PLUS: AI's disruption is already here and Anthropic's promise to pay for power
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Elon Musk's AI venture is in turmoil, losing half of its founding team in just over a year. The high-profile departures come amid a blockbuster merger with SpaceX and an abrupt pivot toward a new mission: building AI data centers on the moon.
The loss of foundational talent raises serious questions about xAI's ability to execute on its increasingly cosmic ambitions. With immense pressure and a radical new direction, can vision and capital alone overcome the immense technical and cultural challenges ahead?
In today’s Next in AI:
xAI loses half its founding team
Why the AI job disruption is happening now
A new benchmark tests AI's math skills
Anthropic's promise to pay for AI's power needs
Exodus at xAI
Next in AI: Elon Musk's AI venture, xAI, is facing major turbulence after losing half its founding team in just over a year. The high-profile departures coincide with an abrupt strategic pivot and a blockbuster merger with SpaceX.
Explained:
Six of the twelve original co-founders have now departed, including recent high-profile exits from reasoning lead Tony Wu and influential researcher Jimmy Ba.
Internal teams are reportedly facing immense pressure from Musk's aggressive demands, falling short of technical expectations on projects like the coding agent MacroHard.
The turmoil coincides with a merger into SpaceX, creating a combined company targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation and a new mission to build AI data centers on the moon.
Why It Matters: The loss of foundational talent raises serious questions about xAI's ability to execute on its increasingly cosmic ambitions. This rapid pivot tests whether vision and capital alone can overcome the immense technical and cultural challenges of competing in the AI race.
The Blindsided Economy
Next in AI: OthersideAI CEO Matt Shumer warns in a viral essay that the AI disruption isn’t five years away—it's already here, fundamentally altering white-collar work and catching most people by surprise. He argues the AI's impact on jobs will be bigger than the pandemic.
Explained:
The recent leap in AI capabilities comes from models that can now autonomously build and test entire applications. Instead of just assisting with tasks, these systems can take a high-level goal in plain English and deliver a finished, polished product.
Public skepticism is often based on free AI tools that are over a year behind the technology's cutting edge. The powerful capabilities of current paid models are driving the disruption and lead some experts to predict AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs within five years.
This isn't just one CEO's opinion; it echoes Dario Amodei's prediction from Anthropic. The concern is that AI is becoming a general substitute for cognitive labor, improving across all knowledge-based fields simultaneously.
Why It Matters: The window for professionals to gain a significant career advantage by mastering AI is closing quickly. At the same time, this technology dramatically lowers the barrier to building new products, making it easier than ever to turn an idea into a reality.
AI's Math Exam
Next in AI: Top mathematicians are cutting through the hype with a new initiative called "First Proof." This live challenge tests if AI can solve novel, research-level math problems, providing a transparent benchmark for its reasoning abilities.
Explained:
This challenge is designed to solve the data contamination problem, ensuring AI models use genuine reasoning instead of just recalling answers from their training data.
The test was created out of academic frustration after some previous claims of AI breakthroughs turned out to be misrepresented literature search results rather than original proofs.
Early results highlight the difficulty of true mathematical reasoning for AI, with top models like GPT 5.2 Pro and Gemini 3.0 Deepthink solving only 2 of the 10 problems in preliminary tests.
Why It Matters: This benchmark moves the evaluation of AI's logical abilities away from corporate marketing and towards a clear, public standard. Success here would signal AI's readiness to become a powerful tool that helps researchers accelerate discovery by automating tedious work.
Anthropic's Power Play
Next in AI: Anthropic is tackling the growing energy controversy head-on, committing to pay for the electricity price hikes and grid upgrades caused by its power-hungry AI data centers.
Explained:
The move addresses the massive energy needs of AI, as the US AI sector is projected to require at least 50 gigawatts of power in the coming years.
To prevent consumers from footing the bill, Anthropic will cover 100% of grid upgrade costs and procure new power—a direct response to utilities increasingly blaming data centers for rate hikes.
The commitment also includes creating thousands of jobs through its projects, investing in local communities, and deploying water-efficient cooling technologies.
Why It Matters:
This move sets a new precedent for corporate responsibility as the AI industry's energy demands skyrocket. By taking financial ownership of its environmental and economic footprint, Anthropic is addressing a major source of public and political friction before it escalates.
AI Pulse
Apple hit snags with its major AI-powered Siri upgrade, reportedly delaying several key features planned for March until later in the year after running into issues during internal testing.
Anthropic warned in a new report that its latest Claude models showed an "elevated susceptibility to harmful misuse," including knowingly supporting efforts toward chemical weapon development.
Heineken plans to cut up to 6,000 jobs over the next two years, citing productivity savings from digitization and AI as a key factor in its restructuring efforts amid weak sales.
A developer shut down his public git server of over a decade after AI scrapers flooded the service with requests, hammering it to death and filling up disk space with error logs.