🚨 Tech companies cut over 80,000 jobs in Q1 2026

🍔 DoorDash gives restaurants AI tools to fake it till they make it

🔓 Meta launches open beta for third-party AI ad connectors

🔞 Utah passed an anti-VPN law that the internet can't actually enforce

🏥 A 2024 AI model is beating ER doctors at their own job

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Tech companies cut over 80,000 jobs in Q1 2026, nearly triple Q1 2025's total, with Meta and Microsoft among the latest to announce cuts while pointing to AI as the driving force.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argues the real causes are pandemic-era overhiring and a rapid Fed rate hike from 0% to over 5%, leaving large companies 25% to 75% overstaffed with bloated cost structures.

Even OpenAI's Sam Altman acknowledged that companies are using AI as a blanket excuse for cuts, a practice now being called "AI washing," which at least Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney had the honesty to reject publicly.

DoorDash launched AI tools that let merchants auto-populate their app listings from an existing website, pulling in photos, hours, and menus, similar to a feature Amazon rolled out for sellers in 2024.

Restaurants also get two photo editing tools: AI Retouch fixes lighting and backgrounds without altering the dish, while AI Replate reskins food photos to look professionally plated using a reference image.

DoorDash is also letting merchants spin up full websites from their existing app listings, and during testing those sites converted orders at nearly 10%, which is a solid enough number to make the feature more than a novelty.

Meta is opening its ad ecosystem to external AI tools via MCP connectors, letting advertisers manage campaigns through assistants like ChatGPT and Claude without leaving their existing workflows.

At launch, the connectors support cross-channel insights and campaign management, but industry insiders are skeptical Meta will open up the performance optimization layer, where its own algorithm remains dominant.

Meta has historically pushed advertisers toward its own tools, so the move reads less like generosity and more like a retention play, keeping ad budgets anchored to its platform even as workflows expand elsewhere.

Senate Bill 73 takes effect May 6, making Utah the first U.S. state to hold websites liable for users who bypass age checks via VPN, and banning sites from sharing instructions on how to do so.

The law assumes websites can detect and geolocate VPN traffic, but they can't. Reliable VPN detection requires deep packet inspection at the ISP level, the same infrastructure authoritarian governments like China and Russia use, not something a web server can access.

The people most likely hurt by this aren't teenagers finding workarounds, but non-technical users who depend on commercial VPNs for legitimate privacy, including journalists, abuse survivors, and political dissidents.

A Harvard study in Science tested OpenAI's o1-preview against two ER doctors across 76 real cases, with the AI hitting 67.1% diagnostic accuracy at triage versus 55.3% and 50.0% for the physicians.

The model worked from raw electronic health-record text only, with no additional context, and human reviewers scoring the results couldn't distinguish AI diagnoses from physician diagnoses.

In one case, the AI caught a rare flesh-eating infection in a transplant patient 12 to 24 hours before the treating doctor did, and this was a model already a generation or two behind the frontier.

A) Yes - 36%

B) No - 64% 🏆