Welcome to the TechMeBrian home for Thursday, June 19th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, are we about to see a summer of layoffs in Silicon Valley?

Mid Journey's new video model, meta continues its aqua-hire spree with some folks we know.

Microsoft has its own nuclear option with OpenAI, while OpenAI is starting to get worried about its models being nuclear dangerous and what even is AGI.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

If the AI job apocalypse is coming, might we see it in Silicon Valley first? Quoting Bloomberg,

Microsoft is planning to axe thousands of jobs, particularly in sales, as part of the company's

latest move to trim its workforce amid heavy spending on artificial intelligence. The cuts are

expected to be announced early next month, following the end of Microsoft's fiscal year,

according to people familiar with the matter. The reductions won't exclusively affect sales teams and the timing

could still change, said the people who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.

The terminations would follow a previous round of layoffs in May that hit 6,000 people and

fell hardest on product and engineering positions, largely sparing customer-facing

roles like sales and marketing. In April, the company told employees it planned to use

third-party firms to handle more sales of software to small and mid-sized customers. Microsoft

has said it regularly re-evaluates the organizational structure to make sure it's investing for growth.

As the company spends tens of billions

of dollars on servers and data centers, executives have pledged to Wall Street and warned

employees that it would keep a lid on spending in other areas, end quote. So that doesn't sound like

it's AI taking those jobs specifically, although might it be the arrival of agents doing the work of sales folks? Still,

my speculative point stands. If AI is about ringing out efficiency, which again, read as money,

I bet Silicon Valley behemus will be the first to find this out.

Mid Journey has launched V1, its first AI video generation model, letting subscribers animate images via its website.

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