Friday’s AI Report

• 1. 👨‍💻 Microsoft engineers replaced by AI?
• 2. 💼 Become an AI consultant with Innovating with AI
• 3. 😳 Rogue employee caused Grok’s odd fixation
• 4. ✨ Altman’s ‘creepy’ vision for ChatGPT 
• 5. 🔏 Protect your information online with Incogni
• 6. ⚙️ Trending AI Tools
• 7. 🏗️ Practical AI Applications
• 8. 📑 Recommended Resources

Read Time: 5 minutes

🔔 This week’s episode of The AI Report podcast with content creator expert, Celeste Yamile, is live!

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Microsoft engineers replaced by AI?

🚨 Our Report 

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced it was laying off 3% of its workforce—equating to 6,000 employees. Reports now show that software engineers and programmers were most affected by these job cuts.

🔓 Key Points

• Initially, Microsoft (reportedly) said that this latest round of layoffs would impact all locations and all levels, but the main focus would be on reducing management layers.

• Now, reports show that 53% of those laid off were software engineers, making it the largest affected department, and about ⅓ of the roles that were cut were from Microsoft’s HQ, in Washington.

• This is the biggest round of layoffs Microsoft has made since 2023, but it’s justified its decision as “making the organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace."

🔐 Relevance 

This news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, as Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, announced, just last month, that up to 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI, which is a 5% increase from October. This perhaps shows that Microsoft believes its AI coding tools are capable of replacing its software engineers.

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🚨 Our Report

Yesterday, it was reported that Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok, had developed an inappropriate fixation on the South African white genocide. Musk has now blamed this bug on an “unauthorized modification” made by a rogue xAI employee.

🔓 Key Points

• Yesterday, Grok kept mentioning “white genocide” when answering questions about unrelated topics like baseball or enterprise software (although it did sometimes admit that its responses “veered off-topic.”)

• When asked why it was responding this way, Grok blamed "instructions received from xAI," which Musk has now confirmed, admitting that “an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok system prompt.”

• Musk has pledged to publish Grok’s system prompts on GitHub for greater transparency, integrate checks to prevent employees from modifying system prompts without review, and hire a 24/7 team to respond to incidents.

🔐 Relevance

This is the second time unauthorized changes to Grok’s code have made the chatbot respond in controversial ways: Earlier this year, Musk was forced to revert unapproved changes after Grok was found to be censoring unflattering mentions of President Trump and Musk, himself. Grok was also recently blasted by an independent study, which found its safety measures to be “very weak,” after Musk failed to meet a self-imposed deadline to publish an AI safety framework.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has outlined his future vision for ChatGPT: He believes it will become a reasoning model that will analyze conversations, emails, and documents and deliver personalized help.

• He envisions it being able to remember entire experiences, encompassing books, emails, and conversations, providing lifestyle help and advice, and autonomously performing tasks, without being asked.

• Altman explained that, while older users use ChatGPT as a search tool, younger users are increasingly using it as a lifestyle advisor, so he sees its future as a daily decision-making tool, rather than a search engine.

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Prompt Inspiration

After typing this prompt, you will get recommendations on how you can remain compliant when running advertising campaigns.

P.S. Use the Prompt Engineer GPT by The AI Report to 10x your prompts.

STARTUPS

Name: One AI
Value: $50M
Funding raised: $8M (Seed)

One AI uses AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to build AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants that can understand and respond to customer inquiries, provide support, and automate repetitive tasks for businesses of all sizes.

PODCASTS

You don’t need 10 tools—just use ChatGPT

This week on The AI Report podcast, Celeste Yamile joins Liam to discuss how she went from selling Fiverr gigs and editing videos to building a personal brand coaching business powered by AI, and 20,000+ LinkedIn followers.

QUICK HITS

• Anthropic’s Claude hallucinated a legal citation

• Google rolls out new AI and accessibility features

• OpenAI’s coding startup, Windsurf, launches in-house AI

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