OpenAI floats handing 5% of itself to the US government on the same day the jobs data delivers a genuine surprise: the companies going hardest on AI are the ones hiring the most. A messy, hopeful counter-narrative to the AI-jobs apocalypse.
The companies leaning hardest into AI are hiring more, not fewer, people.
The AI-and-jobs story has been dominated by fear, but the newest data cuts the other way. Ramp found high-AI-adoption firms grew headcount 10% over two years — and 12% at entry level — while low-adoption firms stayed flat. Box's survey echoes it. Meanwhile even a hard new benchmark shows AI completing just 16% of freelance tasks at professional quality. NLW's long-held optimism is getting numbers behind it — even as real, painful displacement in specific roles is still coming.
OpenAI has proposed contributing a 5% equity stake — worth around $42 billion at current valuations — to a sovereign wealth fund structured like Alaska's Permanent Fund. It's unclear whether the administration would buy the stake or receive it as a gift, and sources call the talks still "conceptual," possibly requiring an act of Congress.
Beyond itself and Anthropic, OpenAI has proposed that all leading AI developers — potentially Google, Meta and others — contribute 5% of their equity. It's not clear any of the other firms agree or are even in the discussions.
— Financial Times. The FT read the proposal as a fairly clear quid pro quo — an attempt to address political blowback by sharing AI-generated wealth with the public while smoothing relations with the White House.
Memory producer Micron agreed to invest $250 million in Trump accounts, the government-funded investment accounts for children introduced last year. The program has so far been funded largely by philanthropy, including a $6.25 billion donation from Dell CEO Michael Dell and his wife.
NLW frames the government stake and corporate contributions as a "strange new era of tributary capitalism." The window on these arrangements is clearly moving — and he steers clear of a hotter take to keep the show moving.
Meta is developing "Meta Compute," a cloud business that would sell access to models hosted on its data centers (like AWS Bedrock) or raw compute (like CoreWeave). It has a name and leadership team — Head of Infrastructure Janardhan, with Daniel Gross and Dina Powell McCormick — but plans are still in flux.
The cloud report sent Meta stock up as much as 10%, closing up 8.8% — its best single day in six months — while CoreWeave and Nebius each lost 17%. Jefferies compared it to the early days of AWS; Mizuho called it more a "plan B" that adds a margin of safety to earnings.
— Rune, OpenAI. OpenAI's Rune riffed on the trend of frontier labs turning into compute vendors, following SpaceX's pivot — including a $1.25 billion-a-month deal to supply Anthropic — which now drives more revenue than Starlink.
The Wall Street Journal reports SpaceX showed a prototype AI device, slimmer than an iPhone, running a proprietary OS and integrating xAI tech, ahead of its IPO. Elon Musk called the report "utterly false" within minutes. With SpaceX's 2025 spectrum buy and T-Mobile chatter, it could hint at a carrier-plus-Starlink-plus-handset play.
After a Reddit uproar, Anthropic rolled back a March experiment in Claude Code that detected proxies and used time-zone and metadata to flag users in China or tied to Chinese labs. Co-developer Tarik said it was meant to prevent reseller abuse and distillation, and stronger mitigations have since replaced it.
NLW argues the takeaway isn't the anti-distillation effort — it's a reminder of the visibility Anthropic has into the work being done on its systems.
Users regained access to Fable 5 and raved: Elvis Sun said it audited his business, cracked backend and engineering problems Opus couldn't, and "is smarter than me." Andrew McAllister called it "an absolute monster" that's "machine-gunning PRs."
A big open question is how often Fable reroutes benign coding tasks to Opus. Nick Dobos said Fable did only 20% of the work; one user paid $321 for a session where "Fable 5 refused to do the work." Others, like Max Weinbach, had no refusals — and Theo found it shines as an orchestrator of other agents.
— Professor Ethan Mollick. Ethan Mollick noted that all the posts about the best workflows for Fable reveal how little anyone knows about organizing work for long-running agents. NLW: figuratively and literally, we're still on day one of figuring out this new class of models.
The Center for AI Safety's Remote Labor Index — which judges deliverables against a paid professional's gold standard — has Fable at 16.1%, up from GPT-5.5's 6.3% and Opus 4A's 8.3%. When first run late last year, top performer GPT-5.2 scored just 2.5%. "The frontier has more than quadrupled in under eight months."
NLW argues the report has something for everyone: work quality is advancing fast, yet getting to a fully economically viable product remains hard. The gap between those two — 84% still needing a human — is where freelancers and firms can redesign their economics and deliverables.
— Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI chief economist. OpenAI chief economist Ronnie Chatterji told an ECB event he doesn't think AI will replace workers, citing his economist father, whose job was "exposed" to the PC but who found it a complement that made him more productive. He noted predicted software-developer job shrinkage hasn't materialized as forecast.
BLS data shows tech and finance losing an average of 28,000 jobs per month so far this year, even as the overall economy adds 113,000 monthly. Analysts split on whether it's genuine AI productivity or a cost-cutting narrative layered over 2022 over-hiring.
Per the New York Times, China's government is pressing firms to avoid AI-driven layoffs, with legal teeth: an April Hangzhou court ruled a tech company illegally fired a worker it replaced with AI. NLW notes this mirrors his own thesis that governments may incentivize keeping people employed before turning to something like UBI.
Ford brought back 350 veteran engineers to retrain AI tools that weren't getting the job done — and became the top mainstream brand in JD Power's Initial Quality Survey. VP Charles Poon: "AI is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," admitting they'd wrongly assumed ingesting design requirements alone would produce quality.
Ramp and Revelio Labs correlated AI spend against payroll for 21,000 US businesses: high-adoption firms grew headcount 10% over two years while low-adoption firms stayed flat, with entry-level growth even stronger at 12%. Aggressive hiring synced to the start of AI adoption, suggesting causation — with spend a modest ~$30 per employee per month.
— Karazian, Ramp lead economist. Ramp economist Karazian said the data is the first evidence that AI-heavy firms are selecting for a new skill set — people who know how to use AI well — and that entry-level workers, recent grads and college students are a natural place to look. He also urged skepticism, noting a 6–12 month learning curve before hiring picks up.
— Aaron Levie, Box CEO. Box CEO Aaron Levie shared a survey of 1,600+ mid and large companies: 58% expect headcount to grow over three years, climbing to 79% among the most mature AI adopters. His logic: more customers from AI-powered sales means more salespeople; more software built means more engineers.
NLW is encouraged that both narrative and numbers now validate his jobs optimism, but warns some job categories will be wiped out and vulnerable populations near career's end will struggle to pivot. Crafting targeted policy for specific at-risk roles, he argues, is a far more tractable task than fighting an imagined AI job apocalypse.