📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Elon Musk Orders Sweeping Layoffs as xAI Fails to Catch Up

In a Thursday tweet, Elon Musk said he was looking to rebuild his AI startup xAI “from the foundations up” after admitting it wasn’t “built right first time around.”

The news comes amid a major exodus of cofounders, with a striking majority of them jumping ship over the last year. Amid the resulting leadership vacuum, the Financial Times reported on Friday that Musk had omitted a key detail in his latest missives on his social media platform. According to the paper’s sources, he’s ordered a round of sweeping layoffs at the company after becoming frustrated with a lack of progress on its AI coding software.

Many roles are reportedly being scrutinized. Musk reportedly ordered higher-ups from Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which xAI was folded into earlier this year, to conduct audits and weed out anybody deemed to be underperforming — likely not what staffers, who were already complaining of burnout, wanted to hear.

The news comes just over a month after Musk announced he had “reorganized” xAI, admitting that it “unfortunately required parting ways with some people.”

The pressure is on. Following SpaceX and xAI’s merger, the space company is looking to go public at a staggering valuation of $1.25 trillion.

But keeping up in the heated AI race is proving far more difficult than Musk may have anticipated, given his decision to rework the entire thing mere months ahead of the biggest stock market listing in history.

Coding, in particular, has become a major focus, with Musk poaching two senior employees from AI coding startup Cursor. According to the FT, staffers have grown concerned that the training data of xAI’s chatbot Grok was lacking, causing it to lag far behind Anthropic’s popular Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.

“Grok is currently behind in coding,” Musk said at a conference earlier this week, as quoted by Business Insider. “The reason I was late for this was that I was just in a giant sort of all-hands on coding, going through all the things that need to happen to essentially exceed our competitors on coding, which I think we’ll do.”

Musk’s messaging surrounding the company’s AI product has been opaque. In August, the mercurial CEO announced the company’s latest AI project, “Macrohard,” a tongue-in-cheek jab squarely aimed at competitor Microsoft. Musk also said that he was combining Tesla and xAI’s efforts to develop a “digital Optimus,” a nod to the carmaker’s humanoid robot.

The man who was leading the “Macrohard” effort, former DeepMind researcher Toby Pohlen, left the company just 16 days after being put in charge of the project late last month.

Where that leaves the future of xAI’s coding tool remains to be seen.

Apart from being pushed out by Musk, who’s now trying to reboot the company from scratch, inside sources told the paper that people are quitting because they’re burnt out, an unsurprising development given the CEO’s infamously brutal micromanagement style. Insiders told the FT that the revolving door of talent was destroying morale.

“My next priorities: sleep for more than 8h, write down all the things I’ve learnt (I have a list), and then think about what I want to do next,” Pohlen wrote.

More on xAI: Elon Musk Says He’s Epically Screwed Up at xAI, Is Rebuilding “From the Foundations”

The post Elon Musk Orders Sweeping Layoffs as xAI Fails to Catch Up appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent tha

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself.

The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools.

"Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application.

For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork, Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding.

How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product

The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code, a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor.

According to Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks.

"Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, cancelling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven," Cherny wrote on X. "These use cases are diverse and surprising — the reason is that the underlying Claude Agent is the best agent, and Opus 4.5 is the best model."

Recognizing this shadow usage, Anthropic effectively stripped the command-line complexity from their developer tool to create a consumer-friendly interface. In its blog post announcing the feature, Anthropic explained that developers "quickly began using it for almost everything else," which "prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude in the very same way."

Inside the folder-based architecture that lets Claude read, edit, and create files on your computer

Unlike a standard chat interface where a user pastes text for analysis, Cowork requires a different level of trust and access. Users designate a specific folder on their local machine that Claude can access. Within that sandbox, the AI agent can read existing files, modify them, or create entirely new ones.

Anthropic offers several illustrative examples: reorganizing a cluttered downloads folder by sorting and intelligently renaming each file, generating a spreadsheet of expenses from a collection of receipt screenshots, or drafting a report from scattered notes across multiple documents.

"In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder," the company explained on X. "Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes."

The architecture relies on what is known as an "agentic loop." When a user assigns a task, the AI does not merely generate a text response. Instead, it formulates a plan, executes steps in parallel, checks its own work, and asks for clarification if it hits a roadblock. Users can queue multiple tasks and let Claude process them simultaneously — a workflow Anthropic describes as feeling "much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker."

The system is built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, meaning it shares the same underlying architecture as Claude Code. Anthropic notes that Cowork "can take on many of the same tasks that Claude Code can handle, but in a more approachable form for non-coding tasks."

The recursive loop where AI builds AI: Claude Code reportedly wrote much of Claude Cowork

Perhaps the most remarkable detail surrounding Cowork's launch is the speed at which the tool was reportedly built — highlighting a recursive feedback loop where AI tools are being used to build better AI tools.

During a livestream hosted by Dan Shipper, Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic employee, confirmed that the team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half.

Alex Volkov, who covers AI developments, expressed surprise at the timeline: "Holy shit Anthropic built 'Cowork' in the last… week and a half?!"

This prompted immediate speculation about how much of Cowork was itself built by Claude Code. Simon Smith, EVP of Generative AI at Klick Health, put it bluntly on X: "Claude Code wrote all of Claude Cowork. Can we all agree that we're in at least somewhat of a recursive improvement loop here?"

The implication is profound: Anthropic's AI coding agent may have substantially contributed to building its own non-technical sibling product. If true, this is one of the most visible examples yet of AI systems being used to accelerate their own development and expansion — a strategy that could widen the gap between AI labs that successfully deploy their own agents internally and those that do not.

Connectors, browser automation, and skills extend Cowork's reach beyond the local file system

Cowork doesn't operate in isolation. The feature integrates with Anthropic's existing ecosystem of connectors — tools that link Claude to external information sources and services such as Asana, Notion, PayPal, and other supported partners. Users who have configured these connections in the standard Claude interface can leverage them within Cowork sessions.

Additionally, Cowork can pair with Claude in Chrome, Anthropic's browser…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com