Tuesday, March 31
Tuesday, March 31
All 11 xAI Co-Founders Are Gone. Every Single One.
The last two original xAI co-founders walked out Friday, completing a clean sweep. Manuel Kroiss (pretraining lead) and Ross Nordeen (longtime Musk advisor) are gone, meaning zero of the 11 founding members remain at Elon Musk's AI company. The collateral damage is immediate: "Macrohard," xAI's splashy AI-agent project for white-collar work, is paused after its lead Toby Pohlen also departed. Musk was hyping Macrohard on X barely two and a half weeks ago. Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly dangling retention packages up to $300M over four years to keep its own researchers locked in. The talent war pricing has gone fully unhinged.
All 11 xAI Co-Founders Are Gone. Every Single One.
The last two original xAI co-founders walked out Friday, completing a clean sweep. Manuel Kroiss (pretraining lead) and Ross Nordeen (longtime Musk advisor) are gone, meaning zero of the 11 founding members remain at Elon Musk's AI company. The collateral damage is immediate: "Macrohard," xAI's splashy AI-agent project for white-collar work, is paused after its lead Toby Pohlen also departed. Musk was hyping Macrohard on X barely two and a half weeks ago. Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly dangling retention packages up to $300M over four years to keep its own researchers locked in. The talent war pricing has gone fully unhinged.
AI Power Plays and Big Money Moves
Sundays used to be for recovery. Now they're for processing the week's final plot twists.
- The average Fortune 500 company mentioned "AI" 79 times in their most recent earnings call, up from 12 times two years ago. The word is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a lot of slide decks.
- Bridge loans used to be boring financial instruments. In 2026, they're narrative devices, signals about what's coming next quarter.
- Google has launched more "switching" features in six months than it did in the entire decade of the Chrome-Firefox wars. The AI chatbot market has entered its number portability era.
- Stanford tested AI advice-giving using posts where the internet had already reached consensus that the poster was wrong. The models still took the poster's side.
Anyway, the weekend delivered. Here's what's generating heat.
Sundays used to be for recovery. Now they're for processing the week's final plot twists.
- The average Fortune 500 company mentioned "AI" 79 times in their most recent earnings call, up from 12 times two years ago. The word is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a lot of slide decks.
- Bridge loans used to be boring financial instruments. In 2026, they're narrative devices, signals about what's coming next quarter.
- Google has launched more "switching" features in six months than it did in the entire decade of the Chrome-Firefox wars. The AI chatbot market has entered its number portability era.
- Stanford tested AI advice-giving using posts where the internet had already reached consensus that the poster was wrong. The models still took the poster's side.
Anyway, the weekend delivered. Here's what's generating heat.
Signals and Shenanigans From the Dev World
Every wall, barrel, and imp is a <div> positioned with CSS 3D transforms. JavaScript handles game logic but rendering is pure CSS. Playable at cssdoom.wtf. Safari on iOS will crash on big maps. The community is both impressed and concerned.
Sid Sijbrandij, diagnosed with osteosarcoma, built a personal R&D loop using ChatGPT to analyze scans, blood tests, and tissue samples. He open-sourced his cancer data at osteosarc.com, including single-cell RNA sequencing. Radical transparency, applied to survival.
A major Gemini update adds a Chrome side panel and an "auto browse" preview that automates browser tasks, built on Gemini 3. Rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers on Windows, MacOS, and Chromebook Plus in the U.S.
Google's TurboQuant compression tech sent AI memory and storage stocks tumbling. Micron took a hit. Investors had bet memory demand was a safe AI play, but software optimization just changed the math overnight.
The TeamPCP threat actor compromised the telnyx package on PyPI with two malicious versions that concealed credential harvesting inside a .WAV file. Project is quarantined. If you're running 4.87.1 or 4.87.2, downgrade to 4.87.0 now.
Meta is shutting down end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs starting May. The privacy community is not thrilled. Another signal that encryption commitments remain negotiable when business priorities shift.
Reuters reports both ByteDance and Alibaba plan to order Huawei's 950PR chip, with Huawei targeting roughly 750,000 units this year. The non-NVIDIA AI silicon pipeline now has real customers placing real volume orders.
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