The vibes at Meta headquarters right now aren’t just bad, they are downright rancid. Starting this morning, waves of emails will start arriving in nearly 8,000 employees’ personal inboxes, informing them that their jobs are terminated. Workers had been dreading the mass culling since it was first leaked by The Information in March, but Meta didn’t address the layoffs with staff until last month.

What’s the damage? The layoffs affect about 10% of the ~78,000 workforce. Earlier this week, the company said in a memo that it would also move 7,000 employees to AI-related initiatives and close 6,000 open roles.

Morale at the Facebook parent company is reportedly at an all-time low:

• Things have gotten so bad that some employees are begging for the virtual pink slip and the 16 weeks minimum of severance, Wired reported.
• An employee who worked at the company for over a decade told the San Francisco Standard, “I tend to cry in the shower.”
• Another worker said large empty boxes began arriving at a few of the Menlo Park offices before today’s layoffs, and no one could give employees an answer as to why.

Layoffs are just the tip of the AIceberg

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2022 that the layoffs were a correction to Covid-era overhiring, but the recent rounds are meant to free up funds for AI spending. The tech giant has pledged to spend as much as $145 billion this year on artificial intelligence.

In April, Meta rolled out a new program internally that tracks employees’ every move on their computers. The company said it would use the data to train AI models on “how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers.”

Big picture: Many Meta workers have pushed back, with some launching a petition urging execs to end the tracking program, and UK workers attempting to unionize. Meta, meanwhile, is reporting record profits.—MM

Acting AG Blanche grilled by Senate over Trump’s $1.8 billion fund. Senators on both sides of the aisle probed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche with questions about President Trump’s plan to use tax dollars to pay people who claim they were victimized by the Biden administration. Joining Democrats in their criticism was Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who called the fund “highly irregular” and demanded more oversight. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Blanche’s testimony raised more questions than it answered. Blanche said he would not rule out paying Jan. 6 rioters, including people convicted of assaulting police officers. “Anybody in this country can apply,” Blanche said.

Google announced a ton of new AI features. At Google’s annual developer conference yesterday, the tech giant revealed…*deep breath* a new 24/7 personal AI assistant called Gemini Spark; Docs Live, which allows users to generate documents with their voices; a new Gemini model called Omni that has advanced video generation abilities; another new, faster Gemini model; and a new AI-powered search box that the company says is the biggest change to its search function since it debuted 25 years ago. Got all that? CEO Sundar Pichai also said the company’s Gemini app now has 900 million monthly active users, more than double from a year ago.

An OpenAI co-founder is joining Anthropic. In what is essentially the nerd version of Kevin Durant leaving the Thunder to join the Warriors, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy announced that he’s joining rival AI giant Anthropic to “get back to R&D.” In addition to doing two stints at OpenAI, Karpathy also worked at Tesla, where he led a team for its Autopilot system. It’s the latest splashy hire for Anthropic after the company poached a founding member of Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this month.—AE

Paperback diehards who claim to love lugging around Ron Chernow doorstoppers are getting vindicated. Today, Amazon is ending support for Kindle e-readers released before 2013—which prompted some users to load up on books or alter their devices.

While the titles already loaded on the gadget your parents gifted you in 2010 aren’t going anywhere, the owners of the ~2 million older Kindles still in use won’t be able to acquire new books from the Kindle Store.

• The change affects more than a dozen models, including some Kindle Fire tablets, the Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation, and the Kindle Touch.
• Amazon is offering a 20% discount on new Kindles and a $20 credit for e-book purchases to those trading in qualifying older models.

But some aren’t rushing to Amazon.com

Many scrappy bookworms are now sidestepping the Amazon ecosystem by sideloading titles onto their vintage Kindles from designated apps on their computer.

Others are altering their Kindle’s software—a more technically involved process known as jailbreaking that may violate Amazon’s terms of service (though not always the law). This allows them to install alternative reading apps with more features and download books in formats that aren’t compatible with ordinary Kindles. You can see how people are doing it here.

Many users are angry…accusing Amazon of practicing planned obsolescence and exacerbating the issue of e-waste, with some saying they’ll switch to competing e-readers. Amazon currently controls 72% of the e-reader market.—SK

Pizza Hut is on a mission to inject 1990s nostalgia straight into the veins of Gen X and millennials. Hundreds of locations are being remodeled with red cups, stained-glass lamps, old-school salad bars, and Pac-Man games in an effort to make them look the way they did when your crush wore JNCO jeans.

In all, 144 dine-in eateries have been converted into “Pizza Hut Classics” since 2019, when the company partnered with franchisees to turn back time. Tim Sparks, the president of Daland Corporation, which operates 93 Pizza Hut locations, has already put 38 spots through a time machine. CBS reported last week that those eateries are among Daland’s top performers. with some customers making three-hour trips to visit them.

The Hut has been getting outpizza’d: Pizza Hut announced in February that it was closing 250 locations due to lagging sales. Contrast that with Domino’s, which is expanding, despite being decades late to stuffed-crust pizza.

In true commitment to the bit, Pizza Hut is reheating its “BOOK IT!” summer reading program that dates back to the 1980s and incentivizes kids to pick up a book in exchange for pizza. Enrollment is underway for children in pre-K through sixth grade, and the program starts on June 1.—DL

On Wednesdays, the Brew’s Sam Klebanov highlights a fascinating stock, commodity, or other asset that’s worth your attention.

Investors are dumping IOUs from Uncle Sam. Government bond prices fell this week, pushing 30-year yields—which move in the opposite direction to prices—to 5.19% yesterday, the highest level since July 2007.

Everyone is worried about inflation accelerating:

• Analysts say the risk of prices rising faster due to a prolonged Strait of Hormuz closure has investors expecting that the Fed won’t lower borrowing costs this year, which makes the current bonds that offer lower interest look as appealing as a hot tub in July.
• The market went from anticipating three rate cuts this year to now a rate hike.

Growing government debt further cheapens federal bonds. The US national debt for last year’s Q4 was 122% of GDP, up from 105% during the same period in 2019.

This affects you even if you’re not a bond trader. Rising government bond yields can translate to higher mortgage rates and more expensive auto loans.—SK