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My fellow AI explorers

Somewhere in Rome, the Pope and an AI company co-founder are preparing to drop what might be the most ambitious document ever written about technology. Somewhere in New York, a Pizza Hut franchisee is staring at a $100 million legal bill that started with a software update. And somewhere in San Jose, 8,000 Meta employees are refreshing their emails, wondering if today is the day.

If it’s not already here, then coming soon to a global location near you: major AI impacts in your daily life.

In today’s edition:

• ✝️ The Vatican Goes AI: Pope Leo XIV teams up with Anthropic for a landmark document

• 🍕 Pizza Hut's $100M AI Disaster: When forced tech rollouts go catastrophically wrong

• 📻 Amazon Alexa Just Became a Podcast Studio

• 👨‍🎓 Eric Schmidt Gets Booed Off a Stage (and what it actually means)

• 💼 Meta's 8,000 Layoffs: The cold math behind Zuckerberg's AI bet

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Eric Schmidt Gets Booed

The Graduation Speech That Captured Everything Wrong With the AI Conversation

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered a commencement address at the University of Arizona this weekend and got booed repeatedly… every single time he mentioned artificial intelligence.

Here's what happened:

• Schmidt tried to draw a parallel between AI and the rise of the computer in the 1980s, framing it as a transformation that graduates could shape

• The boos intensified each time he mentioned AI and its impact on the workforce

• He acknowledged the reaction directly: "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear."

• It was not an isolated incident: a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida was booed the same week for mentioning AI

The class of 2026 is walking into a job market where entry-level roles are quietly disappearing, and companies are pointing to AI as the reason. And the people championing the technology at graduation stages are not the ones facing the consequences. Schmidt called their fears "rational," but then urged them to adapt anyway.

That gap between "the future is exciting" and "I can't get a job interview" is exactly where this backlash ruminates. And Schmidt, worth an estimated $20 billion and speaking from a podium, couldn't bridge it in 30 minutes.

There's something worth sitting with here. The industry's standard response to these moments is to explain harder. More nuance. Better framing. But the graduates weren't booing because they misunderstood the technology. They were booing because they understood the incentives.

They've watched companies replace junior roles with AI tools, justify hiring freezes with AI efficiency, and then invite the architects of that system to lecture them about opportunity.

🧠 Takeaway: This is a cultural reckoning that the industry keeps treating as a communication problem. It's not. There is a generation that is literate, technically sophisticated, and genuinely angry about how the gains from AI are being distributed. That anger is going to find political expression. The booing is just the early signal.

Check out the full story on The Guardian here →

Meta's 8,000 Layoffs

The Coldest Math in Tech Right Now

Meta started laying off 8,000 employees this week — roughly 10% of its workforce — while simultaneously raising its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to as high as $145 billion, almost entirely for AI infrastructure.

Here are the numbers that’ll break your brain:

• Q1 2026 revenue: $56.3 billion, up 33% year over year

• Q1 2026 net income: $26.8 billion

• 2026 AI infrastructure spend: $125 to $145 billion

• Median employee compensation in 2025: $388,200, which is down from $417,400 in 2024 due to a second consecutive year of cuts

• Compensation packages being offered to top AI researchers: up to $100 million

The internal mood, per Wired's interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees: "Everyone is unhappy. The only people who are not unhappy are, literally, executives."

Meta also deployed surveillance software called the Model Capability Initiative on U.S. employees' work laptops in April, capturing keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots from apps like Gmail and Slack. The point was to train AI agents to become capable of replacing human workflows. Performance reviews now factor in whether you are using AI tools.

Read that part again. The company is tracking how humans work. Building AI to replicate those workflows. Cutting the humans. And then asking the remaining employees to rate their own replaceability on their performance review.

Zuckerberg's framing on this is unusually candid. He told employees at a town hall that the cuts were a direct consequence of AI infrastructure costs and declined to rule out further rounds later in the year. Finance chief Susan Li said on the Q1 call that executives "don't really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future."

That sentence is doing a lot of work.

🔮 Prediction: More rounds are coming… reports point to potential layoffs in August and again later this year. The hyperscaler model has become explicit: maximize AI infrastructure, minimize human headcount, keep the delta. Meta is just the most transparent about saying it out loud. Expect every major tech company to follow the same script with slightly different wording over the next 18 months.

Read the CNBC story here →

30-Second AI Play

🎙️ Turn Any Topic Into a Podcast With Amazon Alexa in Under 3 Minutes

Amazon's Alexa+ just launched Alexa Podcasts. It’s a feature that generates full podcast episodes on demand using two AI-generated hosts. Here's how to use it right now:

Step 1: Open the Alexa app or your Echo Show and say: "Alexa, create a podcast about [your topic]."

Step 2: Alexa gives you an overview of what it plans to cover. Adjust the length, tone, or angle before it generates anything.

Step 3: Wait a few minutes. You'll get a notification on your Echo Show or the Alexa app when your episode is ready.

Step 4: Listen immediately or find it saved under Music & More for whenever you need it.

Who is this for?

• You want an audio briefing on a topic while commuting, cooking, or at the gym

• You're prepping for a client meeting and want a quick summary without reading five tabs

• You want to stay current without staring at a screen

Alexa pulls from 200+ real news publications (AP, Reuters, Washington Post, Vox Media and more), so it's not hallucinating. It's Google's NotebookLM for the masses, except you don't need to upload anything. Just ask.

💡 Pro tip: Try asking for a podcast on "what's happening with AI and the job market right now" and let it rip. The results are genuinely impressive

Other Relevant AI News!

🤖 OpenAI's Codex just went mobile: developers can now monitor, approve, and redirect AI coding tasks from their phone in real time, free on iOS and Android. You can manage a full dev environment from your couch, which is either the future or a work-life balance disaster depending on your perspective.

✝️ The Vatican and Anthropic are teaming up. Pope Leo XIV will launch his first encyclical on AI, titled Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25 alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. The document draws a direct parallel between AI and the Industrial Revolution. And given Anthropic's ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration, this Vatican alliance is about to become a political flashpoint.

🍕 Pizza Hut is being sued for $100 million by a franchisee who says the chain's mandatory AI delivery system, Dragontail, caused cascading operational breakdowns. The problems raised delivery times from 30 to 45+ minutes and wiped out years of double-digit sales growth. The first major test of AI liability at franchise scale is now in a Texas courtroom.

🎓 SyracuseCOE hosted a major AI industry summit bringing together enterprise leaders, researchers, and policymakers to chart AI's industrial future.

📉 110,000 tech layoffs have hit 137 companies in 2026 so far, with AI cited as a growing driver. The pace is accelerating, and the April numbers alone included 83,000 cuts across the industry.

Golden Nuggets

• ✝️ The Vatican's AI encyclical could become the most influential ethics framework of the decade. Watch May 25 closely

• 🍕 The Pizza Hut lawsuit is the first major test of AI liability at franchise scale, and every enterprise deploying mandated AI systems should be paying attention

• 💼 Meta's playbook is now official: AI infrastructure replaces headcount, and the savings don't go to workers. They go to more compute

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