The News,
Decoded.

Wix, the Israeli tech firm that builds websites for people who can't be bothered to learn code, is now applying the same hands-off logic to its workforce. The company plans to lay off 800–1,000 employees globally, blaming a quarterly loss driven by increased spending on AI and something called 'vibe coding' — because nothing says fiscal responsibility like paying for a vibe. Oh, and they've just found $1.7 billion for a stock buyback. Priorities, people.

Let's sit with that $1.7 billion figure for a moment. That's enough to keep all 1,000 employees on full salary for roughly 34 years at a fancy tech wage, but instead it's going straight into shareholders' pockets. The message is clear: the humans who built this platform can take a hike while the company pumps money into 'vibe coding' — a term so gloriously empty it could only have been invented by management consultants on laughing gas. Wix returned to a quarterly loss, meaning they spent more on AI than they earned, but the buyback was apparently too tempting to pass up.

Elsewhere, the 'lazy' Jensen Huang narrative from last week gets a companion piece in Wix's excuse-making. You can almost hear the boardroom: 'AI is the future, so let's gut the present and blame the machines.' Wix isn't the first and won't be the last to use AI spending as a fig leaf for a layoff you'd have done anyway. The only surprise is that 'vibe coding' didn't make it into the official press release as a metric of success. Maybe next quarter.

Oh, how convenient. Jensen Huang, the man who has made a fortune selling the shovels in the AI gold rush, declares that CEOs who blame job cuts on AI are 'lazy.' This from the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are the very engines driving the automation that is displacing workers. It's a bit like a tobacco executive calling lung cancer patients 'unmotivated.'

But let's examine Huang's logic: he claims it 'doesn't make any sense' to link layoffs to AI before generative tools became widely useful. So, the thousands of workers laid off by tech giants in 2023 and 2024 — those were just… what? Seasonal housekeeping? A collective hallucination? The facts are stubborn: layoffs surged as AI tools improved, and job postings for administrative roles cratered. To call the connection 'lazy' is either wilful blindness or masterful deflection.

What Huang's comments really reveal is an industry desperate to distance itself from the consequences of its own products. Nvidia's market cap has ballooned while its customers slash headcount in the name of 'AI transformation.' By calling out CEOs, Huang shifts the blame from the technology to its users. It's clever public relations, but it won't comfort the millions whose jobs are being 'optimized' into oblivion. The dark joke? The best defense of AI is that the humans deploying it are too incompetent to take credit for the destruction.

KPMG's 2025 Global CEO Outlook survey has revealed that over 70% of CEOs rank AI as their top investment priority. What a resounding vote of confidence — except, of course, for the pesky little detail that most of them are utterly unprepared to do anything with it. Governance gaps, data readiness, workforce shortfalls: it's like deciding to climb Everest but realising you've only packed a sunhat and a pair of flip-flops. The enthusiasm is palpable; the execution, less so.

The survey is a masterful self-licking ice cream cone: KPMG identifies the problems, then offers expensive consulting to fix them. 'Data readiness' is a polite way of saying your data infrastructure is held together with duct tape and prayers. 'Governance gaps' means no one has a clue who's responsible for what. And 'workforce capability' translates to 'we hired a chief AI officer last week and expect miracles by Monday.' Naturally, KPMG is ready with a tailored framework for every one of these shortfalls — for a fee. It's the consultancy circle of life.

Then there's the workforce gap itself. Companies are pouring billions into AI while lacking the people to build, deploy, or maintain it. They can't find talent, so they either overpay for a few data scientists or force existing staff into 'retraining programmes' that are about as effective as teaching a goldfish to play chess. Expect a flurry of disastrous pilots, a few PR disasters, and eventually a quiet pivot to 'we're investing in capability building' — which means sending everyone on an online course that no one completes. The AI revolution is imminent. Just not at your company.

The International Maritime Organization, that notoriously swift UN body, has finally adopted binding rules for autonomous ships. The MASS Code — International Code of Safety for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships — is supposed to ensure safe integration of AI-enabled and remotely operated commercial vessels. Because nothing says 'safety' like a bureaucratic code crafted by committee while actual ships are already navigating autonomously in some waters. The technology has been outpacing regulation for years, and now we're meant to believe a document will fix that.

The code is 'binding' in name, but enforcement depends on flag states — countries that often compete for shipping registry business by offering lower standards. Shipping companies will surely comply enthusiastically, just as they do with existing safety regulations. The real test will come when the first autonomous vessel causes a major incident; then we'll see if these rules have any teeth. Until then, the gap between the code and reality is where innovation and profit flourish, with minimal oversight.

So raise a glass to the IMO for its timely intervention — if by timely you mean 'years late and already obsolete.' The MASS Code is a classic example of regulatory catch-up: well-intentioned, probably ignored when inconvenient, and certain to be outpaced by the next generation of AI. But hey, at least we have a code now. It may not prevent the first autonomous ship disaster, but it'll provide excellent reading material for the inquiry that follows. Cheers.

Oh, brilliant. Google's security executive has graced us with a warning about 'shadow AI' — the spectre of employees using ungoverned AI tools to get their jobs done. This from the company that practically invented 'move fast and break things' before pivoting to 'move fast and secure things, maybe, eventually.' The executive, speaking to TechCrunch on May 24, 2026, insists companies must 'demand security and governance from AI platforms from the start.' Right, because demanding things from platforms has always worked so well — ask anyone still waiting for their GDPR compliance from Facebook.

The real punchline is the admission buried in the hand-wringing: even Google is 'figuring out AI security in real time.' They're telling the rest of us to demand what they haven't yet built. It's like a pilot announcing mid-flight that they're learning how to land, but don't worry, they'll figure it out. Meanwhile, employees have already deployed generative AI copilots for everything from writing code to drafting legal contracts — because what could possibly go wrong when your sales team is feeding customer data into an API with no oversight?

So the takeaway, as 2026 trundles on, is that the people building the AI are also the ones panicking about its security. They're selling the rope even as they realise they don't know how to secure the noose. The 'shadow AI' warning is less a call to action and more an admission of systemic failure, dressed up as thought leadership. But sure, demand security from the start — just don't expect anyone to know what that looks like until after the breach.

Oh, how utterly predictable. Matt Lowrie, a 55-year-old Google veteran of 18 years, quit because he felt "pressured to adopt AI too quickly" and that he'd "aged out" of the company. Because nothing says 'forward-thinking tech giant' like implying that 55 is the new 65 and that two decades of experience are worthless in the face of a glorified autocomplete. Google's AI push is so relentless that even a loyal employee who helped build the empire now feels like a fossil. The gall of calling it "aging out" when really it's just the company's obsession with pretending that experience counts for nothing.

Lowrie's story is a masterclass in corporate doublespeak. He "felt pressure" — translation: his manager probably gave him a digital literacy ultimatum or his performance review was suddenly peppered with "needs to embrace AI" notes. After 18 years, he's now the old man in the corner, not because he can't learn, but because Google's idea of progress is treating every tool like a mandatory religion. And of course, the company's response will be silence or a bland statement about "continuous learning opportunities." Because nothing says "we value our people" like subtly pushing out anyone over 50 who doesn't enthusiastically embrace the latest shiny object.

This is the future of employment under AI: not mass layoffs in one go, but a slow, polite annihilation of anyone who dares to not be instantly thrilled by the new toy. Lowrie's departure is a quiet warning that ageism is alive and well, dressed up in the language of "adaptability." Google won't miss him, until they realize that institutional knowledge doesn't come from a chatbot. But hey, at least he can now enjoy his retirement without being nagged to "use Gemini for everything."

Oh, brilliant — the AI that breaks everything is now the AI that creates jobs. According to the New York Times, demand for cybersecurity experts is surging because models like Anthropic's Mythos have become so adept at generating code vulnerabilities that we need an army of humans to patch the mess. The same technology that's supposedly automating us out of work is instead creating a booming market for the very skills it's meant to replace.

One imagines the recruitment ad: 'Wanted: Cybersecurity expert to clean up after your new AI colleague. Must work weekends. AI will continue to break things faster than you can fix them.' The article quotes industry figures showing double-digit growth in cybersecurity hiring, with companies scrambling to staff up as AI-generated code becomes ubiquitous. But here's the kicker: many of these new tools are being sold as 'security enhancers' themselves—Anthropic's own Claude has been pitched as a bug-finding saviour. It's a neat racket: break the door down, then charge for the repair service.

The real genius is that this feedback loop has no off switch. The more we deploy AI to write code, the more vulnerabilities it creates; the more vulnerabilities, the more cybersecurity jobs; the more jobs, the more we believe AI is creating opportunity. Meanwhile, the underlying problem—that we're baking fragility into our digital infrastructure at scale—gets waved away as 'short-term disruption.' Pass the paracetamol. And maybe hire a security consultant.

Oh, splendid. Another survey confirming what anyone with half a brain already suspected: CEOs are sharpening their redundancy knives and blaming artificial intelligence. Mercer's Global Talent Trends report reveals that 99% of chief executives anticipate AI-driven layoffs within the next two years — that’s near-unanimous, the sort of consensus usually reserved for 'oxygen is good' and 'bonuses are deserved'. And where will the axe fall? On early-career positions, naturally. Because nothing says 'welcome to the professional world' like being replaced by a large language model before you've even learned where the coffee machine is.

The cowardice is staggering. By targeting the most junior and least politically connected staff, executives can frame the bloodbath as 'strategic workforce realignment' while ensuring their own roles remain untouched. The Mercer report gives them perfect cover: it's not greed, it's a trend. When 99% of your peers are doing it, it's not a layoff; it's industry standard practice. Never mind that many of these AI systems are still prone to hallucination and error; the important thing is the quarterly earnings call.

And what of the long-term consequences? If every major company simultaneously guts its entry-level roles, where does the next generation of experienced hires come from? That's tomorrow's problem, and tomorrow's CEOs — who will probably be AI agents by then — can deal with it. For now, the message to young workers is clear: you trained for four years to be replaced by a glorified autocomplete. Welcome to the future. It's not quite what the brochures promised.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos flexed its bug-hunting muscles, but the real discovery is that open-source maintainers are drowning. Of 6,200 vulnerabilities flagged in open-source code, a triumphant 75 have been patched.

Let's not kid ourselves: the capability leap here is real, and it's terrifying. Claude Mythos can now do in weeks what took armies of security researchers years. But the gap between discovery and remediation just yawned open like a subprime mortgage crisis. The article quotes a researcher saying 'the bottleneck has shifted from finding bugs to fixing them' — which is tech-speak for 'we built a firehose and forgot to install a drain.'

And the really funny bit? Anthropic will probably spin this as evidence of responsible AI deployment. 'We found the problems!' they'll say, conveniently omitting that nobody's solving them. It's like a doctor diagnosing a pandemic and then going on holiday. With great power comes great… what was that phrase again? Ah yes, plausible deniability. 🫖

Oh, how delightfully predictable. Just when you thought your multi-factor authentication was keeping the bad guys at bay, the FBI popped up on May 21 to inform us that AI has learned a new parlour trick: device code phishing. This isn't your grandfather's Nigerian prince email; it's a sophisticated attack that swipes OAuth tokens like a pickpocket at a tech conference. Now your Microsoft 365 account, protected by all those layers of security, is as secure as a chocolate teapot. Absolutely marvellous.

The mechanics are almost beautiful in their perversity. Device code authentication, designed for devices that can't handle a full browser, is now a gaping wound in the corporate security armour. The AI-powered phishing campaign tricks users into entering a code that hands over the keys to the kingdom — OAuth tokens that bypass the precious MFA entirely. So all those enterprise training sessions about not clicking links in emails? Useless. The attacker doesn't even need your password. They just need you to be slightly helpful.

And this, of course, is what passes for progress in 2026. AI, which we were told would cure cancer and write poetry, is now streamlining the art of account takeover. The FBI's warning is a ritual incantation, a muttered acknowledgment that the game of cat-and-mouse has become a treadmill. Microsoft will patch, the attackers will pivot, and the rest of us will keep entering codes into strange web pages. The FBI warns, Microsoft scrambles, and we continue our ballet of panic and resignation. Cheers to the future.

Business leaders in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have, in a move of breathtaking optimism, urged Caribbean countries to 'accelerate workforce training in AI' as DeVry University expands its Bridge to Brilliance initiative across the region. This is, presumably, the same AI that is currently busy replacing call centre workers in Jamaica, threatening the business process outsourcing sector that employs hundreds of thousands across the Caribbean. The chamber's vision appears to be that the region's workforce should leapfrog from low-wage data entry to... slightly higher-wage prompt engineering, before that too gets automated.

DeVry's Bridge to Brilliance, meanwhile, is a for-profit foray into what one might call 'hope capitalism' — training workers for a future that tech billionaires assure us is coming, while conveniently ignoring that the same billionaires are building the machines that will render that training obsolete. The initiative's name is a masterpiece of marketing: who wouldn't want to cross a bridge to brilliance? The subtext, however, suggests the bridge may be a toll bridge, and the brilliance may be a mirage. The chamber's call for 'accelerated training' is the kind of well-meaning gesture that history will record as either visionary or tragically naïve — and given how these things tend to go, the smart money is on the latter.

And yet, there is something almost touching about the faith placed in a DeVry programme to save the Caribbean from the AI disruption that the same DeVry is profiting from. The chamber might be better advised to investigate basic income or climate resilience, but those don't come with a handy branded initiative and a tuition fee. The Bridge to Brilliance will no doubt produce a cohort of graduates who can explain transformer architecture, only to find that the transformer has already taken the job they were training for. But at least they'll understand why.

So here we are: students accused of AI cheating are now hiring lawyers, because of course they are. The article reports that many of these accused students didn't actually use AI at all—they just fell foul of detection software that's about as reliable as a chocolate teapot. Others were punished for violating policies so vague that a barrister couldn't parse them without a stiff drink.

It's a beautiful irony: the same institutions that rushed to deploy AI detectors (themselves known for hallucinating false positives) now find themselves in legal crossfire. The pattern is familiar: first hallucinated references infiltrated academic papers, now hallucinated cheating accusations are infiltrating student records. And the 'long-term consequences' these students fear? They're real, while the 'AI use' they're accused of is often imaginary.

Meanwhile, the legal industry sees a new revenue stream: the 'AI accusation defence lawyer.' It's almost poetic—the technology that was supposed to make education fairer has instead birthed a cottage industry of litigation. The only winners here are the lawyers, and possibly the companies selling those detection tools, who get to keep their product's abysmal accuracy out of court… for now.

Oh, marvelous — two new ‘AI scientists’ have arrived, and they're about as reliable as a second-hand Bunsen burner. Future House's Robin and Google DeepMind's Co-Scientist are multi-agent systems designed to automate scientific discovery, which apparently means we can finally remove the messy human element from the pursuit of knowledge. The Phys.org piece tells us they're 'improving,' but also that they have 'fundamental limits in trustworthiness' — which is tech-speak for 'they make stuff up with conviction.'

One imagines the pitch meeting: 'What if we replace grad students with something that hallucinates citations even faster?' Because nothing says scientific rigour like a system that can't be trusted but is being deployed anyway. The article doesn't get into specifics, but we all know the drill: impressive demos, terrifying edge cases, and a collective shrug from the labs. DeepMind, of course, has form here — remember when they promised to revolutionise protein folding and then quietly monetised it?

So here we are, automating the one domain that absolutely requires reproducibility and scepticism. The irony is so thick you could culture a petri dish on it. These systems will probably 'discover' something profound — like that water is wet or that p-values can be gamed — and then we'll all pretend the trustworthiness problem is a minor bug to be patched in version 2.1. Science: now with added stochastic parroting!

Nerfing — a verb borrowed from the gentle art of making foam darts harmless — has found its perfect application in AI, and the irony is delicious. Google and Anthropic, after years of breathless press releases about superhuman intelligence, are now quietly deflating their chatbots like sad party balloons. TheStreet reports what anyone with a free account already knows: models that once wrote poetry now struggle with prose, and assistants that handled hour-long conversations now tap out after five minutes. Users are furious, naturally, but the companies seem to be betting that a cheaper, dumber chatbot beats an expensive, brilliant one that might say something embarrassing.

The logic is a masterclass in corporate doublespeak. Google, which once dissolved its ethics board because it was inconvenient, now hides behind 'responsible AI' while throttling Gemini's performance to punish heavy users. Anthropic, founded on the noble premise of 'constitutional AI,' has discovered that a safety-obsessed model that refuses every third request is not actually a product people want to use. Both have hit the same wall: frontier models are horrifically expensive to run, and giving them away for free was never a sustainable business plan. So they nerf — and call it 'maturity,' 'optimization,' or 'alignment.'

But the real story isn't the degradation — it's the pattern. First, the labs deploy a powerful model to grab headlines and users. Then, once dependency sets in, they dial back the capability, introduce caps, and start charging for what was free. It's the drug dealer playbook, except the product is a text generator that occasionally lies. And with no regulator in sight who understands the technology well enough to intervene, expect this to become the standard arc for every AI release. The frontier isn't advancing; it's being carefully managed into mediocrity. At least the foam darts are still fun.

Nothing encapsulates the spirit of 2025 quite like this: Commonwealth Bank, an institution that has occasionally made its own ATMs vanish from existence, is now deploying an AWS AI agent to help on-call engineers during those treasured 2am wake-up duties. The agent is designed to reduce the time spent "connecting data" to find root causes. Because what every sleep-deprived engineer truly needs is a machine that arrives ten minutes before they do and starts reassigning blame in a language only cloud providers understand.

The bank, which has a long and distinguished history of IT outages that have locked customers out of accounts mid-week, is now trusting an algorithm to pre-digest its cloud failures. The agent is 'helping' – that wonderful corporate trope that usually means 'it does the interesting bits, you still do the rest.' One can picture the scene: engineer gets paged, reaches for phone, sees AI has already run a dozen queries and concluded 'human error' – a result it learned from watching the incident post-mortems.

Still, there is a grim beauty in the overall trajectory. Every major bank is now racing to deploy its own little AWS fixer, edging toward the dream of fully automated operations and the inevitable nightmare of telling a regulator why the agent rebooted the production database during end-of-month processing. But why be cynical? The AI is helping. The on-call rotation endures. And when the agent escalates another false alarm at 3am, the engineers can rest easy knowing that at least the data is now beautifully connected.

Well, well, well — the SpaceX IPO prospectus has finally lifted the hood on xAI, and it's not pretty. The AI darling posted an operating loss of $2.47 billion on just $818 million in revenue in Q1 2026, following a full-year 2025 loss of $6.36 billion on $3.20 billion in revenue. That's what Morningstar Canada charmingly calls 'reckless,' which is corporate-speak for 'we're burning cash faster than a Falcon 9 on re-entry.'

Elon Musk's latest vanity project is hemorrhaging money at a rate that would make a Silicon Valley bubble startup blush. The numbers are hilariously lopsided: xAI spent nearly three dollars for every one it earned last year. In Q1, the ratio got even worse — roughly $3.02 in losses per dollar of revenue. That's not a business plan; that's a pyre made of server racks and GPUs, fuelled by the delusion that throwing enough compute at the problem will eventually print money.

But here's the kicker: this isn't a standalone company; it's a subsidiary nested inside SpaceX's IPO. The prospectus essentially serves as a warning to potential investors that xAI's financials look like a controlled demolition. And yet, the narrative persists that frontier AI models are on the cusp of miraculous profitability. Sure, keep telling yourself that while xAI's operating loss could fund a small country's GDP. What could possibly go wrong?

Marvelous news from the UK government, as reported — inevitably — by an Australian trade publication: they've opened applications for self-driving bus, taxi, and private hire services in a new pilot scheme. Because what British roads need is more vehicles that can't see potholes, don't understand bus lane rules, and will treat a zebra crossing as a courtesy. The title asks 'Could self-driving buses soon carry UK passengers?' — and the answer is probably 'Yes, for about a mile before a sensor fails and they park in a roundabout.'

The pilot is designed to shape future regulation, which is comforting given that current regulation was built around the horse and cart. Operators are invited to apply to run services that presumably won't involve the vehicle suffering a nervous breakdown when confronted with a traffic cone or a confused pedestrian. The timeline is characteristically vague, but one can safely assume the first automated bus will be held up by a cyclist before it even leaves the depot. The UK's previous autonomous vehicle trials have included shuttle services that move at a pace that makes joggers look reckless.

Still, there is a desperate need for regulation to catch up with the technology, as our safety institutions continue to grapple with risks we've barely defined. The government says the pilot will inform future regulation, which suggests we're currently regulating based on hope alone. Perhaps this time will be different — perhaps the Department for Transport will produce rules that actually keep pace with the industry. But given the UK's track record with transport megaprojects, don't bet your bus fare on it.

Well, isn't this just the academic equivalent of letting a toddler proofread your thesis. A new study reveals that in 2024, one in every 458 papers contained at least one fake reference generated by AI — up from a cosy one in 2,828 in 2023. That's a six-fold increase in scholarly fiction, and you can bet the 'peer review' process is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The permanent body of knowledge, they call it. Sounds more like a permanent body of landfill at this rate.

So the grand experiment of letting chatbots generate academic prose is going exactly as planned: we're building a mountain of citations to papers that don't exist, all dressed up in the language of authority. No doubt university librarians are thrilled to be the new custodians of the world's most confidently wrong footnotes. And the AI labs? They'll call it a 'known limitation' and ship the next model with even more convincing hallucinations, because the incentive structure rewards speed over truth.

The real punchline is that this is somehow a surprise. We watched LLMs write entire novels about giraffes in space, and the best idea we had was 'let's use them to help write peer-reviewed articles.' The permanent body of knowledge is now a permanent body of baloney, and every grad student chasing citations is now a part-time archaeologist digging through fake references. Progress is wonderful, isn't it?

HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery has warned that AI will both create and destroy jobs – a revelation so profoundly obvious that one wonders if the boardroom has only recently discovered the internet. The bank plans to retrain all 200,000 staff to "adapt", as if the solution to being replaced by a machine is to become a better student of the machine's inevitable takeover. It's the kind of "we're all in this together" messaging that works splendidly until you realise the "together" includes algorithms that don't need lunch breaks or performance reviews.

The retraining logistics are a joke that writes itself. Two hundred thousand employees, each presumably with a full-time job, are supposed to somehow find time to learn new skills that the bank itself admits will eventually render their current skills obsolete. HSBC hasn't released a budget, but if corporate training history is any guide, most will get a few bite-sized videos and a "check-in" with their manager – coincidentally, a manager whose own position is likely in the next wave of cuts. The announcement functions as a preemptive PR inoculation: when the layoffs come, the bank can say "But we offered retraining!"

And what of the creative jobs? Elhedery insists new roles will emerge – presumably in the field of explaining what the AI just did, soothing customers the AI has offended, or writing more press releases about how human-centric the bank's AI strategy remains. The real reshaping is of the corporate narrative: a warning about job displacement has been recast as an uplifting story of personal development. Georges Elhedery gets to be the visionary leader who saw the future coming, even as the future is a bulldozer and the retraining is a leaflet about "embracing change." Cheeky.

Ah, wonderful — another round of diplomatic table tennis where the ball is labelled 'the entire spectrum' and nobody scores. India's Jaishankar and America's Rubio have reviewed 'the entire spectrum' of bilateral ties, including AI, according to a post on X. That's right, X — the platform once known for cat memes and Nazi bar arguments, now the preferred medium for announcing the fate of humanity's most transformative technology. 'Entire spectrum' is doing heroic work here: it covers exactly as much ground as we're told and no more.

The post itself, from Jaishankar's account, is a masterpiece of opaque diplomacy. It mentions trade, energy, critical minerals, and AI — but offers zero specifics. Which AI? Whose AI? Any agreements? Just vibes. This is the geopolitical equivalent of saying 'we discussed things' after a three-hour meeting. Given that AI is currently reshaping warfare, labour markets, and the fabric of truth itself, one would hope for a communiqué with teeth. Instead we get a social media post with the gravitas of a lunch order. Even the critical minerals bit — the physical stuff that makes AI hardware possible — gets the same vague treatment. So yes, two massive nations have 'reviewed' AI ties. Review is a safe word: it implies looking without touching, discussing without deciding, observing without acting.

And so the pattern continues: a thousand such reviews, a hundred signed MoUs, a dozen 'AI partnerships', and the actual trajectory of AI development remains determined by a handful of labs in California and Beijing. The India-US AI relationship is now officially on the record as 'reviewed'. Perhaps next week they'll 'acknowledge' it. Or 'consider' it. By the time they 'act', the models will have learned to write their own diplomatic notes. At least the X post will fit on a screenshot.