📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI

Twitter founder and Block Inc (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced late last month that his fintech venture was making “one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company” by “reducing our organization by nearly half.”

Dorsey cited rapid improvements in AI tech as the primary reason, sending shockwaves across Wall Street. He’d previously instructed employees to embrace AI at all costs, triggering major anxiety over job security that turned out to be warranted.

The culling perfectly played into ongoing fears that AI automation is coming for white-collar jobs, a major job market and economic disruption that workers are becoming increasingly worried about — and which clearly has execs salivating.

As big tech was incurring losses over ongoing fears of an AI bubble starting to burst, Block investors sent a clear signal, sending shares of Dorsey’s company soaring following his announcement.

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey told analysts during a call, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

But the CEO’s boasting failed to convince everybody that the AI-triggered job apocalypse is nigh. As former employee Aaron Zamost, who was head of communications at Square from 2015 to 2020, argued in an essay published by the New York Times, there are likely a litany of other factors at play apart from AI.

“The question on minds everywhere: Is AI a terrifying new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable?” he wrote. “Or is Block’s announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing?”

“The truth is, nobody knows the answer — not even Block itself,” Zamost argued.

The former head of comms wrote that Dorsey had “long placed big bets based on a read of early signals” and “show a tendency to identify patterns, see enormous growth as an inevitability and go all in with conviction.”

But whether AI really explains the company’s major downscaling instead of neatly providing a “new justification for layoffs” remains unclear at best. For one, Block had already seen major rounds of layoffs in both 2024 and 2025.

Its prior history is relevant as well. Between the end of 2019 and end of 2023, the company’s head count ballooned from 4,000 to almost 13,000 employees, per the WSJ, a major pandemic-era hiring spree.

“Look closer at specific cuts — like shrinking the policy team and eliminating diversity and inclusion roles, former colleagues told me — and Block’s latest reorganization reads like standard prioritization and cost management, not an AI-driven reinvention,” Zamost wrote.

Particularly, executives forcing their employees to adopt AI tools, often against their will, could trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy at companies claiming to be “AI first,” he argued.

“That future, however, is colliding with the reality of what AI can actually do,” Zamost wrote, pointing to AI models generating “useless email summaries, antisemitic chatbots, and AI overviews that can’t get even basic facts right.”

“Not all the roles I’ve heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines,” he added.

Other analysts were equally unconvinced by Dorsey’s argument that AI had allowed him to cut almost half his company’s workforce.

“The vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI,” corporate investment bank Mizuho Americas’ Dan Dolev told the WSJ.

“This isn’t an AI story,” former Block employee Jason Karsh tweeted. “It’s organizational bloat wearing an AI costume.”

More on Block: Jack Dorsey Lays Off 4,000 Employees After Move to AI

The post Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI Layoffs, Insider Says appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Eksklusif ai: 200,000 ancient Milky Way stars reveal the Universe

Astronomers in Italy and Germany have turned to some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way to estimate the true age of the Universe, and finally address the long-standing mystery known as the Hubble tension.

Researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy, and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), used precise stellar data to determine that the Milky Way Galaxy, which includes the Solar System, is likely 13.6 billion years old.

Even though this age contradicts the younger Universe proposed by Cepheid and supernova measurements, it agrees with the older age estimated from the cosmic microwave background. It adds a new perspective to the Hubble tension debate.

“This project beautifully shows how combining expertise from different fields can open new windows on fundamental questions,” Elena Tomasetti, a PhD student at the University of Bologna and lead author of the study said.

A new cosmic approach

The Hubble constant, which measures how fast the Universe is expanding today, is one of the most debated questions in modern cosmology. While estimated at roughly 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc), its exact value is still disputed.

Meanwhile, different measurement methods have produced conflicting results throughout the years. Observations based on nearby cosmic objects like Cepheid variable stars and supernovae suggest a faster expansion rate. This corresponds to a younger Universe of roughly 13 billion years.

In contrast, measurements based on the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, indicate a slower expansion, as well as a slightly older Universe of about 14 billion years.

“Measuring the age of stars is, in itself, a complex challenge, but we now live in an era in which the quantity and quality of available data allow us to achieve unprecedented precision and, for the first time, statistically significant results,” Tomasetti said.

To address the challenge, the research team placed their focus on the ages of the oldest stars in the galaxy. Because the Universe cannot be younger than the stars it contains, accurately measuring the ages of the oldest stars in the Milky Way can provide a robust lower limit on the age of the Universe.

Clues from ancient stars

For the project, the team utilized an existing catalogue of stellar ages developed at AIP, which contains age estimates for over 200,000 stars in the Milky Way. Data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission provided precise measurements of stellar distances and spectra.

This information made it possible for the scientists to determine stellar properties with unprecedented accuracy. The team utilized the dataset to select a carefully vetted sample of the oldest stars with the most reliable age measurements.

They prioritized quality over quantity, and filtered out objects that might distort the results. The final sample included about 100 ancient stars, whose ages were determined using the StarHorse computational framework.

Cristina Chiappini, PhD, a senior scientist at AIP, noted that the Gaia mission has effectively turned the Milky Way into a near-field cosmology lab. “We can now estimate stellar ages with unprecedented precision,” Chiappini said.

“The next breakthrough will be accuracy, anchoring the Galactic timeline with far greater certainty,” she concluded in a press release. “The HAYDN mission concept, with AIP participation, aims to provide that decisive step.”

Future data releases from Gaia are expected to further improve age estimates and could refine measurements of both the Universe’s age and the Hubble constant.

The study has been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com