CHINA ELIMINATES 12,000 ‘OBSOLETE’ UNIVERSITY DEGREES IN PUSH TO PREPARE FOR THE AI ERA CHINESE UNIVERSITIES SCRAP 12,000 DEGREE PROGRAMS AS AI RESHAPES JOB MARKET DEMANDS

There goes our weekend plans...

META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild. This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit." A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy." Here is what's behind it. Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees." The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing." At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes. Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year. That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact." The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger. META declined to comment.

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

Checked out the The Malaysian AI Show and Tell yesterday. Very happy to see people are building cool stuff