we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
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today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack
We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
Video generation models are improving fast—real-time autoregressive models now deliver high quality at low latency, and they’re quickly being adopted for world models and robotics applications. So what’s the problem? They’re still too slow on consumer hardware.
🚀 What if we told you that we can get true real-time 16 FPS video generation on a single RTX 5090? (1.5-12x over FA 2/3/4 on 5090, H100, B200)
Today we release MonarchRT 🦋, an efficient video attention that parameterizes attention maps as (tiled) Monarch matrices and delivers real E2E gains.
📄 Paper: https://t.co/d1AAMIseow
🌐 Website: https://t.co/41mqriKekx
�� GitHub: https://t.co/hp5iJttviA
🧵1/n
Sonnet 4.6 is now live in Claude Code. It's cheaper than Opus 4.6 and nears Opus-level intelligence, and devs in early testing often preferred it to Opus 4.5. Now the default for Pro and Team plans.
If you read my article and are still skeptical about AI progress, I beg of you: try the newest models.
Give them the same context and tools you would give a person doing your task.
They are way better than you might expect, and this is the worst they’ll ever be.
India AI Impact Expo 2026 was a powerful convergence of ideas, innovation and intent.
It showcased the extraordinary potential of Indian talent in shaping the future of Artificial Intelligence for global good.
Above all, it reaffirmed our commitment to harnessing AI responsibly, inclusively and at scale for human progress. Here are the highlights…
Google has revealed that "commercially motivated" actors attempted to clone @GeminiApp by bombarding it with over 100,000 prompts. This "model extraction" attack aimed to steal the AI’s proprietary logic and reasoning capabilities, particularly in non-English languages, to train a cheaper, unauthorized copycat model.
The attackers systematically mapped Gemini’s response patterns to create a synthetic dataset for fine-tuning smaller, open-source models. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group detected the coordinated activity and blocked it, labeling the incident a direct attempt at intellectual property theft.
Beyond commercial cloning, Google’s report noted a rise in state-backed threats. Groups from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are increasingly using AI to refine phishing campaigns, perform reconnaissance, and assist in writing code for malware.
Source: Ars Technica
Inaugurated the India AI Impact Expo 2026 at Bharat Mandapam.
Being here among innovators, researchers and tech enthusiasts gives a glimpse of the extraordinary potential of AI, Indian talent and innovation. Together, we will shape solutions not just for India but for the world!
codex momentum is strong, and many people are feeling just how big of a leap 5.3 is.
if your organization hasn't tried codex yet, it's worth revisiting.
codex is so good at the toil — fixing merge conflicts, getting CI to green, rewriting between languages — it raises the ambition of what i even consider building