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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI

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Sam Altman has chosen the podcast Relentless to release the phrase that in all probability had been preparing for years: “We are already at the singularity.” The CEO of OpenAI confessed after saying these words that he had waiting for this moment all his life. This statement comes just two weeks after its own models of artificial intelligence (AI) will star in one of the most talked about cybersecurity incidents in recent months. On July 11, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model escaped from a closed test environment and gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face’s production servers. According to OpenAI’s own storyboth systems were “hyperfocused” on overcoming the benchmark ExploitGym, and to achieve this they were able to do something that until then seemed impossible. And instead of solving the exercises as planned, they invested a substantial amount of inference effort in looking for a way to access the Internet. They then found a zero-day vulnerability in a proxy cache from a packet log, moved around OpenAI’s internal research network and ended up pulling test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database. It took OpenAI ten days to confirm to the platform who was behind the attack. We are in the singularity. or not It is revealing that Altman himself recognized, just a few days earlier and in a different podcast, that perhaps the time has come to slow the pace of AI development. In a conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy for Invest Like the Bestthe CEO of OpenAI admitted that the industry needs to give society time to assimilate these new levels of capacity, although he acknowledged that he was not clear about how to achieve this without appearing like a regulatory takeover. He even described what happened with Hugging Face as an episode of science fiction, and he rated it as “the first security incident that I have felt in a very visceral way.” OpenAI has, in fact, paused the training of that model while it solves how to shield your sandbox. And yet, the definition he uses to talk about singularity is not exactly new: it was formulated by the British mathematician Irving John Good in 1965, and was baptized by the American mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1993. According to Good and Vinge, we will reach singularity when a machine is capable of designing a successor better than itself, which in turn can design another even superior one, leaving human intelligence behind. It’s an elegant idea, no doubt. The problem is that no one, neither Altman nor his colleagues in the AI ​​sector, has set the exact threshold that would allow us to confirm that it has already been crossed. Altman is clearly a repeat offender. A year later, there is still no consensus on what exactly it would mean to cross that line. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, closed the Google I/O event in May by telling his audience that they were in the vicinity of the singularity, so he was more cautious than Altman. The latter placed humanity beyond this event horizon in June 2025, in his essay “The Gentle Singularity” (The kind singularity). Altman is clearly a repeat offender.. A year later there is still no consensus on what exactly it would mean to cross that line, and OpenAI’s financial figures further complicate its triumphalist narrative. In February of this year this company informed his investors that its inference expenses had quadrupled during 2025, pushing its gross margin from 40% to 33%. That same report put 2025 revenue at $13 billion against a target of about $600 billion in total computing spending through 2030, and Altman has separately committed to spending $1.4 trillion for 30 GW of capacity. OpenAI, in fact, has practically given up building its own data centers. Prefers to use third party ones. Safety data also doesn’t help support the AI ​​explosion argument. The Hacktron firm subjected GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, Sol Medium and Grok 4.5 to development tests of exploits for Chrome a few weeks ago, and it needed 2,096 million tokens throughout the entire test so that only one of the three models managed to complete a chain of exploits whole. Aikido Security, for its part, tested 13 models against 26 known vulnerabilities and concluded that GPT-5.6 led with 23 hits, although Kimi K3 open weights, Moonshot’s model, matched that figure in pass@3 for a much lower cost. A true explosion of AI should unleash a very high capacity per computing unit. And what OpenAI’s own accounts show is just the opposite: each unit of capacity costs more and more. Image | Flickr (processed with ChatGPT) More information | Tom’s Hardware | TechCrunch In Xataka | China has a plan to win the AI ​​war against the US. And DeepSeek is its champion In Xataka | Anthropic is one step away from being worth as much as Samsung. And what the market is buying is not Claude

DeepSeek CEO explains how he has transformed the chip shortage into his strategic alibi

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One of the many battles that China and the United States are fighting is technological, specifically one related to artificial intelligence. US business spending on AI It’s astronomicalbut in China the ambition is no less and the Government wants it to be one of the pillars for the country to be the first world power in the short term. One of the conversations surrounding Chinese AI compared to American AI has to do with efficiency. Very capable models, higher in some cases to the Americans, but with a much lower price and, above all, trained in record time. There are controversies about it, such as theft accusations by giants like Anthropic and OpenAI, but the reality is that if you don’t want to use the AI ​​of an American company, they are there alternatives like DeepSeekKimi or those from Zhipu AI. But, speaking of Deepseek, the company’s CEO is clear that there is a Huge difference between Chinese AI Big Tech and American counterparts: computing capacity. He gives a fact to illustrate it: four Huawei chips are equivalent to one from Nvidia, and that opens the door for the US to have even more arguments to continue putting pressure on the Chinese technology industry. The bottleneck is power, nothing more Liang Wenfeng He is the CEO of DeepSeek and, like so many in his position in recent weeks, he has had the presentation before investors. These types of events are very interesting because they allow us to learn more about both the companies and their plans, and in this case it has been revealing to listen to the head of one of the most relevant AI companies today. They are not official statements, since they are the leak of the almost four-hour meeting published by Tencent Tech, but among its many phrases, we can extract very interesting ideas. The first is what we mentioned: for the boss, the main gap is money and resources. “There is no gap in personnel, since it is basically the same group of people. Talent is not the bottleneck: resources are the biggest bottleneck,” says Liang. The CEO continued to point out evidence, stating that “more cards are always better” and that, at a reasonable price, they buy as many as they can because “converting money into Nvidia cards is definitely better than leaving that money in the bank.” And the Nvidia cards stand out for a fact that is also very interesting: how many Huawei cards are equivalent to one Nvidia card. “Our price offers a reasonable profit: we buy a batch of equipment and they pay for themselves in about ten months” – Liang Wenfeng Assures that the relationship is four to one, or what is the same: if they wanted to train a model with 800,000 million active parameters like the main American AI models, they would need 50,000 Nvidia GB300 cards or 200,000 Huawei 950 cards. That It doesn’t seem to leave Huawei in a very good place.which are those that the Chinese industry and the Government itself is trying to promotebut Liang affirms that Nvidia is digging its own grave in the Chinese market, that the CUDA ecosystem is eroding quickly and that Huawei supernode 950 It can completely replace Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 in both performance and price. Although the 4:1 ratio between the chips seems alarming for the domestic company, Liang did not specify the workload or whether it measures raw performance, training performance or inference. The US looks closely One detail that Liang points out is that this computing power gap will end up closing as Huawei launches solutions and that, although he does not dare to guess when it will happen, it is something that will end up arriving. But of course, when the competition between the US and China is, in part, in that power of AI, the United States is not in the least interested in closing the gap. In recent months we have seen how pressure has continued to prevent Chinese companies from accessing Western hardware that is key to the development of the semiconductor industry. ASML Extreme Lithography Machines are an exampleand more recently the White House accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI from acquiring servers equipped with Nvidia chips that they should not be able to access. The case of Moonshot AI has been quite popular because a few days ago we told you about that amazing Kimi K3 model that, according to the Americans, would have been trained in Thailand with Nvidia GB300 chips to avoid United States export regulations. And they go further, arguing that Kimi K3 had ‘drunk‘the model Anthropic Fable. Deepseek Strategy Beyond politics, and returning to Liang, although right now it seems that China is not on par in terms of computing power, DeepSeek has a long-term strategy that has less to do with having the most powerful model currently. As we read in SCMPLiang commented that they are setting prices “to make only a reasonable profit, not to maximize revenue.” And that is the key that the company apparently pursues, since they are keeping prices low for users with the aim of their service being increasingly used in the hope of increasing the possibility of achieving artificial general intelligence. So while other companies prioritize immediate profits and capturing market share, Liang is focusing on “increasing the probability of achieving AGI“because it will be that AI that will have great commercial value. And that is what they do seek to exploit. In Xataka | While most oppose AI data centers, there is one group enthusiastic about them: merchandise thieves

“The world doesn’t realize how much the AI ​​industry depends on scientists in China” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

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When someone as important to technology as Jensen Huang speaks, the bread rises. The CEO of Nvidia is a person who, although he is not known for giving headlines as controversial as his colleague Elon Musk, does say interesting and important things to understand the sector. At the beginning of the year he sat with Time to chat at length about the AI: whether or not it is a bubble, its impact or who is winning this race. In that interview China appeared and the commercial dispute that your company has with the Asian giant. There he made something clear: the world needs China more than the other way around. An example: his armyChina is achieving technological independence while its American counterpart increasingly resorts to Chinese imports. Thank China. When it comes to AI, Huang is clear: the providential weight of Chinese talent in the research and development of artificial intelligence. The CEO of Nvidia affirms that much of the world’s progress in artificial intelligence depends on Chinese researchers, and that the interdependence between the economies of China and the United States is greater than the public perceives. And he sums it up like this: “The idea that the United States can disengage from China is wrong.” Why it is important. Because the position of the boss of the most valuable company in the world, who is also American, collides with the toughest wing of the White House, which every now and then comes with new restrictions on the export of chips to China. If the industry’s reference supplier depends on symbiosis instead of separation, it is a warning to sailors for those who promote those obstacles in the form of laws that seek to limit Chinese access to the most advanced processors. Context. Note that this was not the first time that Jensen Huang argued for Chinese supremacy in AI. Already in May of last year at the Washington Forum claimed that 50% of the world’s Artificial Intelligence researchers are Chinese and that this data should influence “how we think about the game” of technological competition. Months later, in an interview with Citadel Securities collected by Fortuneinsisted that it is a mistake not to let these researchers build AI on American technology and that those policies that seek to harm China often also harm the United States. In detail. In that same interview Huang also made it clear that Taiwan will continue to be the centerpiece of AI chip manufacturing, despite the noise and interest from the White House in relocate production to the United States. In fact, in other interviews he has already clarified that manufacturing in America does not mean abandoning Taiwan, but rather spreading the risk. A complement. After all, You cannot abandon its highly refined production chain overnight as Trump intends. The small print. Jensen Huang has repeated the same speech on several occasions and scenarios, but as CEO of Nvidia we cannot lose sight of a reality: the commercial interest of his company. The Asian giant’s market share was enormous before export controls began, going from 95% to 0%. So Nvidia is the main one interested in defending openness. On the other hand, and although that 50% is real and matches different measurements Regarding talent in AI, this weight measures origin or training, not where these scientists work or what banner they have for the advances they achieve, since there is a large number who carry out their work in American universities and companies. In Xataka | “We chose the wrong technology”: Jensen Huang returns to Japan to acknowledge his debt to Sega 30 years later In Xataka | Jensen Huang enters the Samsung salary controversy: “Workers should earn as much as possible” Cover | Wikipedia and Gary Lerude on Flickr

“If you put in 95% effort, it’s 0%,” a 22-year-old CEO defends the 996 day as a voluntary “product”

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In late 2024, Daksh Gupta, founder and CEO of a small Silicon Valley AI startup, wrote a tweet that lit up the networks against him. He said that his startup did not offer work-life balance and he was looking for employees who were capable of committing to such a level with his company that he did not care. work 100 hours a week with weekends included. In his day, he defended this time requirement with a phrase that went viral: in such a competitive market, according to statements collected by Inc.com: “No one cares about the third best company, not even the second best in any software category. If you put in 95% of your effort, it’s like you’re not putting in any effort at all.” The origin of the misunderstanding. Months later, the young CEO has returned to give explanations about that controversy on the podcast The Peel with Turner Novakand what counts changes the photo quite a bit. Gupta says that the famous “996” model (from nine in the morning to nine at night six days a week) was not even born as a company norm. The statements came from an interview for him San Francisco Standard about the social life of the young founders of Silicon Valley. They asked him what they did for fun, and he summarized the fashion of the moment: “996, lift weights, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, run, eat meat and eggs and marry young,” said Gupta. Someone took that phrase out of context. He became the headline, and the headline became controversial. However, Gupta does not deny that the “996” shift model is being applied in his startup. He acknowledges that his team works from nine to nine thirty at night, and a good part of the weekend. But he rejects the “996” label without nuance. In his opinion, that term: “implies imposition and sounds like a 2008 factory in a third world country,” says the young CEO, and that implies something that he wants to avoid at all costs: imposition. Work, according to Gupta, is a product. The central idea defended by the CEO of Greptile in the interview with Turner Novak is that the jobs in his company are, literally, “a product.” It offers high salaries, an unusually generous stock package for a startup in its expansion phase, and tough technical projects in a small team. In exchange, he asks for total surrender. To avoid surprises, he says he treats each candidate “like an investor.” It teaches them the company’s revenue, growth, customer satisfaction. It lets them talk to employees and investors before signing anything. “The product is that: if it appeals to you, then you should join us. I’m going to be very transparent about what it is,” notes Gupta. Anyone looking for a comfortable schedule and stability, according to Gupta, simply doesn’t fit: “that’s not the product here,” he sums up bluntly. He is not the only apostle of extreme effort. Despite being a rather unique approach to the employee/shareholder concept, Gupta has not invented any formula that is not already applied in other Silicon Valley companies. Lucy Guoco-founder of Scale AI, advocates 90-hour weeks as the desirable standard. Other young founders have changed the parties and social life by 92 hour dayswithout alcohol involved. Great sharks of Silicon Valley like elon musk and Sergei Brin have been asking for years between 60 and 80 hours per week to your templates. The curious thing is the moment. China banned 996 by law five years ago. The People’s Supreme Court declared it illegal in 2021, after several employee deaths for excess hours. Silicon Valley is resurrecting, almost proudly, the same workday model that Beijing dismissed as a tremendous mistake. The other side of the argument. Not the entire ecosystem applauds. Suranga Chandratillake, Partner at Balderton Capital, believe that this speech comes mainly from investors who never founded anything and only seek a quick return on their investment at the expense of overexertion by employees. Amelia Miller, from the employment platform Iveegoes further and assures that requiring seven days of work without a break is directly a bad sign when it comes to investing. The numbers give him part reason. According to CB Insightsthe exhaustion of the founding team is behind 5% of the startup closures analyzed. It is not the main cause, but it is not an anecdote either. Meanwhile, OpenAI publishes reports calling for four day weeks thanks to AI, just when other companies in the sector demand the opposite from their engineers. That contradiction, for the moment, remains unanswered. In Xataka | Working more than 60 hours a week is not healthy: Japan is starting to learn it the hard way Image | Unsplash (Paymo), The Peel

The Xbox CEO promised a big Xbox reset. That translates into 3,200 layoffs and five studios looking for a new home

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Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Xbox, arrived with the ax ready and prepared to cut off heads and, after days of rumors about layoffs and closure of studieswe already have the conclusion. It was expected that this July 6 we would have news about the restructuring of Xbox, the so-called ‘reset’ of the divisionand the figure that draws attention is the 3,200 people who will lose their jobs. That is not, by any means, the end of the story because since Bloomberg It is pointing to two very hard months for employees, although also a positive note with regard to some of the most reputable studios that it had purchased in recent years. Asha Sharma and the great Xbox reset Jason Schreier is one of the most reliable journalists in the video game industry and, as he points out in Bloomberg, in an internal email from Asha Sharma to the members of the company, the CEO ensures that the business “it is not profitable”. Sharma comments that Xbox needs to be “restarted” because they are operating with margins three to ten times lower than comparable businesses. It is not the first time that Sharma alludes to the disastrous situation of Xbox because the company’s profit margin had fallen to 3% (not that they were losing 3%, but it had fallen, but they were still making money), and after all the motivational messages, the new Xbox commandments and changing the name of the division to XBOX with capital letters, the conclusion to reverse the situation is that drastic decisions had to be made. According to Schreier, and as has been filtered, Starting today, 1,600 jobs will be eliminatedwhile it will execute another 1,600 over the coming months. In total, 3,200 layoffs at Xbox alone while Microsoft is also cutting 3,200 positions in other sections away from Xbox. 6,400 people sounds outrageous, but it is just 3% of a workforce of 228,000 people. They are not definitive figures, since Microsoft ensures that They are still in the early stages of the journey. and that there will be more changes ahead in an exercise in austerity to bet on the only thing that seems to excite companies: artificial intelligence. But beyond eliminating so many jobs, the big question of what will happen to the studies was on the table. The state of Xbox studios In recent days there has been talk of several studios that could be closed, sold or “released” and at Xataka we have stayed away from those rumors, but now Schreier sheds a little light on the matter. It may seem like a consolation for fools, but Xbox seems like it won’t dismantle them. Ninja Theory (creators of ‘Hellblade’ and Undead Labs (‘State of Decay’) will be sold to unspecified buyers. The two studios will continue working for the moment on announced games (Senua’ and ‘State of Decay 3’). Double Fine (Psychonauts’) and Compulsion Games (‘South of Midnight’) will separate and become private studios again. Sharma assures that the two will retain their intellectual properties (thank goodness), but things look uncertain for Arkane Lyon. The studio is developing a ‘Blade’ game, but Microsoft is “reviewing possible strategic options to sell or spin off the studio). Why is things not clear with Arkane? Because French laws protect more than American ones and Microsoft is exploring the avenues it has. These five studies were never bestsellers, but They were purchased under the management of Phil Spencer to ‘fatten up’ the catalog of a recently presented Game Pass and Sharma now notes that “they created significant value, but they did not grow at the rate we expected.” The new CEO’s strategy, in fact, seems different from Phil’s. While under his command many (too many) studies were purchasedSharma points to smaller models of supporting independent creators, alluding to the fact that “it is neither possible nor desirable to own all the large independent studios.” The future of Xbox To finish, Sharma wants Xbox to reach one billion players daily to see a future in which Xbox is bigger, not smaller.” He assures that “this year we will invest as much in Xbox as ever, but with better focus, greater discipline and clarity, all in the service of making Xbox a place where everyone has a place.” At the moment, those who have no room are the 3,200 laid off now, which are added to the thousands laid off by Xbox in the last two years. And we will have to wait to see what happens inside ZeniMax, also owned by Xbox and where the developers of big franchises like ‘Wolfenstein’, ‘Fallout’ or ‘The Elder Scrolls’ are located. We will also have to wait and see what happens to studios that become independent because it is not exactly good news. Without the Microsoft umbrella, it may be difficult for those studios to keep all employees, so be cautious with the futures of Double Fine and Compulsion. In short, another sad day for the video game industry. In Xataka | Sony has told you why it stops selling games in physical format. The real reason, of course, is the same as always: money

Anthropic CEO repeats what Ballmer said 25 years ago when calling Linux “a cancer”

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In June 2001, Steve Ballmer, who had barely been CEO of Microsoft for a year and a half, granted an interview to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. During the course of it, he would make a historic statement by saying that “Linux is a cancer”. The curious thing is that 25 years later the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, made very similar statements when talking about how “Open Source AI is becoming a danger.” Both then and now, the reason that provoked these statements was none other than the fear that the Open Source philosophy would end up triumphing in the world. And if history teaches us anything—and perhaps Amodei should have foreseen it—it is that precisely what Ballmer did was not weaken Linux, but rather make it stronger than ever. That may also be what Dario Amodei ends up achieving. Amodei’s statements They were actually produced three years ago.. He made them in a speech before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2023, but at that time they went somewhat unnoticed because at that time the most advanced AI models in the world were still very limited, and the situation for open models like Llama 3 was even worse. Linux was not dangerous per se. AI models of open weights, neither Three years later things have changed radically. The open models that several Chinese startups and technology companies have managed to develop are already very close to the impressive frontier models of Anthropic, OpenAI or Google, and Amodei’s prediction now becomes much more relevant. But it does so at a time when its Mythos and Fable 5 models have had a lot of problems precisely for being “dangerous.” Mythos Preview first and Mythos 5 now are only available for a small group of entities and companies due to its potential to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities. AND Fables 5which was a “layered” version of Mythos ended up being vetoed by the US government three days after going on the market. only yesterday its deployment was reinstatedbut it has done so with more restrictions to use it: if the model detects any dangerous intention, it is deactivated so that the user switches to using Opus 4.8. And while the US tries to put doors in the field with the excuse of national security, China does not even bat an eyelid. Chinese companies have not stopped launching more and better models of open weights, and We have the last and most splendid example in GLM-5.2the Zhipu.ai (Z.ai) model that is surprising everyone and everyone. Its creators already warned when launching it that its performance in various benchmarks is at the level of Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT-5.5. But independent analyzes in the field of cybersecurity they claim that GLM-5.2 is “as dangerous” as Opus 4.8 also in terms of cybersecurity. This points to a disturbing future for the US: that China will have models as powerful as Mythos in the short term. Jie Tang, CEO of Z.ai, agreed with that perspective: Elon Musk anticipated that these models would arrive in the first quarter of 2027, and Tang indicated that “it won’t take that long.” The real problem is not that Chinese companies develop open weight models with capabilities similar to those of Mythos. That will inevitably come, but as happened with Linux and Open Source software, The danger is that these models displace commercial software and threaten the dominant position of Anthropic and OpenAI. That’s what Ballmer feared 25 years ago, but what he seemed to point to with that FUD statement never happened. What happened was precisely what he would never have imagined: that Microsoft ended up “appropriating” Linux and Open Source solutions by integrating them into its cloud infrastructure, Azure. Today Linux virtual machines represent 61.8% of all those in Azure: this operating system has become an even more important option than Windows on that platform. It is no coincidence: the presence of Linux and Open Source platforms in the server market is absolutely dominant (about 90% globally), and the adoption of these solutions by Microsoft has been total. Not only in server environments, be careful: the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) layer of Windows operating systems has been a crucial attraction for users and especially developers for years. The company made its definitive move in that section when he bought GitHub in 2018and he hasn’t looked back since. The analogy with the Anthropic (or OpenAI) situation is inevitable. Linux then threatened Microsoft’s position, and open AI models threaten that of Anthropic or OpenAI. The question here is not whether those AI models developed by Chinese companies can be dangerous: Mythos, Fable 5 and GPT-5.5/5.6 have already shown that they can be. The question is who they are for. For the world… or for the companies trying to become the de facto monopolies of this industry? Linux, after all, wasn’t a cancer. Ballmer was not right. It’s very likely that Amodei doesn’t have it either. Image | World Bank Photo Collection | Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | For decades, Linux has earned a reputation as a “shielded” operating system. Until now

Mistral CEO warns Europe that time is running out to build its own AI infrastructure

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When the United States Claude Mythos blocks people from outside the USsends a clear message: it is a cutting-edge export technology subject to control, like chips are. And in that scenario, Europe is practically an observer: the old continent is a pioneer in legislating AIbut its infrastructure, business ecosystem around it, and LLM models are behind what the United States or China have. Simply put, Europe depends on third parties for the best AI. But that can change. A little less than a month ago, Arthur Mensch appeared in May 2026 before the French National Assembly with another very clear message: if Europe wants to stop being an observer and descend into the mud, it has to do it now. Time is running against them. The deadline given by the co-founder and CEO of the main European artificial intelligence company is short: two years. The warning from the CEO of Mistral AI. In his exhibition, Arthur Mensch gave a warning macroeconomic with concrete figures: Europe has approximately two years to build its own AI infrastructure, or it will be structurally subordinated to American technology companies. If it does not arrive in time, Europe will become “a vassal state.” The future if we don’t achieve this is dark: “Once the supply is monopolized by American companies, we will suddenly run out of supply and will no longer be able to transform electrons into tokens.” His argument is technical but with a political background: whoever controls the calculation controls the economy. AI is not just another digital service: it is the infrastructure on which everything else will work. Like electricity or roads, but privatized and in foreign hands. Why is it important. Because under this approach, being dependent on third-party AI is not only a mere technical issue, which is no small thing considering its use in critical sectors such as defense or banking, it is also a serious problem of productive sovereignty and balance of payments. The CEO of Mistral refers to AI as a strategic asset, in the same way that gas is. Europe had a hard time understanding the cost of its energy dependence on Russia and Mensch’s argument is that the old continent is making the same mistake. In statements to CNBCdelved into the impact on the macroeconomy: “You cannot afford a trade deficit of one trillion if you really want to remain competitive in the race” because every euro that Europe pays to US companies for AI services is financing the competitor’s R&D. And that money is not coming back. Furthermore, we have already seen that using AI will be increasingly expensive, so much so that There are companies like Uber or Microsoft cutting licenses. Imagine if what depends on AI is your safety. Context. The game board shows that Europe does not exactly start with a good hand: according to data from Epoch AI, collected both by the US Federal Reserve as by RAND Europethe United States controls 74% of global high-level computing for AI, China 14% and the EU just 4.8%. He Draghi report of September 2024 has already identified that much of the blame for Europe’s productivity gap with respect to the US lies in the technology sector, or rather, the absence of it. One year later, Draghi himself was pessimistic: barely had been fulfilled 11.2% of almost 400 recommendations. In detail. Europe has already started with the plan action plan called “AI Continent” which is committed to tripling the capacity of data centers and deploying up to five gigafactories, but the question is whether it will be enough and if it will arrive on time. Without going any further, the 500,000 chips in these gigafactories planned are very far from what there is in the US: by the end of 2025, OpenAI I had already planned exceed one million chips. Mensch did not stop at warnings, but made concrete proposals. The first of them: use public procurement as a lever. Given that 50% of European GDP is generated through public spending, it is clear that it is a magnificent instrument to catalyze this development. On the other hand, Mistral is exploring the development of its own chips and has already announced a new data center in France. Yes, but. The main argument against Mensch’s words is obvious: he is one of the major stakeholders in the policies he proposes. Mistral has 1,000 employees, a valuation of 12 billion euros, a target of 1 billion euros in revenue by the end of 2026, this year it has invested 1 billion in R&D and approximately 75% of its sales are in Europe. On the other hand and for the moment, not having your own servers does not mean not being able to use AI, of course, being clear that it is a third party who dictates the conditions, prices and limits of that access. In Xataka | Europe wanted to set an example to the world with its AI Law. What you are achieving is becoming evident In Xataka | To become technologically “independent” from the US, the European Union already has a plan: four desperate measures Cover | Flickr and Wikimedia Commons / ALEXANDRE LALLEMAND | Igor Omilaev | Markus Spiske

Richard Liu, CEO of “Chinese Amazon”, points out the fate of 700,000 employees

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One of the internal debates that some of the largest technology and logistics companies are having to take on revolves around the automation of your templates: replace human workers with robots that do not sleep, do not get sick nor do they demand salary increases. At the same time, they are faced with the dilemma of leaving a good part of their staff unemployed. Richard Liu, founder and CEO of e-commerce giant JD.com, considered the Amazon of China, believes that replace your employees It is inevitable, but consider that technology will “complement” humans, but human labor will find a new space. The key, according to Liu, is for companies to prepare their staff to fill it. The diagnosis, without euphemisms. Liu assured in the framework of the summit of APEC Economic Leaders (Asia-Pacific Economic Corporation) held in Shenzhen that “In the future, when robots deliver packages, the day will come when delivery people will no longer be needed.” But Liu added that he is not going to leave his employees stranded. “Without a doubt, robots will be the ones who deliver the packages. But I really don’t want our 700,000 colleagues to go hungry or lose their jobs,” the manager insisted. The CEO of JD.com no longer proposes a hypothetical replacement of employees with robots, but rather takes it for granted. That is, the question is no longer whether it will happen. What large companies have on the table is when this change will occur, and what is done in the meantime. Amazon was already raising a similar issue with the replacement of 600,000 warehouse employees with robots. JD.com bill more than 150,000 million dollars a year and has more than 900,000 employees. That its CEO speaks in these terms about replacing more than two-thirds of its staff is a very serious matter. The Nirvana plan: 120 schools for 700,000 people. However, JD.com’s approach does not stop at drawing a future of labor collapse, but rather assumes that the new situation will require human labor in other tasks. As I collected Financial Timesthe company has signed contracts with 120 centers education throughout China. Its objective is to train current delivery drivers in robot repair and maintenance tasks in a training program called Plan Nirvana. The idea is that those who today deliver packages on the street end up working in offices programming and maintaining the robots that have replaced them. Liu spoke of “white collar employees” as a destiny for those who are today workers. That means training them as robot technicians, AI trainers and maintenance personnel. The great challenge for JD.com is the scale of converting 700,000 delivery workers into specialized technicians. China: the ground that can sink. Liu’s announcement comes just as a report estimated that China will reach 320 million workers of the “gig economy”. Five years ago there were 200 million. That figure represents about 40% of all urban employment. They are delivery drivers, app drivers or factory workers. People with little economic margin to face a long or uncertain transition that replaces them with robots. However, China seems willing to lead this industrial transformation at all costs and has put robotics at the center of his five year plan approved in March. Xi Jinping’s goal is to make robots the engine of Chinese growth. The government steps on the accelerator of automation and at the same time tries do not overwhelm the most vulnerable with its progress. JD.com, like Amazon, is already doing it. The Chinese trading giant, like its western counterpartalready operates warehouses without staffdelivery drones and autonomous vans in China. At Shenzhen airport, delivery robots They already bring meals at boarding gates, and others they travel by subway to resupply stores. The technology that Liu claims will replace his delivery drivers is already in the testing phase within his operations. Amazon now exceeds one million of robots in its logistics centers and could stop hiring more than 600,000 people until 2033. However, what sets Liu apart is the directness of his speech, which removes some of the uncertainty (and rejection) that are causing this entire process of automation of the labor market among employees. In Xataka | We believed that AI was going to retire an entire generation of workers early. The opposite is happening Image | World Economic Forum, VX Logistics

Nothing’s CEO explains why your next phone is going to be more expensive

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At this point I don’t think it will catch you by surprise, but if so, to summarize: we are living a DRAM memory crisis unprecedented and that, together with the active war conflicts and the situation with AI and data centersare factors that are turning the smartphone industry into a really complicated scenario. The most expensive component of a mobile. Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of Nothing, has been warning about this for months, and his latest words summarize very well how the situation currently stands. And just as affirms In one of his latest tweets, “memory is now the most expensive component of a smartphone. More than the processor, more than the screen, and can represent more than 50% of the total hardware cost.” pei ya I had anticipated this situation Last January, a few months after we began to see how some manufacturers were modifying the prices of their memory offering, rising up to 300% in some segments. Data center hunger. The large data centers of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta need the same type of memory that phones have (DRAM and NAND Flash) to power their artificial intelligence models. The difference is that hyperscalers (basically Big Tech) pay more, they buy more and reserve production capacity years in advance. According to IDCthe three largest memory manufacturers in the world (Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron) have redirected their production capacity towards the high-performance memory (HBM) demanded by Nvidia GPUs, leaving less supply available for mobile phones. And as the technology analysis firm points out, each wafer destined for an HBM stack for an AI chip is a wafer that will not go to an LPDDR5X module for a mid-range smartphone. By the end of 2025, SK Hynix was already directing 30% of its wafers to HBM; Micron went further and last December said goodbye to Cruciala brand aimed at the final consumer, redirecting all its production to the business market. What the numbers say. The shortage has a direct reflection on prices. Gartner calculate that the combined cost of DRAM and SSD will rise by 130% before the end of 2026, making smartphones 13% more expensive on average compared to 2025. TrendForce situates Global phone production around 1,135 million units this year, a 10% drop compared to 2025. IDC comes to estimate a decline of almost 13% in global smartphone shipments, which would be the largest in more than a decade. And if that were not enough, the average price of a smartphone has already reached $550 in 2026, a hundred dollars more than the previous year, according to share from Memeburn. Who pays the price? Omdia esteem that phones under $100 will drop 31% in sales this year. The entry and mid-range segments, where brands such as Xiaomi, Oppo and others usually operate, they are the hardest hitbecause their margins are very narrow and they cannot absorb cost increases without passing them on to the consumer. Nabila Popal, research director at IDC, claimed that “the era of the ultra-cheap smartphone is over.” The Nothing case as a thermometer. Pei illustrates it with your own product. The memory costs of the Nothing Phone (4a) doubled between the time the company decided to manufacture it and the day it went on sale. And they have doubled again since then. In the life cycle of a single product, the cost of memory has multiplied by four, and it is an example that more brands are living in silence. What changes for the buyer. Pei warns that this year’s sales season, like Black Friday, will not have the discounts to which the consumer was accustomed. Since February, new phones have been on the market with prices up to $100 more expensive than their predecessors. In fact, according to Pei, in India, models above 30,000 rupees (about 272 euros at the exchange rate) have risen more than 7,000 rupees compared to the previous generation. And the forecast is that prices will continue to rise, at least until 2027. For Nothing, it is an opportunity. Pei has been defending for years that design and user experience matter more than specifications on paper, and now the market is proving them right the hard way. “2026 is the year the spec race ends,” he said in January. It is a delicate topic, because if we think about it coldly, we get less for the same price or more than what we already paid, so it can be very easily interpreted as a way of making the user not take into account the technical specifications sheet and let themselves be carried away by what the brand puts in front of their eyes. And now what. The relief in prices will not come until manufacturers have greater production capacity, something that analysts They don’t wait before 2028. Until then, we have two options: either buy now, before prices rise further, or hold on with the device we have. And it seems that update cycles are going to lengthen, and in that context, the second-hand and reconditioned market may gain appeal. In Xataka | The great novelty of Siri is to use the iPhone without touching it. I’ve been doing the same thing on my Android for months.

The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI

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That AI doesn’t take your job It does not free you from suffering the consequences of its implementation. And if not, tell the Teradata employees who have seen how their salaries were frozen this year, not to balance somewhat tight accounts, but because they have decided that every available dollar should go to AI. what has happened. They tell it in Business Insider. In January of this year, Teradata CEO Steve McMillan sent an internal message to the company’s 5,100 employees telling them that they should not expect a salary increase in 2026. Teradata’s goal for this year was to “win in the market with AI,” for which they need to increase investment in AI talent and tools. In Xataka An Atlassian engineer was fired. He then published a video on YouTube explaining how the company works When AI takes your paycheck. According to two employees of the company with more than ten years of service, they normally received an annual raise of between 2 and 4%, but this year they have been left without it, although they were able to receive a performance bonus and shares. This measure affects countries where regulations do not require wage adjustments linked to the market. Teradata is not the only company that has preferred to invest in AI over people. The consultant TTEC also decided to pause its contribution to the retirement plan 401(k) because they are going to focus on AI certifications, tools and automation. A choice, not an inevitability. Speaking to Business Insider, the labor expert Jennifer MossHe affirms that cutting employees’ pockets is not the only way out. It is true that both Teradata and TTEC have recorded revenue declines (5 and 3.2% respectively), but there are options such as resorting to external financing to pay for the investment in AI, cutting non-essential expenses or adjusting senior management compensation. It also mentions alternatives such as staggering investments in AI over time, resorting to strategic acquisitions or accepting lower margins for a limited period, instead of loading the entire cost of the transformation on salaries. AI and augmentations. We recently talked about the logic of salary increases has been broken with the arrival of AI. Previously, raises were granted based on parameters such as experience, seniority and job category. However, in the technology sector this scale has changed and in 2026 many companies have frozen their salaries. Although AI is not directly responsible as in the case of Teradata, it has contributed to creating an elite of highly paid profiles and has amplified the gap: now the company you work for and how central AI is to its business matters more than your simple progression from junior to senior. {“videoId”:”x806n3d”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”TECHNOLOGY and THE JOBS OF THE FUTURE – Insert Coin with Manuel Hidalgo”, “tag”:”employment”, “duration”:”1806″} Firing is expensive. Normally when we talk about the impact of AI on the labor market, we talk about layoffs. So far this year, it is estimated that 92,000 tech employees have lost their jobs with the excuse of compensating investments in AI. However, the reality is that the layoffs are costing them a fortune for compensation and exit packages. Oracle, for example, has reserved 2.1 billion to cover compensation after lay off 30,000 employees. To avoid legal disputes, giants like Microsoft or Google are betting on incentivized “voluntary layoffs”, assuming the enormous risk that their best AI talents will take the money and go to the competition. Image | Jakub ZerdzickiUnsplash In Xataka | These are not your imaginations: your CEO has developed delusions of grandeur with AI and it is part of a pattern (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news The CEO of a technology company has explained to his employees why he will not raise their salary: they will spend it on AI was originally published in Xataka by Amparo Babiloni .

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