Meta to Layoff 20%, AI Cured Dogs Cancer, Nvidia's New Chip

0:28Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the podcast, we're covering story I want to talk about that everyone is talking about is that Meta is preparing to lay off potentially more than 20 % of its workforce while ramping up AI spending. So they're making a lot of money. They're just cutting their workforce to spend more on AI. And this is what we've already seen from a bunch of other players in the industry. So let's get into all of it and the implications in the whole industry of AI. Before we do, the biggest thing I'm super excited about today to announce is that over on my platform, AIbox.ai, which gives you access to tons of different AI models for just$8.99 a month, we have just added five new audio models.

1:03So there's one that is for music, sound effects, and a voice changer. All of these are over on 11 Labs. And in addition, we have all of the different OpenAI voices and tons of new audio voices on 11 Labs. So if you do anything with audio, music, sound effects, or voice changing, go check out AIbox.ai and you get access to all of these new models. I am super excited about that. And you can also build them into workflows that you can automate different things you do at work. This is something I'm doing every single day and it is saving me so much time. So go check it out. There's a link in the description to AIbox.ai.

1:34It's only$8.99 a month and you get 20 % off if you get an annual plan. So it's a super amazing tool that I hope it saves you a ton of time. All right, let's get into the first story today is this kind of cancer vaccine that was created for a dog. So basically, this is coming out of Australia. It's pretty wild. There's a tech entrepreneur named Paul Conahan, and he decided to try something. Basically, he went to the vet and they told him that his rescue dog, Rosie, only had a few months left to live because she had a really advanced cancer. So I think instead of doing what a lot of people do, most, I mean, everyone really, and just kind of accepting the prognosis, he decided to use AI tools, including ChatGPT and then Google's AlphaFold to analyze the tumor.

2:15So he had Rosie's healthy DNA, and then he had her DNA sequenced from the tumor. And then he converted the tumor tissue into data and used ChatGPT to identify the mutations that were driving the cancer. This is incredible. Not because, you know, not because I think a lot of people will be like, oh, he's like kind of in tech. So that's how he was able to do this. He has no background in biology, right? He's just literally working with ChatGPT and asking it how to do this. How do I sequence DNA? How do I like, what do I do with the tumor data that they gave me? And he was able to take all of this.

2:49And then he went and found some researchers at New South Wales. And they designed a custom mRNA vaccine tailored specifically to Rosie's tumor. The thing that took the longest, because they actually got that done pretty quick. The thing that took the longest is that they had to wait three months just for the regulation to approve that it was going to be safe to vaccinate his dog, which kind of is horrible considering it you know only had months left to live and he's probably super stressed about it and the regulation took longer than them cranking out this vaccine just with chat gpt and then rosie received her first injection december and then by march she had about a tennis ball size tumor and had shrunk about 75 percent and continuing to shrink so researchers believe that this might be the first kind of personalized cancer vaccine ever created for a dog but this also will work for humans and i think the bigger implication here is that the same approach is already being tested in humans by companies like Moderna, Merck, and BioNTech.

3:43Now, of course, when we're doing humans, there's so much red tape and regulations probably won't be available for years, which is honestly a huge shame in my opinion. And don't even get me started on my thoughts on the pharmaceutical industry in this regard. And perhaps it's regulation in America, but I don't know, not my favorite thing. It's incredible that he was able to make this for his dog really quick and get it ready in three months, a custom vaccine. So I think this obviously started out as a really desperate attempt to save his dog, but I think it's actually a preview of AI driven personalized medicine that we're going to see more of.

4:15And hopefully we'll see this for humans in the future. Next up, NVIDIA is preparing a major AI chip reveal. NVIDIA's massive AI conference is called GTC. It's kicking off and Jensen Huang is expected to unveil the company's next generation of AI chips. These chips are designed for the next wave of AI models and large-scale inference workloads. I think right now we're really entering a phase where companies aren't just training models, they're actually deploying them everywhere. And so that means that the demand for the inference compute is exploding. And NVIDIA to this point has already become really the central infrastructure provider for the AI boom.

4:47And I think, you know, every new generation of chip basically resets the performance ceiling for the entire industry. So if NVIDIA, reveals another major leap. I think it's going to accelerate the entire AI ecosystem again. So that is what I would say to look out for at GTC. Another thing that's incredible right now is that OpenAI is exploring a$10 billion enterprise AI venture. They're in talks with several major private equity firms about launching a joint venture, which is focused on deploying AI across corporate America. Now, why is this important? It's like, oh, great, another OpenAI corporate kind of partnership.

5:22We've seen a bunch of these enterprise partnerships, yada, yada. out what's the big deal. I think what's interesting is who's involved here. So the firms that are involved in this are TPG, Bain Capital, Advent, and Brookfield. And the venture could be valued at about$10 billion. About$4 billion of that is in outside investment. Oh my gosh, I don't know if you guys can hear me, but I'm in North Carolina right now and there's a huge thunderstorm going outside. I just heard a huge crack of thunder. My audio enhancing software probably cut it out, but just throwing that out there for you. It's exciting times over here while we're, It's an ominous sound as I'm talking about this$10 billion deal, but not really.

5:57I think it's actually a cool deal. Private equity firms right now, they own thousands of companies across a lot of different industries. So basically, if OpenAI tools are getting rolled out across all of the portfolios, right? So how it works is those four major PE companies, they're going to roll out OpenAI software across all of their portfolio companies. And I think that is going to help the AI adoption scale very fast in those organizations, if they can pull this off correctly. Now, are, you know, those portfolio companies not already using AI is the question. If they're tech companies, I think, you know, they probably are.

6:28But there's a lot of industries where the AI where AI is very good and proficient and the firms are just not using it. And Anthropic recently put out a report on this whole thing where they were kind of showing where AI was, you know, very proficient at different tasks and where it was being used. And there were some huge gaps. For example, engineers, AI is great at a lot of engineering tasks, and it's less than 2 % of, you know, engineers for like architectural engineers that are using AI in their workflows and what they're doing. So these types of deals are actually pretty big if they can get into those types of organizations.

7:00And I think it also helps. And beyond just, you know, helping AI adoption, I mean, it's obviously helping open AI's AI adoption, because perhaps if those companies are using AI, they're using Google or Cloud or another player. So this is pretty interesting. instead of selling tools you know one company at a time if you just hit all of the big you know owners these big private equity owners that own multiple companies you can get it rolled out much faster so this is going to be interesting the biggest story of the day though is that meta has has kind of announced or there's leaks from inside meta that they might cut up to 20 percent of their entire company and they're doing all this to expand ai inside their organization so after there's kind of these leaks.

7:42Meta stock jumped about 3 % after the report surfaced that there was kind of this massive round of layoffs that was going to be tied directly to AI spending. This is all according to a report out of Routers, by the way. So senior leaders inside of Meta have been asked to prepare plans that could reduce the company's workforce by more than 20%. If it happens, it could affect over 15 ,000 employees. This could be one of the largest layoffs in Meta's history. The company had about 79 ,000 employees at the end of 2025. And I think these potential cuts would really dwarf the 11 ,000 person layoffs that they announced back in 2022.

8:19So they have been, you know, cutting people, or they've been known to do these types of cuts before. But over 15 ,000 employees could be one of their biggest yet. Meta hasn't confirmed this report. You know, they're just like, Oh, this is just speculative, aka, like, they're just figuring it out right now. But I think the context about the story is telling us a lot. Basically, Meta right now is planning an absolutely enormous AI spending push. They're planning on, you know, it's, you know, astronomical how much they want to spend on AI. And because of this, they need to come up with the money somewhere.

8:51And this is part of it. Meta says that our AI related capital expenditures this year will fall somewhere between 115 billion and 135 billion as they're building out new AI infrastructure that's part of a 700 billion dollar total ai spending wave that we're expecting across a bunch of these big companies amazon microsoft alphabet meta all of them are you know they have basically capex plans that are they're putting them at about 700 billion dollars that are going to be coming over the next few years and i think right now the message from the leadership over at meta is pretty clear you know ai is now their top priority zuckerberg has been you know kind of framing 2026 is a year that meta pushes towards what he's calling personalized super intelligence.

9:31Last year, they spent 14.3 billion dollars investing in scale AI. Then they hired their CEO, Alexander Wang, with a bunch of their other top researchers. So I think we're starting to see this this kind of strategy, this clarity in their strategy right now, right? They're spending these huge amounts of money on AI infrastructure and talent, right? Because there was like, you know, reports that some of these deals were worth a billion dollars when just like hiring talent, like the top researcher would cost a billion dollars and that's because they're you know give them a couple hundred million dollars and then tons of stock and equity and stuff they got to stick around for like five or six years so anyway or maybe it was like an eight-year deal a billion dollars for eight years for some of these top AI researchers so anyways I mean and that's all speculative and that depends on the stock price and a bunch of other things but like meta is spending a ton of money and I think that that is very clear but of course they have to offset those costs because that money isn't you know coming out of thin air and so um what i will also say is meta is not the only one that's doing these layoffs block also recently announced layoffs it was about 4 000 employees and i believe that that was like 40 of the entire company of block um we're just seeing companies want smaller teams that can move faster with ai amazon is cutting 16 000 roles earlier this year at last seen just announced that they're cutting 10 of their workforce.

10:45And they are redirecting all of that money into AI. And then there's also a consulting firm, Challenger Grain Christmas. And they said that AI has already been cited in more than 12 ,000 job cuts in the US this year so far. And it's kind of interesting, because I believe it's actually higher. But companies like Amazon, when they cut 16 ,000 people are like, Oh, it's not related to AI, we're just, you know, trimming up the company and rearranging things a little bit. But honestly, I believe it's it's due to a lot of shifts that are happening in industries. Now, as Amazon and meta and elastin and all these other companies are they permanently cutting these roles i don't think so i think in the next couple years we'll bring them all back in but i do think that they're we're reevaluating and we can do more with less due to ai so i think we're going to see kind of this initial wave of layoffs and then i think as the companies kind of find their equilibrium again they'll start hiring people back and making sure that everyone they hire is kind of ai first and understands how to use these tools some analysts say that companies are just basically using the AI as a convenient explanation for layoffs, right?

11:45Like, hey, we got to become more profitable, we're going to do layoffs, and let's just blame it on AI. But I think that's maybe partially true, but I do believe that AI is actually, you know, dramatically increasing productivity. And so you just don't need the same headcount to grow revenue. And if meta actually follows through with the cuts that they're doing at this scale, while also ramping up AI spending, I think it could become one of the biggest signals yet of how the AI economy is reshaping the tech industry. So I guess if we just kind of zoom out on all of these stories I covered today, they basically all have the same theme, which is that AI is not just this kind of like cool technology experiment that it feels like we've been doing for the last couple years.

12:23Right now, I think we're seeing 2026. I mean, especially with all the layoffs, that it is restructuring the entire industry, personalized medicine, you know, there's trillion dollar chip infrastructure that's being built out, there's private equity deploying AI across 1000s of companies, I think now is potentially one of the biggest workforce restructurings in, you know, big tech history that we're about to see. I think the AI era is not coming, as I've been saying for a long time. I think it's already here. And this is probably going to accelerate on almost all of these kind of genres that I covered today.

12:54So thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you want to stay up to date on all of the latest AI news every single day, tune into the podcast, make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If this was helpful, insightful, and if you, you know, good to keep you up to date on all the latest AI news. Make sure to go check out AIbox.ai if you want to get access to over 40 of the top AI models all in one place for$8.99 a month. Anytime something new drops, you don't have to go and spend$20 subscription to go try it out. Go get it on AIbox.ai. All right, I'll catch you on the next episode.