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Friday roundup: Unis hiring AI officers, OpenAI on jobs and Nano Banana

Broadcom touts a $10 billion order from a mystery client, believed to be OpenAI. — Not much is known about the custom chips Broadcom will make for OpenAI, scheduled for next year. (Picture: Adobe)

OpenAI will make custom chips with Broadcom
With Nvidia lurking in the background, more companies are working on their custom AI chips. Now OpenAI has entered the fray, said to produce their own chips with Broadcom next year. It will be for internal use, and won’t be released broadly. They have a long history with this, having first entered talks with TSMC last year. Broadcom said on its earnings call this Thursday that it had secured a $10B order for AI chips without naming from whom, and now the Financial Times is reporting that it is, indeed, OpenAI, who has no comment on this.
More at: Financial Times (Paywalled) and Reuters.

Amazon lens lets you shop for anything you can see
The latest feature in the Amazon Shopping app on iOS lets you simply point your camera on anything you like, and shop for the same or similar items in real-time. It partners with Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, to also answer questions about the products in the shop. It should «roll out to more customers in the coming weeks,» meaning there’s likely an Android version in the works.
More at: Amazon’s product page, and The Verge.

Read on for more News!

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85% of US college students say they use generative AI, 25% use it to cheat

AI use at colleges has reached critical mass, but most usage is above board. — Hardly anyone abstains from using AI in colleges in 2025. (Picture: Adobe)

The 2025–26 Student Voice survey, an annual poll of student attitudes by Inside Higher Ed, was devoted to artificial intelligence in its latest edition — and discovered some fascinating results.

Overall usage of generative ai has reached a critical point, with almost every student using it for coursework. But what they use it for is equally interesting.

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Almost all game developers say AI is reshaping their industry

You'd have a hard time finding a game developer not using AI at this stage. — Almost everyone in the games industry has embraced AI tools. (Picture: Google)

In a new survey of game developers from Google Cloud, 90% of them say they use generative AI in their workflows — and even more (97%) see it as truly transformative.

Further, 90% report that AI is reducing repetitive tasks in their work, and 94% even see it as driving innovation.

The technology has upended «norms in developers’ daily lives and work processes,» the study finds.

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Google bosses want more internal AI use

Google appears to be struggling with internal AI adoption. — Google is looking at ways to increase AI usage internally, while others are miles ahead. (Picture: www.quotecatalog.com, CC BY 2.0)

At an all-hands meeting last week, CEO Sundar Pichai called on employees to get «more efficient» through AI use, rather than hiring more people.

While some Microsoft divisions are making AI use mandatory, and Amazon saying they will reduce headcount due to AI, Google seems to be struggling with uptake.

Only about 50% of users of an internal AI coding tool, Cider, uses the service weekly, writes CNBC.

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Microsoft Research: These are the jobs most vulnerable to AI disruption

There's a direct comparison between tasks performed by AI and the actual jobs that do them, says Microsoft. — Microsoft produces a big, scary list. (Picture: Adobe)

The company behind the Copilot chatbot has compared the tasks most frequently performed by AI to actual jobs doing the work.

The result might not be all that surprising, as AI is used the most to solve issues in translation, communication and writing — and is least used in areas such as construction and other manual labor.

Data is from 2024
From studying some 200,000 anonymized copilot sessions in the USA during 2024, Microsoft has been able to produce a list of the 40 most vulnerable jobs — and the 40 least affected ones.

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AI use to become mandatory at Microsoft division

A bellwether for the industry as a whole? Microsoft division mandates AI use. — Usage of AI will become part of permanence reviews at this Microsoft division. (Picture: Ryan Vaarsi, CC BY 2.0)

The developer tools division head at Microsoft, Julia Liuson, recently sent out a memo to managers bluntly saying that «Using AI is no longer optional.»

— AI is now a fundamental part of how we work, she wrote. — Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional — it’s core to every role and every level.

Employee evaluations should now include their use of AI tools, she says, and managers are rushing to find a formal metric to measure it.

Internal performance requirements at Microsoft vary from team to team, and this is just one division. But it shows how quickly companies are adopting the technology.

Across all of Microsoft, it is estimated that 30% of all coding is already done by AI.

Go read the full scoop at Business Insider, the discussion on r/Singularity, and check out Tag: Work

Amazon says it will reduce headcount due to AI efficiency

Amazon will reduce headcount as AI agent take over common tasks — Andy Jassy from a previous event. (Picture Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a company-wide email to workers yesterday, touting the progress they are making on AI implementation.

In it, he says AI agents are coming, and coming fast — and «it should change the way our work is done.»

Using AI everywhere
He wrote that Amazon has been on the bleeding edge of the revolution and is using AI in «virtually every corner of the company,» and goes on to list everything from intelligent shopping assistants to Alexa+.

Amazon has more that 1 000 generative services and applications built or in progress, Jassy says.

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Altman sees mass job loss — and plans to counter with more AI

Altman: Whole classes of jobs going away. — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns about the very hard parts of the coming AI train. (Picture: OpenAI)

In what was surely supposed to be an inspirational essay from Sam Altman, he drops a few more tidbits around his «scary times ahead» warning from earlier this month.

Whole categories of jobs will be wiped out, he writes — but then says AI will bring us so many benefits and new policy options we won’t care much:

— There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before, he writes.

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OpenAI’s Codex now available to ChatGPT Plus users

ChatGPT Plus-tier gets access to Codex! — Wider availability for Codex likely means even more pressure on the coding market. (Picture: Chatgpt.com)

Caught this morning, there seems to be a new option in the sidebar at Chatgpt.com for the new Codex coding model — meaning it has expanded access.

Codex is the latest coding agent from OpenAI that runs on a modified o3-model.

Super-coding agent
It can generate several instances of code from your prompts, and even run them in a sandbox to select the best/most efficient version.

OpenAI says it can complete tasks autonomously that would otherwise take hours or days to finish, and they are using it themselves to offload repetitive tasks.

The Plus membership for ChatGPT is $20 a month, and Codex launched as a «research preview» in May for Pro users, who fork out $200 a month.

Update: It appears Codex now also has Internet acccess, which is off by default and comes with a stern warning.

See also: teknotum on the Codex launch, and the announcement thread on X.

Altman warns of “scary times ahead,” but is positive about broad future

The OpenAI CEO sat down with mindfulness expert and Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield and Soren Gordhamer for a wide-ranging conversation about AI consciousness, benefits, regulation and ethics yesterday, on a conference called Wisdom 2.0.

They discussed several interesting topics, but Altman said »There will be scary times ahead» as AI gets sharper, without mentioning the recent jobs panic specifically.

Brace for a lot of change
The notion, he said, is for OpenAI to release research previews — or incomplete models — early so that the world can think and prepare for the consequences.

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Anthropic CEO says it’s time to wake up on AI job losses

Dario Amodei from Anthropic.com — Anthropic’s Dario Amodei worries about entire job segments getting wiped out. (Picture: Anthropic)

As the job market already shows signs of tightening due do AI, Anthopic’s Dario Amodei brings a stern warning to the labs and the government.

— AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, he tells Axios — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next five years.

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Big Tech stops hiring new graduates, as entry level jobs dry up

Some managers prefer AI to grads, and it is compounding. — Gradute hirings in Big Tech is plummeting, as some say they prefer AI for easier tasks. (Picture: Jordanhill School D&T Dept, CC BY 2.0)

37% of managers now say they’d rather use an AI than hire a Gen Z employee, according SignalFire’s latest job market report.

The report tracks 650 million professionals and 80 million organizations, and its headline numbers are stark, showing a 35 % drop in graduate hiring in 2024 compared to 2023, and a 50 % drop compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Even top computer science grads are struggling to break in, the report finds, with hiring down 50 % since 2022.

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Anthropic claims world’s best coding AI with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet

World's best coding model? According to Anthropic, yes, of course. — Anthopic’s new agentic, thinking and reasoning models are great for coding, and plays Pokemon for 24 hour runs. (Picture: Anthropic)

Opus 4 can sustain almost a full work day of focused coding work, while Sonnet 4 is supposed to be excellent for thinking and reasoning.

Both models produce near-instant responses to queries, but can turn to reasoning and thinking for more demanding requests.

World’s best on coding?
Anthropic claims Opus is «the world’s best coding model,» and it edges out Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and GTP 4.1 on SWE-bench Verified, but cannot surpass OpenAI’s o3 on certain PhD-level benchmarks, according to TechCrunch.

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OpenAI debuts Codex, an AI coding agent, further disrupting the software industry

Codex can run your code multiple times until it finds the best version. — Codex can run your code multiple times until til finds the best version. (Picture: OpenAI)

In a world where 30% of Big Tech code is written by AI already, OpenAI says it wants to join the club for «virtual teammates,» and it’s getting ever closer with today’s launch.

OpenAI’s Agents Research Lead, Josh Tobin tells TechCrunch that the company wants software agents to complete tasks autonomously that would otherwise take hours or days to finish, in anything from one to thirty minutes, and OpenAI is already using the model to offload repetitive tasks.

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Every chip designer will have a thousand AI agents, says Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang sees great opportunities for AI agents in chip design. (Picture: screenshot)

Nvidia is already known for leading the charge in chip design for AI applications, and CEO Jensen Huang has a few bold ideas about where agentic AI is taking us.

In a May 15 on-stage interview with Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan at CadenceLIVE 2025, Huang reflected on the future of chip design—and offered a glimpse into how cutting-edge companies are thinking about AI’s next phase.

Much like how software engineers today increasingly rely on AI coding tools—and soon, autonomous agents—Huang envisions every chip and systems engineer being supported by “assistant chip designers” that help with everyday tasks:

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