Welcome to Tech News Briefing.

It's Tuesday, February 24th.

I'm Katie Dayton for the Wall Street Journal.

The age of growing headcount is over, at least in the world of AI startups.

Small companies are doing all they can to remain that way,

whilst growing revenue as part of a bid to showcase efficiency to investors.

We take a look at how the trend is reshaping the tech industry.

Then, we're going on a tour of America's newest tech factories.

After years of political promises and encouragement from the government, more chip makers and other manufacturing companies

are breaking ground on US plants and gearing up to higher American workers.

But can these facilities really compete with their counterparts in Asia?

Stay with us to find out.

But first, once upon a time, a growing headcount at a new company was seen as a positive sign.

Now, in an age of AI outsourcing, not so much.

Some Silicon Valley startups are running leaner than ever, using the latest AI tools to keep

staff numbers as low as possible. My colleague Bell Lin is here to talk about this new flex.

So Bell, generally speaking, where are these companies finding that AI works best within the

workforce? Are there particular jobs or even functions that you've heard these AI companies

cutting out and replacing with technology? In most cases, it's the software engineering function.

So these software developers that use tools like Anthropics Cloud Code or OpenAI's Codex,

which are really sort of supercharging the way in which they write code,

and many times replacing the active writing code at all.

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