Meta to Layoff 20%, AI Cured Dogs Cancer, Nvidia's New Chip

Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the podcast, we're covering the top four AI news stories happening today.

There is one that I'm super excited about. I posted about this over on LinkedIn, but there is an LM engineer.

He just used chat GPT and some AI tools to design a personalized cancer vaccine for his dog and actually shrink the tumor.

Nvidia is preparing to unveil its next generation of AI chips.

Open AI is reportedly working on a massive enterprise partnership with PE firms, which is kind of interesting.

And then the big story I want to talk about that everyone is talking about is that meta is preparing to lay off potentially more than 20% of its workforce while ramping up AI spending.

So they're making a lot of money. They're just cutting their workforce to spend more on AI.

And this is what we've already seen from a bunch of other players in the industry.

So let's get into all of it and the implications in the whole industry of AI.

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All right, let's get into the first story today is this kind of cancer vaccine that was created for a dog.

So basically, this is coming out of Australia.

It's pretty wild.

There's a tech entrepreneur named Paul Conham and he decided to try something.

Basically, he went to the vet and they told him that his rescue dog Rosie only had a few months left to live because she had a really advanced cancer.

So I think instead of doing what a lot of people do, most, I mean, everyone really and just kind of accepting the prognosis.

He decided to use AI tools, including chat GPT and then Google's alpha fold to analyze the tumor.

So he had Rosie's healthy DNA and then he had her DNA sequenced from the tumor.

And then he converted the tumor tissue into data and used chat GPT to identify the mutations that were driving the cancer.

This is incredible.

Not because, you know, not because I think a lot of people will be like, oh, he's like kind of in tech.

So that's how he was able to do this.

He has no background in biology, right?

He's just literally working with chat GPT and asking at how to do this.

How do I sequence DNA?

How do I, like, what do I do with the tumor data that they gave me?

And he was able to take all of this and then he went and found some researchers at New South Wales.

And they designed a custom mRNA vaccine tailored specifically to Rosie's tumor.

The thing that took the longest because they actually got that done pretty quick.

The thing that took the longest is that they had to wait three months just for the regulation to approve

that it was going to be safe to vaccinate his dog, which kind of is horrible, considering it, you know,

only had months left to live and he's probably super stressed about it.

And the regulation took longer than them cranking out this vaccine, which is with chat GPT.

And then Rosie received her first injection December.

And then by March, she had about a tennis ball size tumor and had shrunk about 75% and continuing to shrink.

So researchers believe this might be the first kind of personalized cancer vaccine ever created for a dog.

But this also will work for humans.

And I think the bigger implication here is that the same approaches already being tested in humans by companies like Moderna, Merck and BioNTech.

Now, of course, when we're doing humans, there's so much red tape and regulations.

Probably won't be available for years, which is honestly a huge shame in my opinion.

And don't even get me started on my thoughts on the pharmaceutical industry in this for regard.

And perhaps as a regulation in America, but I don't know, not my favorite thing.

It's incredible that he was able to make this for his dog really quick and get it ready in three months to custom vaccine.

So I think this obviously started out as a really desperate attempt to save his dog.

But I think it's actually a preview of AI-driven personalized medicine that we're going to see more of.

And hopefully we'll see this for humans in the future.

Next up, Nvidia is preparing a major AI chip reveal.

Nvidia's massive AI conference is called GTC.

It's kicking off and Jensen Hwang is expected to unveil the company's next generation of AI chips.

These chips are designed for the next wave of AI models and large-scale inference workloads.

I think right now we're really entering a phase where companies aren't just training models.

They're actually deploying them everywhere.

And so that means that the demand for the inference compute is exploding.

And Nvidia to this point has already become really the central infrastructure provider for the AI boom.

And I think every new generation of chip basically resets the performance ceiling for the entire industry.

So if Nvidia reveals another major leap,

I think it's going to accelerate the entire AI ecosystem again.

So that is what I would say to look out for at GTC.

Another thing that's incredible right now is that OpenAI is exploring a $10 billion enterprise AI venture.

They're in talks with several major private equity firms about launching a joint venture,

which is focused on deploying AI across corporate America.

Now, why is this important?

It's like, oh, great.

Another OpenAI corporate kind of partnership.

We've seen a bunch of these enterprise partnerships.

Yada Yada, what's the big deal?

I think what's interesting is who's involved here?

So the firms that are involved in this are TPG,

vain capital, advent, and Brookfield.

And the venture could be valued at about $10 billion,

about $4 billion of that is an outside investment.

Oh my gosh.

I don't know if you guys can hear me,

but I am in North Carolina right now.

And there's a huge thunderstorm going outside.

I just heard a huge crack thunder.

My audio enhancing software probably cut it out,

but just throwing that out there for you.

It's exciting times over here.

It's an ominous, it's an ominous sound

as I'm talking about this $10 billion deal.

But not really.

I think it's actually a cool deal.

Private equity firms right now,

they own thousands of companies

across a lot of different industries.

So basically, if OpenAI tools are getting rolled out

across all of the portfolios, right?

So how it works is those four major PE companies,

they're gonna roll out OpenAI software

across all of their portfolio companies.

And I think that is going to help the AI adoption scale

very fast in those organizations.

If they can pull this off correctly.

Now, those portfolio companies

not already using AI as a question.

If they're tech companies, I think they probably are.

But there's a lot of industries

where AI is very good and proficient

and the firms are just not using it.

And Anthropic recently put out a report on this whole thing

where they were kind of showing

where AI was very proficient at different tasks

and where they were being used.

And there were some huge gaps.

For example, engineers, AI is great

at a lot of engineering tasks.

And it's less than 2% of engineers

for like architectural engineers

that are using AI in their workflows and what they're doing.

So these types of deals are actually pretty big

if they can get into those types of organizations.

And I think it also helps.

And beyond just helping AI adoption,

I mean, it's obviously helping OpenAI's AI adoption.

Because perhaps if those companies are using AI,

they're using Google or Claude or another player.

So this is pretty interesting.

Instead of selling tools, one company at a time,

if you just hit all of the big owners,

these big private equity owners that own multiple companies,

you can get it rolled out much faster.

So this is going to be interesting.

The biggest story of the day, though,

is that Meta has kind of announced,

there's leaks from inside Meta,

that they might cut up to 20% of their entire company

and they're doing all this to expand AI

inside of their organization.

So after there was kind of these leaks, Meta stock jumped

about 3% after the report surfaced,

that there was kind of this massive round of layoffs,

so it was going to be tied directly to AI spending.

This is all according to a report out of routers, by the way.

So senior leaders inside of Meta have

been asked to prepare plans that could reduce the company's

workforce by more than 20%.

If it happens, it could affect over 15,000 employees.

This could be one of the largest layoffs in Meta's history.

The company had about 79,000 employees at the end of 2025.

And I think these potential cuts would really

dwarf the 11,000-person layoffs

that they announced back in 2022.

So they have been cutting people,

or they've been known to do these types of cuts before,

but over 15,000 employees could be one of their biggest yet.

Meta hasn't confirmed this report.

They're just like, oh, this is just speculative,

aka, they're just figuring it out right now.

But I think the context about this story

is telling us a lot.

Basically, Meta right now is planning

an absolutely enormous AI spending push.

They're planning on, it's, you know,

apps astronomical, how much they want to spend on AI.

And because of this, they need to come up with the money

somewhere, and this is part of it.

Meta says that their AI-related capital expenditures

this year will fall somewhere between 115,000,000

and 135,000,000, as they're building out new AI.

Infrastructure, that's part of a $700,000,000 total AI

spending way that we're expecting across

a bunch of these big companies.

Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta,

all of them are, you know, they have basically CapEx plans

that are putting them at about $700 billion

that are gonna be coming over the next few years.

And I think right now, the message from the leadership

over at Meta is pretty clear, you know,

AI is now their top priority.

Zuckerberg has been, you know, kind of framing 2026

as a year that Meta pushes towards what he's calling

personalized superintelligence.

Last year, they spent $14.3 billion investing in scale AI.

Then they hired their CEO, Alexander Wang,

with a bunch of their other top researchers.

So I think we're starting to see this kind of strategy,

this clarity in their strategy right now, right?

They're spending these huge amounts of money

on AI infrastructure and talent, right?

Because there was like, you know, reports

that some of these deals were worth a billion dollars

when just like hiring talent, like the top researcher

would cost a billion dollars.

And that's because they're, you know,

giving them a couple hundred million dollars

and then tons of stock and equity and stuff.

They got to stick around for like five or six years.

So anyway, or maybe it was like an eight-year deal,

a billion dollars for eight years

for some of these top AI researchers.

So anyways, I mean, and that's all speculative

and that depends on the stock price

and then a bunch of other things.

But like meta is spending a ton of money.

And I think that that is very clear.

But of course, they have to offset those costs

because that money isn't, you know, coming out of thin air.

And so what I will also say is meta's not the only one

that's doing these layoffs block also recently announced

layoffs that was about 4,000 employees.

And I believe that that was like 40%

of the entire company of block.

Where it's just seeing companies want smaller teams

that can move faster with AI.

Amazon is cutting 16,000 roles earlier this year.

At last, the end just announced that they're cutting 10%

of their workforce and they are redirecting

all of that money into AI.

And then there's also a consulting firm,

Challenger Gray and Christmas.

And they said that AI has already been cited

in more than 12,000 job cuts in the US this year so far.

And it's kind of interesting because I believe it's actually

higher but companies like Amazon when they cut 16,000 people

are like, oh, it's not really AI.

We're just, you know, trimming up the company

and rearranging things a little bit.

But honestly, I believe it's due to a lot of shifts

that are happening in industries.

Now, as Amazon, Perm and Meta and Alaska

and all these other companies are

permanently cutting these roles, I don't think so.

I think in the next couple of years,

we'll bring them all back in.

But I do think that they're re-evaluating

and we can do more with less due to AI.

So I think we're going to see kind of this initial wave

of layoffs and then I think as the companies

kind of find their equilibrium again,

they'll start hiring people back

and making sure that everyone they hire is kind of AI first

and understands how to use these tools.

Some analysts say that companies are just basically using

the AI as a convenient explanation for layoffs, right?

Like, hey, we got to become more profitable.

We're going to do layoffs and let's just blame it on AI.

But I think that's maybe partially true

but I do believe that AI is actually, you know,

dramatically increasing productivity.

And so you just don't need the same head count

to grow revenue.

And if Meta actually follows through with the cuts

that they're doing at this scale,

while also ramping up AI spending,

I think it could become one of the biggest signals yet

of how the AI economy is reshaping the tech industry.

So I guess if we just kind of zoom out

on all of these stories I covered today,

they basically all have the same theme,

which is that AI is not just this kind of like

cool technology experiment that it feels like

we've been doing for the last couple of years.

Right now I think we're seeing 2026,

I mean, especially with all the layoffs,

that it is restructuring the entire industry,

personalized medicine, you know,

there's trillion dollar chip infrastructure

that's being built out.

There's private equity deployment AI

across thousands of companies.

I think now is potentially one of the biggest

workforce restructurings in, you know, big tech history

that we're about to see.

I think the AI era is not coming

as I've been saying for a long time.

I think it's already here.

And this is probably going to accelerate

on almost all of these kind of genres that I covered today.

So thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

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All right, I'll catch you on the next episode.