Block Cuts Half Its Workforce and Stock Jumps 24% as AI Reshapes Enterprise Efficiency

Block cut over 4,000 employees, roughly half its workforce, "to move faster with smaller teams using AI." The stock rose 24% after hours. The company is now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person, four times its pre-COVID efficiency.

Components of the State Street software ETF have lost a combined $1.6 trillion in market cap this year as investors reprice legacy SaaS against AI-native replacements.

Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund now uses Claude to screen investments for reputational and ethical risk.

Researchers have shown that foundation models can be self-distilled into multi-token predictors that decode 3x faster at under 5% accuracy loss. Self-distillation means training a smaller, faster version of a model using the original model's outputs as training data.

Sakana has demonstrated it can compile documents directly into model weights via hypernetworks, giving language models durable memory without bloating context windows. This means the AI can permanently learn from documents rather than just temporarily holding them in memory.

LM Provers released QED-Nano, a compact 4B model that writes Olympiad-level math proofs approaching frontier performance.

Google's new Nano Banana 2 image model combines Pro-level reasoning with Flash speed.

Eli Lilly and NVIDIA launched LillyPod, the world's first DGX SuperPOD with B300 systems, packing 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and over 9,000 petaFLOPs toward drug discovery. A petaFLOP is a quadrillion calculations per second.

CoreWeave's Q4 revenue grew 110% year over year.

Dell expects AI server revenue to double in fiscal 2027.

Meta has reportedly signed a multi-billion-dollar deal to rent Google's TPUs, diversifying away from NVIDIA.

Japan's Rapidus secured $1.7 billion to reach 2-nm mass production by 2028. 2-nm refers to the size of transistors on the chip, with smaller meaning more powerful and efficient.

Smartphone shipments are expected to drop 12.9% to a decade-low as AI-driven memory prices affect consumer hardware.

Anthropic introduced scheduled tasks in Claude Cowork that complete recurring jobs automatically, from morning briefs to Friday presentations.

Amplifying is pointing Claude Code at thousands of GitHub repos to extract what the model considers current best practices.

Burger King is deploying "Patty," a headset-mounted voice AI that assists with meal prep and scores employees on "friendliness."

At a Gap store in San Francisco, World ID Orbs now scan shoppers' faces to verify humanness.

Anthropic publicly refused to let its models power mass surveillance or autonomous weapons for the Department of War.

Under Secretary of War Emil Michael attacked Claude's constitution for requiring sensitivity to non-Western traditions, previewing how system prompts may become the next regulatory battleground.

At Changzhou First People's Hospital, two AGIBOT A2 humanoids named Zhen Zhen and Ru Ru greet patients with handshakes and handle registration and navigation.

The FAA barred flights over Fort Hancock after a military laser anti-drone system accidentally downed a US government drone.

Starship V3 is headed for ground tests with Elon "highly confident" in full reusability.

Rocket Lab is introducing silicon solar arrays for gigawatt-scale orbital data centers.

Rockefeller researchers published the first chromatin accessibility aging atlas across 21 mouse tissues, finding that immune cells diverge most dramatically with age. Chromatin accessibility refers to how open or closed DNA is, which affects which genes can be turned on or off.

In China, AI is turning famous historical landscape paintings into immersive simulations.

Parts of the Pentagon are reportedly resisting full UAP declassification, with officials fearing "demonic" implications could trigger public panic or religious upheaval.