American Express plans to eliminate about 5% of its global workforce - roughly 3,850 jobs, based on its nearly 77,000 employees at the end of 2025 - and record a $336 million restructuring charge. Chief Financial Officer Christophe Le Caillec said the cuts are intended to make the company leaner and more agile while preparing it to use artificial intelligence more extensively. The company plans to reduce management layers and expand managers’ spans of control before automating processes, rather than applying AI to work that has not been organized effectively. CEO Stephen Squeri said the changes are meant to improve efficiency and help Amex accelerate innovation.
The reductions reflect a wider financial-services push to automate repetitive work; Barclays recently announced plans to cut about 5,000 jobs, also around 5% of its workforce. Squeri also described AI’s potential to personalize cardholder experiences and offers, while stressing that external AI agents will only be allowed into Amex systems through approved connections to protect customers and merchants. The announcement came alongside stronger-than-expected quarterly adjusted earnings of $4.68 per share, and Amex raised its full-year earnings guidance to $18.30-$18.60 per share, partly aided by proceeds from selling its stake in Global Business Travel Group. Revenue rose 9% to $20.06 billion, slightly below analysts’ expectations, and shares fell about 4% in afternoon trading.
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Researchers tested 16 LLMs on all 55 TIS-100 puzzles, giving each one attempt and time to refine its code. The models found 133 new performance tradeoffs across 18 puzzles and set three outright cycle records, though human players improved on most solutions within days. (tis-100.wincon.dev)
Australia is considering a new criminal offence for AI companies that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent harm caused by their models. The government is also weighing an AI safety watchdog with power to impose significant fines, following a hack of a Medicare statistics portal involving OpenAI. (abc.net.au)
AI is increasingly becoming a gateway through which people find information. Audiences still resist having AI produce their news. (niemanlab.org)
Nvidia holds a central position in the AI industry, making disruption to the company potentially catastrophic for the wider ecosystem. The race for advanced AI is also intensifying economic and geopolitical conflict, while concentrated corporate power and infrastructure face growing political resistance. (france24.com)
LLM inference can require reading about 26 GB of model weights to generate each token from a 13-billion-parameter model. The explanation shows how model size drives memory bandwidth demands during text generation. (youtube.com)
Deletion Tuning matches full fine-tuning across three LLM post-training methods by zeroing fewer than 0.05% of model weights. Its compact masks also preserve prior-task accuracy better than full fine-tuning, LoRA, and random sparse tuning. (arxiv.org)
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