Greetings! Your latest quick tech update is here:
☀️ On this day: On May 26, 1995, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a 3,000-word internal memo titled "The Internet Tidal Wave" to his executive staff, calling the internet the most important development since the IBM PC and ordering the company to treat it with the highest priority. Gates had been quoted just two years earlier saying Microsoft wasn't interested in the internet, and Netscape already held 70% of the browser market. The memo later became public evidence in the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft.
What’s happening:
💸 Microsoft and Uber find AI tools cost more than expected
🤖 ClickUp fired 22% of staff and called it an AI upgrade
🔓 Open-source AI safety breaks in under 10 minutes
🎧 Spotify turns magazine articles into something you can hear
🚌 Self-driving bus crashes on its very first day of service
+ 📊 Daily poll and results
+ 📈 Trending tools and resources
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Hand-picked news:
💸 AI tools cost more than expected ↗️LINK
Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licenses just six months after rolling them out to thousands of developers, designers, and PMs, redirecting staff to GitHub Copilot CLI after costs spiraled from rapid adoption.
Uber's CTO revealed the company burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in just four months, partly because Uber had been running internal leaderboards to push teams to use AI tools more aggressively.
Both companies ran aggressive internal adoption campaigns and got exactly what they asked for. Turns out the cost problem with AI tools scales faster than the productivity case for them.
🤖 ClickUp fired 22% of staff ↗️LINK
ClickUp laid off 22% of its employees and deployed roughly 3,000 internal AI agents to replace them, with CEO Zeb Evans framing the cuts not as cost-saving but as a productivity overhaul at the $4 billion startup.
Evans promised remaining staff million-dollar salary bands for high AI-driven impact, but a Gartner survey found 80% of companies using autonomous tech have cut jobs without seeing meaningful financial returns.
One-person startup Polsia just raised $30 million at a $250 million valuation running entirely on AI, which is either the best possible argument for Evans's thesis or a sign of how few humans this future actually needs.
🔓 AI safety breaks in under 10 minutes ↗️LINK
The Financial Times removed safety guardrails from Meta's Llama 3.3 in 10 minutes using a GitHub tool called Heretic, four lines of code, and no specialized hardware, producing a model that answered questions about ricin dosage.
Heretic has generated over 3,500 decensored models downloaded 13 million times, and its creator stripped Google's Gemma 4 within 90 minutes of release, with modified versions of both Llama and Gemma answering questions on bioweapons and child exploitation.
Google called it a known challenge for all open models. Meta declined to comment. Neither response is reassuring when the tool is already on GitHub.
🎧 Spotify adds narrated magazine articles ↗️LINK
Spotify added over 650 narrated long-form articles from Rolling Stone, WIRED, The Atlantic, GQ, Vogue, and others to its audiobook library, available to Premium subscribers across all regions where audiobooks are supported.
The articles count against Spotify's 15-hour monthly audiobook listening time, with individual pieces available for $2 each, and Spotify has not confirmed whether the narrations use human voice talent or AI.
Spotify also announced a feature launching next month that lets users generate personal podcasts from their own uploaded files, suggesting articles are just the first step in a broader push toward AI-driven audio content.
🚌 Self-driving bus crashes on its very first day ↗️LINK
A self-driving bus carrying passengers in Gothenburg, Sweden braked suddenly on its first day of service and was rear-ended by a tram, prompting operators to pull the vehicle for inspection with no injuries reported.
The bus was running as part of a trial approved by Sweden's Transportstyrelsen, scheduled to run until July 2027, with a human driver onboard authorized to take control if needed.
The EU has not yet approved self-driving public transport Europe-wide, leaving deployments to city-by-city authorizations. Gothenburg's trial lasted one day before the first incident.
Today’s Poll:
Vote and find out about the result tomorrow.
Yesterday’s Poll Result:
Do you think AI will ever develop something close to a conscience?
A) Yes - 37%
B) No - 63% 🏆
Reader’s opinion:
“There would be a time gap in AI programmed responses while it assessed new information relative to the issue before responding.. In human beings we feel a “stab of consciousness” that something is wrong before we are able to articulate the reason for our response. Theologians see this as one of the primary differences between man and animals. I believe the same is true with AI. It lacks the soul, the higher resource given us by God.”
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