GM just laid off hundreds of IT workers to hire those with stronger AI skills

Until recently, many tech professionals viewed themselves as a special and respected worker class: highly educated, hard-working, well paid, and in demand. “They considered themselves above unions,” says Zak Thompson, senior software engineer at Kickstarter and union steward at Kickstarter United. Big Tech issued aspirational mission statements that motivated workers, workplaces were seen as meritocracies, and employees were encouraged to speak out if they were unhappy. If workers didn’t like where they worked, they just moved on: other employers would be falling over themselves to hire them. How times have changed. Now, fed up with mass layoffs, disillusioned with Big Tech’s direction, and stunned by bold management proclamations that AI will displace huge numbers of people in many tech jobs — starting with programmers — interest in unions has risen sharply among tech professionals. Workers in some organizations, including Kickstarter, have already taken the plunge. A surge in interes

Omen AI has raised $31 million in a Series A round led by Nava Ventures, with participation from CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, and Hard Launch Capital, alongside personal investments from executives at Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and TensorWave. The company has raised $40 million in total since its founding in 2024. The startup […]

Data products help standardize how raw data sets, data warehouse views, and data lake logical views are combined and used to deliver analytics and AI capabilities. By developing data products, teams can streamline much of the upfront data pipelines, governance, and management needed to deliver trusted data assets that people, tools, and AI can then use for different purposes. The way you cook a meal can serve as a helpful analogy. You can choose to purchase only raw ingredients like tomatoes, wheat flour, eggs, and fresh herbs to make a favorite pasta dish. The approach works well when you have the time and skills to cook from scratch or want to prepare a nice meal for a small family. Otherwise, you may want to buy canned tomatoes, your favorite box of pasta, and a spice mix to cook the same meal, especially if you are time-constrained, are cooking for many people, or want a consistent finished product.   Like the not-from-scratch pasta meal, data products provide a similar level of ti

Junyang Lin, the former technical lead of Alibaba's Qwen, walked through the model family in a talk "towards a generalist model / agent," then expanded it in an essay. We read both for practitioners: Qwen3 hybrid thinking modes and dynamic thinking budgets, where the merge fell short, the shift from reasoning thinking to agentic thinking, why agentic RL infrastructure is harder, and where reward hacking bites. The post Qwen’s Former Lead on What Hybrid Thinking Got Wrong — and Why He Now Backs Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.

How Pandas chunking, Dask, and Polars help process millions of records when adding more compute isn't an option. The post What Can We Do When Memory Becomes the New Bottleneck in Data Engineering? appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Conference demos often struggle with the same challenge: showing people what technology can do without asking them to sit through another product presentation. At SAS Innovate 2026, SAS partner Notilyze took a different approach. Rather than leading with a traditional demonstration, Notilyze showcased an interactive soccer game that encouraged attendees [...] The post How one SAS partner turned analytics into an interactive experience appeared first on SAS Blogs.

Spurred by Washington's sudden curb on Anthropic, global corporations are shifting away from general-purpose, rented AI to prevent policy changes from hampering their core business operations overnight, said Rohit Kapoor, chairman and CEO of the Nasdaq-listed analytics and digital solutions company.

Small prompt changes can silently break critical behavior in production. This article introduces a practical framework to detect hidden regressions before users notice. The post Prompt Engineering Fails Quietly —  Prompt Regression Is Why appeared first on Towards Data Science.