Layoffs don’t boost the share price — they drop it
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/23/layoffs-dont-boost-the-share-price-they-drop-it/]
It’s common wisdom that doing a layoff sends your stock price up. But what if that wasn’t true? Elsie Peng at Goldman Sachs analysed layoffs between July and November 2025 and what the stock price did afterwards. [MarketWatch] On average, a layoff was followed by the stock price going down 2% over the following two […]
#AI takes another journalism job: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/20/mediahuis-suspends-senior-journalist-over-ai-generated-quotes
Companies go full AI — then the bill comes due
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/19/companies-go-full-ai-then-the-bill-comes-due/]
Around the world, the enterprise AI revolution rockets forth at full speed! Get rid of those annoying and expensive employees! Replace them with the magical truth machine! And the huge push for Claude Code in the past few months! You can hardly log into Mastodon without seeing yet another tech luminary who’s chosen to replace […]
Facebook shutting down its Horizon Worlds VR Metaverse
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/18/facebook-shutting-down-its-horizon-worlds-vr-metaverse/]
Meta, formerly Facebook, has a bee in its bonnet about AI and is spending as much money as it can. But it had another bee in its bonnet before this — the Metaverse! Virtual reality! Mark Zuckerberg loved the Metaverse so much he even changed Facebook’s name to Meta. The Metaverse’s flagship app was Horizon […]
AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/12/ai-companies-try-to-pay-staff-in-ai-tokens-not-money/]
This week’s big headline is: “Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation“. Uh huh. [Business Insider] The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an AI company … you get paid in AI tokens. The units that the AI vendor charges API access in. You have […]
Bonus #AIIsGoingGreat: After assuring us recent incidents were only coincidentally connected to AI*, Amazon "summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools"
In today's #AIIsGoingGreat (ht @platypus*), Microsoft security does a nice writeup of SEO bros abusing "summarize with AI" buttons to inject "memories" into AI assistants… and then goes on to offer mitigations like "be sure to hover links before you click them" and "regularly check your AI memories" … because if the last 30 years of infosec has taught us anything, it's that user vigilance is the first and best line of defense, right?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/02/10/ai-recommendation-poisoning/
That helpful “Summarize with AI” button? It might be secretly manipulating what your AI recommends. Microsoft security researchers have discovered a growing trend of AI memory poisoning attacks used for promotional purposes, a technique we call AI Recommendation Poisoning.
UK AI Action Plan: vaporware, crypto bros, and no AI
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/10/uk-ai-action-plan-vaporware-crypto-bros-and-no-ai/]
The UK announced its AI Opportunities Action Plan in January 2025. This would transform the UK into an AI country! Rocketing into the future! The plan was based on two reports in 2024 from the Tony Blair Institute, with lots of what looked like factual details about the UK industrial landscape — but which the […]
Block’s AI layoffs are fake too
[Full text: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/09/blocks-ai-layoffs-are-fake-too/]
Twitter cofounder and ayahuasca beard weirdo Jack Dorsey has a company called Block that does a useful thing — CashApp — and a lot of stupid stuff with bitcoins and so on. On 26 February, Block announced a huge layoff — over 4,000 people, 40% of the company. Morale has been down at Block — […]
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Reed Mideke
