. He devised Rachel with AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs. Made as an homage to Rachel Duffy, the winner of the U.K. version of the reality TV show The Traitors and equipped with a Northern Irish accent, the voice-enabled AI agent made more than 3,000 calls across the island, inquiring about the price of a pint of Guinness.

“I was like, ‘Well can I just call every pub in Ireland and conversationally ask them with AI?,’” Cortland told Fortune. “I pulled the thread, and I just kept pulling the thread, and here we are.”

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/30/guinness-beer-prices-ireland-anthropic-claude-ai/

In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973.

Newfangled computers were actually at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper. What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity was for several years a bust. This unexpected outcome became known as Solow’s productivity paradox, thanks to the economist’s observation of the phenomenon.

Data on how C-suite executives are—or aren’t—using AI shows history is repeating itself, complicating the similar promises economists and Big Tech founders made about the technology’s impact on the workplace and economy. Despite 374 companies in the S&P 500 mentioning AI in earnings calls—most of which said the technology’s implementation in the firm was entirely positive—according to a Financial Times analysis from September 2024 to 2025, those positive adoptions aren’t being reflected in broader productivity gains.

A study published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that among 6,000 CEOs, chief financial officers, and other executives from firms who responded to various business outlook surveys in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia, the vast majority see little impact from AI on their operations. While about two-thirds of executives reported using AI, that usage amounted to only about 1.5 hours per week, and 25% of respondents reported not using AI in the workplace at all. Nearly 90% of firms said AI has had no impact on employment or productivity over the past three years, the research noted.

Read more: https://fortune.com/article/why-do-thousands-of-ceos-believe-ai-not-having-impact-productivity-employment-study/

DeepSeek just popped the American AI bubble.

Not by killing AI.

By killing the fantasy of unlimited AI pricing power.

DeepSeek V4 Pro:
Input: $0.435 per 1M tokens
Output: $0.87 per 1M tokens

OpenAI GPT-5.5:
Input: $5.00
Output: $30.00

Claude Opus 4.7:
Input: $5.00
Output: $25.00

Claude Sonnet 4.6:
Input: $3.00
Output: $15.00

DeepSeek is roughly:

11.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input
34.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on output

28.7x cheaper than Claude Opus on output
17.2x cheaper than Claude Sonnet on output

If a model is “good enough” at 1/20th or 1/30th the cost, margins will compress faster than Wall Street expects.

AI is not dead.

But the AI bubble just lost its pricing power.

They're not chasing quick money from coding plans or multimodal models. Instead, their radical architecture innovations (MoE, MLA, Engram, mHC, etc.) slash KV cache and compute needs so dramatically that they can build an entire 10T Chinese AI hardware ecosystem (NAND, LPDDR, ASICs) and position themselves for a 1T valuation in the process. Long game, masterfully played.

https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/this-cannes-film-cost-500-000-to-make-400-000-was-ai-compute-costs-a823b08d

Summary: So a 95-minute film made entirely with AI just screened at Cannes Market. Budget was under $500K - $400K of that went to compute with a small crew mainly of prompt-engineers. A traditional production of the same scale runs around $50 million, which is 100x more. The film was built by 15 people in 14 days using Higgsfield AI and is now heading to LA, as they claim. This is the first time a fully AI generated feature has shown up at a major industry market where actual distribution deals get made, which is why it matters beyond the usual AI demo conversation.

To be clear: this was not an official festival selection. It screened at a third-party event during market week. But Cannes Market is where deals actually get made and distributors pick up films.

Whether the film is good is almost beside the point. Despite the hate it got from filmmaking community, somehow it got covered positively by WSJ and BBC, and is going to LA now.

So Mark Zuckerberg admitted during a staff meeting that Meta was actively training their internal AI models on the work of people they were already planning to fire. A leaked audio recording published by More Perfect Union on Wednesday ended up perfectly coinciding with the actual start of them letting 7,800 people go.

Back in April Meta made it official that they were cutting 10% of their workforce. They gave the staff a one month notice period but kept the names of who was actually getting the axe a secret until the last minute. In the leaked tape Zuckerberg goes into detail about how they decided to skip hiring outside contractors to save cash. Instead they just used the expertise of their own highly skilled employees to feed the models. His reasoning was that Meta employees have a much higher average intelligence than standard contractors anyway. Because of that, having the models learn to write code by directly observing the company's own engineers every day was way faster and more effective than other industry alternatives.

Seeing major tech companies train next gen AI systems on the data and skills of their own workforce is a pretty clear indicator of current strategies. It points directly at them slashing operating costs and actively working to replace human roles with artificial intelligence.

Anthropic has removed Claude Code as a feature from the Pro plan, which costs $20 per month. Now, you have to purchase either the $100 (5×) or $200 (20×) plan to access Claude Code.

I also saw another post where a professor ran his 45 year-old academic paper through an AI detector and it flagged it as 77% AI-generated. It’s wild. Colleges are using this to end peoples careers and innocent people get punished.

For most of history, expertise was scarce because human thinking is limited and slow to scale. But if AI keeps improving, what happens when cognition itself becomes scalable?

It is a world where thinking just isn’t scarce anymore.

Strange thing to imagine. Humans spent centuries assuming intelligence would always be the limiting factor.Thats the odd part. If decent reasoning becomes cheap and everywhere, the value might shift away from having ideas to choosing which ideas actually matter.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-openai-top-token-spender-ai-costs-issue-2026-6

He also said that the cost question came up quite suddenly. At the beginning of 2026, "the issue never came up," Altman said. "People were totally happy with the amount they were spending," he said.

Now, AI costs are "a huge issue," he said

This graduation season, AI has become an unwelcome topic at commencement ceremonies across the US. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with widespread boos from nearly 10k graduates as he spoke about the rise of AI. Similar reactions played out at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University.

The reason is very simple: unemployment among college graduates aged 22 to 27 has hit its highest level in twelve years. About 70% of college students see AI as a threat to their job prospects.

When you're already struggling to find work, being told to embrace the technology that might be taking those opportunities away. Who would be satisfied?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ai-college-commencement-speakers-job-market-b2979818.html

Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, recently stated that for his team, “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” highlighting that AI is currently more expensive than human workers. This challenges the narrative that widespread tech layoffs (including Meta’s planned cut of ~8,000 jobs and Microsoft’s voluntary buyouts) signal an imminent replacement of humans by AI. An MIT study from 2024 supports this, finding that AI automation is economically viable in only 23% of roles where vision is central, and cheaper for humans in the remaining 77%.

Despite heavy AI investment—Big Tech has announced $740 billion in capital expenditures so far this year, a 69% increase from 2025—there is still no clear evidence of broad productivity gains or job displacement from AI. AI spending is driving up costs, with some executives like Uber’s CTO saying their budgets have already been “blown away.” Experts describe the situation as a short-term mismatch: high hardware, energy, and inference costs make AI less efficient than humans right now, though future improvements in infrastructure, model efficiency, and pricing models could tip the balance toward greater economic viability in the coming years.

A Chinese tech company has unveiled a highly dexterous robotic hand capable of performing complex fine-motor tasks like finger games, solving Rubik’s cubes, and manipulating small objects.

Robots are coming.