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My fellow AI explorer,

Two stories dropped this week that are going to be talked about for a long time.

Not because they’re surprising. But because, at last, the companies themselves are saying out loud what everyone already suspected.

Oracle admitted in a legal filing that AI is reducing its workforce. Getty Images, a company that sued AI developers for years, just struck a multi-year deal with OpenAI. And China quietly built the world’s fastest supercomputer from scratch with no foreign chips.

We are no longer in the “AI will change everything someday” era. This is the “AI is changing everything right now” era.

In today’s edition:

58% of buyers now start their research in ChatGPT or Gemini, not Google. Most startups aren't showing up there yet.

The ones that are get cited by the AI tools their buyers, investors, and future hires already use. And they convert at 3×.

Download the free AEO Playbook for Startups from HubSpot and get the exact steps to start showing up. Five minutes to read.

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Most companies caught cutting jobs because of AI do one thing: deny it. Oracle did the opposite.

In its fiscal 2026 annual report filed with the SEC, Oracle disclosed it cut 21,000 employees over the past year, nearly 13% of its entire workforce, and put this in writing: “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.”

That sentence is historic. Here’s what the numbers look like:

The pattern here is the clearest version of what’s happening across all of Big Tech: spend massively on AI infrastructure, cut humans to offset the costs, and bet the entire business on the AI revenue eventually showing up.

Oracle is one of the first companies to make that connection explicit in a regulatory filing. Most companies still insist AI “complements” their workforce. Oracle just told the SEC it doesn’t.

The other detail that matters: Oracle warned it “may initiate new restructuring plans in the future.” This isn’t over.

🔮 Prediction: Oracle’s candor triggers a wave of copycat disclosures. Once one company says it in an SEC filing, others can no longer pretend it isn’t happening. Expect workforce reduction language tied explicitly to AI to appear in at least a dozen major corporate filings before year’s end.

Is this the corporate honesty we’ve been waiting for, or just legal cover? Hit reply.

Read the full CNBC story here →

This one requires some context, because the reversal is absurd.

Getty Images announced a multi-year display partnership with OpenAI this week, making Getty’s licensed photo library available inside ChatGPT search and discovery features. Getty’s stock immediately surged over 145%.

Here’s what makes this remarkable:

The court loss wasn’t just a legal defeat. It was a signal that the old strategy (litigate and wait) wasn’t going to save the business. AI image generation is too good now, and it’s directly threatening Getty’s core licensing revenue.

The deal is framed as a “display” partnership, meaning Getty photos appear as results when ChatGPT surfaces visual content. Crucially, no financial terms were disclosed, and there’s been no confirmation that Getty images can be used to train future OpenAI models. That distinction matters enormously to the 600,000 photographers who supply Getty’s library.

For OpenAI, this is simple: licensed, provenance-tracked photography makes ChatGPT’s visual responses more trustworthy and more commercially useful as they push deeper into advertising and commerce.

🔮 Prediction: Getty’s pivot accelerates. Every major content owner watching Getty’s stock surge after years of losses will quietly recalculate whether fighting AI in court is smarter than licensing it. The holdouts will become a smaller and smaller group.

Would you trust an AI that shows you licensed Getty photos more than one that generates its own images? Reply and tell me.

Read the full story of this dramatic reversal here →

Oracle’s SEC filing made the stakes concrete. Here’s a five-step playbook for making yourself irreplaceable when AI is explicitly in the cost-cutting conversation:

💡 Pro tip: Oracle’s filing specifically noted that AI-driven cuts could create “shortages of skilled employees” and “loss of institutional knowledge.” The people who survive AI disruption aren’t the ones who avoided it. They’re the ones who made themselves the bridge between the AI tools and the humans making decisions.

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🖥 China’s LineShine just claimed the world’s fastest supercomputer crown on the TOP500 list using entirely domestic chips, though experts note the system isn’t optimized for AI workloads and the real frontier AI leaders don’t even submit to the list.

🔄 Meta paused an internal employee-tracking program after sensitive laptop data was exposed, a reminder that training AI on internal workplace data creates serious privacy risks companies are only beginning to reckon with.

🚀 Noam Shazeer, co-author of the landmark “Attention Is All You Need” paper that underpins every major AI model today, has left Google DeepMind to join OpenAI as Lead for Architecture Research, despite Google paying $2.7B to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago.

📊 Samsung has rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to all South Korean staff and its global DX division, in what OpenAI is calling one of its largest enterprise deployments to date.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Send me your thoughts by replying to this email (yes, I read them all :)

Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI