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Intuit lays off 1,800 employees
Spotlight: Musk promises Grok-3 by the end of the year
Jack Shields
July 11, 2024
Welcome back!
It’s another big day in AI. Amazon Web Services just introduced a game-changing new tool and intuit is laying off over 1,000 employees. Let’s get straight into today’s news.
In today’s Daily Update:
🗞️ Intuit lays off 1,800 employees amid growing AI push
🤖 AWS App Studio aims to build enterprise applications from text prompts
📸 Elon Musk promises Grok-3 by the end of the year
🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits
Read time: 2 minutes
TOP STORY
🗞️ Intuit lays off 1,800 employees amid growing AI push
Source: Getty Images
Yesterday Intuit announced an AI-focused reorganization plan that includes laying off 1,800 employees.
What you should know:
The dismissed employees make up about 10% of Intuit’s workforce.
Intuit will close its offices in Boise, Idaho and Edmonton, Canada, where more than 250 employees work.
CEO Sasan Goodarzi says more than 1,000 of the layoffs were underperforming employees, but the company’s expectations have elevated due to a growing focus on incorporating AI into its products and services.
Intuit says it plans to match the layoffs by hiring at least 1,800 new employees in 2025.
Why it matters: The specifics here are slightly unclear. Intuit did confirm that 300 jobs are being eliminated to streamline work, so AI is likely at least partially responsible for some of these layoffs. At some point companies outside of the tech and software industries will find ways to leverage AI to save labor, so now is still a great time to integrate AI tools into your workflow.
AI TOOL OF THE DAY
🤖 AWS App Studio aims to build enterprise applications from text prompts
Source: Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services just introduced AWS App Studio, a generative AI-powered service that lets users create enterprise-grade applications from natural language prompts.
Key points:
App Studio aims to enable customers without software development skills to build enterprise applications within minutes.
Users simply describe their desired program in plain language and App Studio will write the code for them.
Example applications include an inventory-tracking system for retail companies or a claims approval tool for insurance companies.
App Studio is currently in preview, and can only be accessed in the US West (Oregon) AWS Region.
Why it matters: Just like Anthropic’s prompt engineering tool that we looked at yesterday, AWS App Studio enables small to medium-sized businesses to develop AI solutions without coding expertise, making internal software applications more accessible to companies around the world.
BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT
📸 Elon Musk promises Grok-3 by the end of the year
DALL-E 3
Elon Musk has delayed xAI’s release of Grok-2 until August, but still plans to launch an even more advanced version of Grok by the end of the year.
The details:
Musk says Grok-3 will be trained on 100,000 H100 GPUs.
xAI is reportedly working on the most powerful training cluster in the world. The company claims training will begin on this cluster this month.
This highlights xAI’s shift away from third parties to its own hardware infrastructure. Musk’s startup leased 24,000 H100s from Oracle to train Grok-2.
Grok’s current model is still far behind ChatGPT, despite having access to real-time data on X.
The bigger picture: Much to Tesla shareholders’ dismay, Musk has been ramping up his generative AI efforts with xAI in recent months. Grok still has a long way to go before it catches up to industry-leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic, but xAI’s rumored infrastructure could help close the gap. Only time will tell if Musk finally delivers on one of his many bold claims about his company’s AI projects.
MORE TRENDING NEWS
🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits
Source: AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
THAT’S A WRAP