Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
💔 Cracks are forming in Meta’s partnership with Scale AI
❌ Salesforce cut 4,000 jobs because of AI agents
🤖 Apple launches new AI chatbot for retail staff
⚡️ OpenAI plans 1 GW data center in India
🛡️ Amazon stopped Russian hackers targeting Microsoft
🎁 + 8 other news you might like
🔮 + 3 handpicked research papers and tools
💔 Cracks are forming in Meta’s partnership with Scale AI LINK
Ruben Mayer, a previous Scale AI executive who joined Meta to help run its new lab, departed after only two months, signaling potential personnel instability within the recent partnership.
Despite Meta's multi-billion-dollar investment, its TBD Labs is using competing data labeling vendors like Surge and Mercor because some researchers reportedly consider Scale AI's data to be low quality.
Meta’s AI unit has experienced growing chaos since the partnership, with new talent frustrated by bureaucracy and several longtime members, including researcher Rishabh Agarwal, announcing their departures from the company.
❌ Salesforce cut 4,000 jobs because of AI agents LINK
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff confirmed slashing 4,000 customer support roles, reducing the team from 9,000 to 5,000 people because AI agents now handle exactly 50 percent of all conversations.
An "agentic sales" system is now calling back over 100 million leads that the company had not contacted over the last 26 years because it did not have enough people.
Although humans still take over when an AI agent needs help, Benioff claimed customer satisfaction scores have stayed about the same, a result he called a "stunning" development.
🤖 Apple launches new AI chatbot for retail staff LINK
Apple has reportedly added a new AI chatbot named "Asa" to its internal SEED iPhone app, a tool designed for the company's sales enablement and education staff.
This functionality is not yet widely available, as many SEED members have stated they do not have access, suggesting a slow rollout or an initial trial phase.
By keeping the assistant private, Apple avoids the public risk of hallucinations and can provide a resource focused strictly on its own product details and sales tips.
⚡️ OpenAI plans 1 GW data center in India LINK
OpenAI is reportedly seeking local partners to build a data center in India with one gigawatt capacity as part of the $500 billion Trump-backed Stargate AI initiative.
If developed, this facility would be eight times larger than North India's biggest existing AI-ready site and represent 22 percent of the country’s total forecast capacity for 2030.
The plan follows a fourfold increase in India's ChatGPT user base over the past year and the launch of a low-cost ChatGPT Go subscription specifically designed for that market.
🛡️ Amazon stopped Russian hackers targeting Microsoft LINK
The Russian state-sponsored group APT29 launched a "watering hole" campaign by compromising legitimate websites to redirect visitors and steal credentials for their Microsoft accounts.
Attackers used the compromised sites to mimic the official device code authentication flow, aiming to harvest login information for the purpose of ongoing intelligence collection against selected targets.
Amazon stopped the threat by isolating affected EC2 instances on its platform, then collaborated with Cloudflare to disrupt the malicious domains and immediately alerted the targeted company.
Other news you might like
- FTC chair warns Google about Gmail’s ‘partisan’ spam filtersLINK
- LLMs struggle with clinical reasoning and are just matching patterns, study findsLINK
- Lovable’s CEO isn’t too worried about the vibe-coding competitionLINK
- UK age check law seems to be hurting sites that comply, helping those that don’tLINK
- End of an era as the last 11-inch MacBook Air is now officially obsoleteLINK
- Bitcoin could be broken by quantum computers, El Salvador warnsLINK
- G42 looks beyond Nvidia as it explores AMD, Cerebras and Qualcomm for AI campus hardwareLINK
- Why Runway is eyeing the robotics industry for future revenue growthLINK
Latest research and tools
Procmon for Linux: a version of the classic Windows tool that provides a way for developers to trace system call activity on a Linux system.LINK
Ruby Curl bindings: a new library for the Ruby language providing efficient, concurrent network requests with native Fiber support.LINK
Spotilyrics: a VS Code extension that displays the synchronized lyrics of the song currently playing on Spotify in a side panel.LINK
Want to get the latest news differently? Find us on:
See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ Techpresso!
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}
.png){kind=small}