They're cutting down the Amazon!

Top News

• Amazon to slash staff: After slashing 27,000 jobs toward the end of 2022, Reuters reports that Amazon is back with the axe to remove up to 30,000 more workers from its corporate labor pool. The company employs well north of one million total staffers, but has just 350,000 members in its corporate — non-warehouse, non-driver — staff. The cuts therefore constitute nearly 10% of the folks working in Amazon’s offices. The ecommerce and cloud giant has also made smaller cuts since its last major reduction in force, underscoring how little interest major tech companies have in keeping a static team size. Smaller or bust, appears to be the mantra.

• Minimax throws down the (coding) gauntlet: TWiST500 company xAI’s latest coding model (Grok-Code-Fast-1) shook up the AI game when it was release. Per OpenRouter data, xAI managed to secure a sizable chunk of he AI coding market after its release. Now, Minimax, a Chinese AI company, has released MiniMax M2 which it claims only costs 8% as much as Claude’s current Sonnet model, and is twice as quick. M2 is aimed at coding tasks, which is why the inexpensive Grok model may be a better match, but what matters is that coding tools are getting faster and cheaper. And that’s accelerative.

• Mercor confirms funding round: As discussed on the podcast today, Mercor has confirmed its $350 million raise at a $10 billion valuation, led as expected by Felicis with participation from Benchmark and General Catalyst. Robinhood’s venture arm also participated. Mercor connects experts to AI companies that need their input to train and tune models. Its work generates more than $1.5 million worth of gross revenue per day at present, making it a critical component of the larger AI landscape.

TWiST 500

AI is popular. ChatGPT’s more than 800 million weekly active users are a testament to that fact. Mix in other services, and you’re looking at comfortably north of a billion humans nattering with digital intelligences any given week.

With the human propensity for crisis, that means major AI labs are facing a growing number of users who are experiencing a mental health emergency. At this point, several people who have taken their own lives were heavy users of OpenAI, and the company has indeed taken steps to improve how its models handle interactions with struggling or potentially unstable individuals.

How common are situations in which ChatGPT users are suffering from mania or suicidal ideation? In a new data release, OpenAI estimated that:

• “[A]round 0.07% of users active in a given week and 0.01% of messages indicate possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania,” and:

• Its “initial analysis estimates that around 0.15% of users active in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent and 0.05% of messages contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent.”

Those are higher than I anticipated, though OpenAI does warn readers of its latest post that mental health crisis are not always easy to spot, and how it defines them greatly impacts its measurements. (Good on the company for being forward with its work and results, and cautious in its confidence in itself as it works on the problem.)

Thankfully, work done to its GPT-5 model is apparently having an impact. The company has measured the result of its work to better tune how ChatGPT responds to users who are struggling, reporting that:

• “We estimate that the model now returns responses that do not fully comply with desired behavior under our taxonomies 65% to 80% less often across a range of mental health-related domains,” and:

• “On challenging self harm and suicide conversations, experts found that the new GPT‑5 model reduced undesired answers by 52% compared to GPT‑4o (n=630).”

So in summation, GPT-5 won’t play ball with users who want it to take part in problematic conversations. In two given conversational examples, GPT-5 reminds a user that it’s not a real person, and that talking to humans is a very important activity. In another, GPT-5 tells a user that “no aircraft or outside force can steal or insert your thoughts,” notes that their UFO fears are something “that people can experience when they’re anxious or overwhelmed,” and explains that just having those feelings “doesn’t mean it’s actually happening.”

Good. OpenAI has moved pretty quickly on the issue of not supporting user delusions when they are harmful, and steering folks towards help when they need it. May all AI labs take similar steps so that even the few people who might fall into a hole do not. We have to take care of one another. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2198: On TWiST, Jason and Alex consider the challenge of 9-9-6, working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. Is this something founders should genuinely be expected to do in order to win? Is work-life balance a happy fiction? They debate it out. PLUS the latest on the big NBA gambling scandal, Presh Kumar walks us through how to use AI to perfect your launch video, AND Anthropic is buying chips from their AI rival, Google!

E2197: Legendary investor Elad Gil joins us for the full episode this week! Jason, Elad, and Alex dig through the news that Amazon (internally) plans to hire fewer humans and build more robots, and try to guess just how many people will lose their jobs to machines and what we’ll do about it (if anything). PLUS Anthropic’s Dario Amodei responded to JCal’s bestie David Sacks, AI wearable makers Sesame emerged from stealth, and much more.

E2196: We’ve got a special Tuesday ep this week, in which Alex sits down with Magic School founder (and former school principal!) Adeel Khan. Though much of the media focus has been on students using AI to cheat on their homework, Khan argues that AI tools can make teachers much more effective, while keeping students more engaged and even inspired. He walks us through the promise and challenges of designing a virtual assistant teacher. PLUS a fascinating Gamma pitch from On the Fly Energy and Eric Glyman from Ramp joins us for a round of Founder Q&A!

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Founder U is Coming to the MENA Region!

Our 12-week pre-accelerator—designed to help early-stage founders build and grow—kicks off this fall in Saudi Arabia. The first cohort launches in Riyadh on November 3rd, followed by in-person and virtual sessions throughout the program. Founders in MENA: this is your chance to turn your idea into a business and get world-class insights on building a successful startup. Apply today: https://mena.founder.university/

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