Meta’s biggest local cut yet: The Facebook parent company is eliminating nearly 1,400 jobs in Washington state, about 20% of its Seattle-region workforce, as part of a companywide AI restructuring. The cuts, disclosed Tuesday morning in a public filing, include nearly 700 positions at the company’s offices in Bellevue’s Spring District (above). Read more.
Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical: In his latest guest commentary, AI researcher and UW professor emeritus Oren Etzioni responds to the pope’s first encyclical, which warns that AI threatens human dignity and demands stronger regulation. Etzioni agrees with the diagnosis but argues the real failure is ours — we blame technologists while our own behavior underwrites their business models. Read More.
RELATED: Twelve AI labs have raised more than $29 billion at a combined valuation of nearly $127 billion — rivaling Ford and GM combined — without shipping anything people can buy, writes Etzioni in a weekend guest column. He examines the “pedigree premium,” Nvidia’s role as kingmaker, and what biotech and dot-com history say about how this bet ends.
Tune In: GeekWire’s Todd Bishop will discuss Pope Leo’s AI encyclical and other topics as the guest on KUOW’s Soundside in the noon hour on 94.9 FM in the Seattle region and kuow.org.
Robotic greens: Big indoor farming ventures have been going bankrupt, but Oregon startup Canopii is betting a smaller footprint is the answer. Its robotic greenhouse takes greens from seed to box in 2,500 square feet, producing enough to supply 20,000 people. A crowdfunding campaign launches this week to build the first commercial unit in Portland. Read more.
Sustainable skies: Alaska Airlines’ managing director of sustainability Ryan Spies talks about sustainable aviation fuel, collective action, and what gives him hope for the planet in our latest Sustainability Spotlight profile. Read more.
From software to song: Hadi Partovi helped teach kids around the world to code through Code.org. Now he’s CEO of Payam Music, which uses an unconventional method to teach piano and plans to go national with backing from investor Mark Cuban, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi (Partovi’s cousin), and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. Read more.
Uncertain future for Bungie: The Bellevue-based video-game studio, part of Sony’s gaming division, will release a final content update for its long-running online shooter Destiny 2 on June 9, ending development on the game. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports significant layoffs are planned, raising questions about the studio’s future. Read more.
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- Amazon’s newly updated Bee wristband offers hands‑free AI note‑taking but raises fresh privacy issues as testers find its always‑listening design both useful and unnervingly invasive. (TechCrunch)
- A University of Washington computer science grad explains why she chose to study CS not for a tech career, but to sharpen her critical thinking and imagination as a fiction writer. (NYT)
- A decade after The Washington Post opened a flashy D.C. headquarters championed by Jeff Bezos as a symbol of its digital future, the paper is now subleasing part of the building amid deep losses, layoffs and Bezos’ growing distance from the newsroom. (Status)
- Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston is stepping down as CEO after 19 years, handing the reins to new co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi — a former Amazon and Meta exec with Seattle-area roots — as the cloud storage giant, which also has offices in the Seattle region, bets on AI for its next chapter. (CNBC, LinkedIn)
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