Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Oracle’s head count has been shrinking as it made layoffs to cut costs — and now there’s a number behind its reduction.A filing published Monday showed that its global workforce declined by 21,000 between May 2025 and May 2026. The number includes both attrition and layoffs.Oracle employed around 141,000 employees worldwide as of May 31, 2026, the filing said.Compared with the numbers reported in its 2025 filing, the company shed 9,000 jobs in the US and 12,000 jobs internationally.Restructuring and other expenses — which consist of costs for employee severance, contract termination, and other exit activity — increased by 391%…

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny has a message for companies that are nervous about their AI token budgets.”ROI is absolutely the right framing because you don’t want to just think about cost because you kind of spend something on it and you get something back,” Cherny said during a recent fireside chat at Scale AI.Jesse Chen, Meta’s director of product management who moderated the chat, asked the Anthropic employee directly about the recent concerns raised by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald about whether the rideshare giant’s AI spending was leading to enough of a return to justify the rising cost of…

Law firms know more clients are asking chatbots for advice before ever calling a lawyer. So legal giant Cooley is building technology that it hopes founders will use instead.Cooley plans to give select startups access to Cooley Go Lab, an online portal where founders can upload files and ask questions about their documents, Matt Bartus, global cochair of Cooley’s emerging companies and venture capital practice, told Business Insider.To build it, Cooley teamed up with Legora, a fast-growing legal technology startup that sells to law firms and corporate legal departments. Last year, Legora entered a new line of business with what…

Does your heart race and breath quicken when your phone spontaneously buzzes with the sound of a call?You may be experiencing “callergy” — a fear of phone calls that’s become increasingly prevalent among young people in the workforce. According to a recent survey by the self-improvement app RiseGuide, 1 in 10 Gen Zers and millennials consider a spontaneous call more stressful than a breakup or a job interview.I’m a zillennial, so I’m not spared from phone anxiety, even though I basically talk to people as a job. I once got a spontaneous call from someone I had sent an email…

Keith Hayden, a 53-year-old software engineer, started searching for a job last fall. He soon realized interviewers had AI top of mind, and Hayden, who has already adapted to big innovation shifts over the past two decades, didn’t have the best answers. So he bought a Claude subscription and started to learn more.He knew he had to adjust — AI is rapidly shifting how software engineers work — as he’s not in a financial position to retire early. After some experimenting, he says he’s “optimistically skeptical” about AI’s ability to write code well, but hopes there’s still space for him…

A Nobel laureate, an OpenAI cofounder, and the architect of modern AI announced they’re joining new AI labs.It reads like the opening of a niche joke for techies. It’s actually a sign the AI talent wars have entered their celebrity era, as labs compete not just for top talent but for superstar names in the quest for AI supremacy.On Wednesday, Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering working on Gemini, said he is leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer is a co-inventor of the Transformers architecture that underlies most of today’s large language models from the likes of Meta, OpenAI,…

Oracle disclosed Monday that it has reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including jobs eliminated because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing. The revelation puts new numbers to what feels to many in the tech industry like an epidemic: companies reporting record revenues while simultaneously culling their workforces, pointing to AI as both the engine of…

OpenAI announced a new initiative on Monday designed to help the open source community improve its cybersecurity game and ward off bugs. “Patch the Planet,” (which is a not-so-subtle allusion to “Hack the Planet,” the iconic catch phrase from the 1995 movie Hackers) will see OpenAI team up with the security company Trail of Bits to help open source maintainers secure their projects. OpenAI said security staff from Trail of Bits will work directly with open source maintainers to review potential code issues. OpenAI’s security tools — like Codex Security — will be used to assist in the process. “Many maintainers…

On Friday, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny made an appearance at Meta’s @Scale conference and, surprisingly, the first question from the audience was about loops. “Are loops the next hype cycle,” the questioner asked, “or are they for real?” Cherny’s answer was an emphatic, “Yes, they’re for real.” “Two years ago, we wrote source code by hand. We started to transition so agents write the code. And now we’re transitioning to the point where agents are prompting agents that then write the code,” he continued. “As big as the step from source code to agents was, loops are just as…

Amazon wants ChatGPT’s users. It just doesn’t want OpenAI to have its data.Amazon has begun buying ads on ChatGPT, making the company one of the highest-profile retailers to appear in OpenAI’s emerging advertising business, according to e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas.The ads direct users back to Amazon’s storefront, where the company controls the customer experience and transaction.Kaziukėnas told Business Insider that Amazon’s decision to buy ads on ChatGPT is “symbolic” because the retailer has largely avoided participating in AI shopping initiatives that let third-party chatbots and AI agents aggregate its products, pricing, and inventory data.The move highlights a tension at the…