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In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company's corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative AI tools and agents. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Jassy said. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce." CNBC reports: Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out "how to get more done with scrappier teams." The directive comes as Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 employees since 2022 and made several cuts this year. Amazon cut about 200 employees in its North America stores unit in January and a further 100 in its devices and services unit in May. Amazon had 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees in its global workforce as of the end of March, according to financial filings. The company also employs temporary workers in its warehouse operations, along with some contractors. Amazon is using generative AI broadly across its internal operations, including in its fulfillment network where the technology is being deployed to assist with inventory placement, demand forecasting and the efficiency of warehouse robots, Jassy said. [...] In his most recent letter to shareholders, Jassy called generative AI a "once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know." He added that the technology is "saving companies lots of money," and stands to shift the norms in coding, search, financial services, shopping and other areas. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen," Jassy said.

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John Harvey, 51, who was an assistant head teacher at Penryn College, is said to have formed a relationship with the girl while she was still a student.

ROB MCGIBBON: A few weeks ago, in this paper's pages I published a deeply personal account about my 25-year estrangement from my father, Robin.

Victoria and David, 50, are in the midst of an escalating rift with eldest son Brooklyn and his actress wife Nicola , after the couple were absent from the former footballer's 50th birthday celebrations.

Photos from today show steel cables and a large notice on the entrance to the Vivemar Hotel on the Costa del Sol saying 'precintado' or 'sealed off' in English.

Atlanta nurse Adriana Smith, 30, was declared brain dead in February, when she was eight weeks pregnant.

EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Finally, aged 70, Hanif Kureishi , whose first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, outraged his own sister, seems ready to embrace convention.

Emergency services rushed to a residential road in Weymouth, Dorset earlier this afternoon after a car hit a pedestrian and a 12-year-old boy was seriously injured.

Little agents everywhere

Salesforce is raising prices for a bunch of its products and claims that increasing integration with AI justifies the increased bills, even after one of its own researchers recently said that AI agents are often underdelivered on basic CRM tasks.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Spanish government has said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain and Portugal earlier this year. Shortly after midday on April 28, both countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks. While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural areas. In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated. Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that it was not necessary." Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However, the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister, who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault. Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to blame.

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Facebook announced it will soon share all videos as reels by default, regardless of their length or orientation. "Up until now, users have been able to share both video posts and reels," notes TechCrunch. From the report: The company is also renaming the "Video" tab on its platform to the "Reels" tab. The update won't change what videos are recommended to you, Facebook says. [...] The idea behind the changes is to streamline the video-sharing format on the social network. It won't be the first time that a Meta-owned platform has done so, as Instagram began automatically converting new video posts under 15 minutes into reels back in 2022. "Previously, you'd upload a video to Feed or post a reel using different creative flows and tools for each format," Facebook explained in a blog post. "Now, we're bringing these experiences together with a simplified publishing flow that gives you access to even more creative tools. We'll also give you control over your audience setting of who sees your reels." [...] The company says it will gradually roll out the changes globally over the coming months.

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They're taking the data from IRSengard, claim Dems; officials tell us that's not true

A coalition of House and Senate Democrats has sent an aggressive letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp questioning whether the controversial data intelligence biz is breaking federal law by allegedly helping the IRS build a searchable "mega database" of taxpayer information, and, likening his firm to US companies accused of aiding human rights violations in apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the People's Republic of China. …

Pheobe Bishop's grandmother breaks down in tears over shocking feud involving her daughters, as

Plus adds a ton more security capabilities for cloud customers at re:Inforce

Amazon Web Services hit a major multi-factor authentication milestone, achieving 100 percent MFA enforcement for root users across all types of AWS accounts.…

The mogul could spend the rest of his life in prison of convicted of using his wealth and fame to coerce women and employees into fulfilling his sexual and violent whims.

The Duchess of Sussex, 43, shared a new photo to her As Ever Instagram account on Tuesday night, counting down the days to her new launch of products.

Women will no longer face prosecution for aborting their own baby for any reason and at any stage up to birth under the proposed legislation, which was backed by 379 votes to 137.

Donald Trump issued a chilling threat to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying the U.S. knows his precise location and he's an 'easy target.'

The agreement, for British Steel to produce 337,000 tonnes of rails over five years, safeguards 2,700 jobs at the Scunthorpe steelworks.

Christine Lagarde has never been short of ambition as her translation from French finance minister to President of the ECB demonstrates.