| | | Lemurs don’t throw hands, they throw stench. | Instead of scratching or biting their enemies, male ring-tailed lemurs weaponize their body odor. They rub their striped tails against the scent glands on their wrists and armpits. Then smack-talk each other by wafting their stinky tails around. | Call it chemical warfare for the animal kingdom. | What’s in store: | Meta’s AI-native push cost thousands of people their jobs… then failed. London neurosurgeons performed the first AI-assisted brain surgery. Mindstream Picks: Texas just froze spending on Flock’s controversial AI surveillance cameras.
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| | | | | META | | | This January, Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle gathered at his Hawaiian compound to set Project OT into motion. (Cue dramatic music). | Projected Organization Transformation was a radical plan to shift Meta into an “AI-native” business model. With digital agents handling a majority of the routine, the tech giant would drastically scale back its workforce and flatten its org chart. Traditional job titles like engineer and product designer would disappear. Instead of hierarchical management structures, there would be pods, with employees given the new generic role of “builder.”
As you might imagine, this didn’t go over well. | How the plan backfired: | Project OT: Meta explored two rounds of layoffs that would eventually shrink the teams by 60%. The first May wave — which cut 10% of staff —caused major internal pushback. The second round never happened. Mismatched results: AI helped drive internal work up by 220%...but only 36% of that was usable improvements. Read: coding surged, but product progress did not. The fallout: Major technical and security incidents jumped 40%, while time spent fixing the damage rose 70%. The journey to becoming AI-native became pretty dang costly.
| The human override | After Reuters caught wind that Meta was planning mass layoffs back in March, employees became outwardly nervous that the company was training systems meant to replace them. I | nternal sentiment fell from 74% to 55% favorable (as reported by a team morale survey) and employee petitions began circulating amongst staff. | By May, just hours before Meta cut 10% of its workforce, Zuckerberg canceled a second round of layoffs under Project OT. The first round continued as planned. | Meaning 8,000 people lost their jobs, but the aforementioned company-wide restructuring didn’t take place. As of last month, Meta said its AI agents had not advanced as quickly as expected. | So, just to get this straight: Thousands of people lost their jobs, for technology that wasn’t ready to take the wheel. All because Zuck got ahead of himself. | He put the cart before the chatbot. - TL | Are “AI-native” workplaces the next evolution of work? | | Vote for live results and see results + opinions from yesterday at the bottom of the email. |
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| | | | What has many teeth but cannot bite? | Find the answer at the bottom of the email! |
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| | | | Stormz is an AI-powered brainstorming platform for facilitators that generates idea suggestions, clusters similar thinking, maps pros and cons, and turns rough concepts into fully developed proposals during live workshop sessions. | Vibeo.ai lets you collect, auto-edit, and publish customer video testimonials with one click, turning real customer feedback into conversion-ready social proof without any video production effort. | BrandCrowd's AI Logo Generator creates a collection of custom logo designs from your business name and keywords in seconds, with full control over colors, fonts, and layouts before downloading in every file format you need. | Life Note lets you journal alongside AI versions of history's greatest minds, from Steve Jobs to Carl Jung, getting personalized guidance and perspective from 14+ professions as you work through your thoughts and challenges. | Fastwrite.io is a Microsoft Word plugin that reads your uploaded sources and suggests relevant phrases, content, and citations as you write, keeping all your references organized in one place without leaving the document. |
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| | | | | MEDICINE | | | The OR has a new assistant scrubbing in! | Surgeons in London, at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, performed the first successful, AI-assisted brain tumor removal. | The procedure took place in May and saved the sight of 48-year old Rhys Hibbert, who has completed a full recovery. | The key word here is assisted. The doctors were still in full control of the procedure. They used AI for live camera footage, real-time analysis, and to help identify structures (like nerves and blood vessels) while operating on the 11mm tumor. | This level of detail is major. Since one millimeter can be the difference between blindness, stroke, or even death. | The AI assist: | Identifies critical anatomy near the surgical site. Color-codes important structures for surgeons to safely recognize. Analyzes live footage using patterns learned from hundreds of surgical videos.
| From research to reality | Up until this operation, the system had primarily been used as a research tool. Now, it’s helped a patient walk out of front doors – vision intact – and return to work. This is a huge technological leap from the world’s first neurosurgical hospital. | And if this is AI’s first day in the operating room, imagine what comes next. | Until then, here’s a question for you: What’s the difference between AI and a brain surgeon? | The world’s most precise “don’t touch that!” - TL |
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| | | | Space: NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, beginning its mission to investigate dark energy, discover exoplanets and explore the distant universe.
Business: Gatwick Airport passengers temporarily lost water supplies after a nearby water main burst, although flights continued operating as normal.
Music: Finneas O’Connell has married his longtime partner Claudia Sulewski in California, with his sister Billie Eilish officiating the ceremony. | Don’t Miss: Texas has frozen state spending on Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras amid growing privacy concerns and reports of misuse by law enforcement. The move follows revelations that the state spent more than $30 million on the technology, as cities across the US increasingly reconsider their use of Flock cameras. |
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| | | | Image of the Day |  | Artwork submitted by Mindstream reader mwalsh: “A realistic watercolour painting of a paper bag filled with glazed donuts” |
| Daily Image Prompt | Commercial shot for office life playset |
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| | | | “When do you trust AI more than yourself?” | Spelling and grammar - 39% ✅ | First drafts - 19% | Never! - 29% | Other - tell us! - 13% | Your Views: | “I use AI as a research assistant for academic writing. It has not yet proved itself to know as much as I do on the subject and often lifts and is guided by mainstream ideas and has to be pushed to go above and beyond received wisdom” - investm | “When it gives me references I can check. AI for spell check is overkill, and no one under 50 seems to care about grammar” - reller1 | “often wrong in non-transparent ways” - 26sim | Submit your opinions in our polls to be featured! |
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| Riddle Me This Answer: A comb! | #1188
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