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Viktor is an AI coworker that lives in Slack, right where your team already works.
Message Viktor like a teammate: "pull last quarter's revenue by channel," or "build a dashboard for our board meeting."
Viktor connects to your tools, does the work, and delivers the actual report, spreadsheet, or dashboard. Not a summary. The real thing.
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Most teams start with one task. Within a week, Viktor is handling half of their ops.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
Oracle Cutting 30,000 Jobs to Pay for AI Data Centers. Who's Next?
TLDR: Oracle quietly started firing up to 30,000 employees to pay for AI data centers, even while the company posted record profits.
The Story:
On March 31st, thousands of Oracle employees woke up to a 6 a.m. email from "Oracle Leadership." No call from HR. No meeting with a manager. Just a note saying their job was gone, effective immediately. Investment bank TD Cowen estimates the cuts will hit between 20,000 and 30,000 workers, roughly 18% of Oracle's global workforce of about 162,000 people across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico. Oracle has filed a $2.1 billion restructuring plan with the SEC. The kicker? Oracle's net income jumped 95% last quarter to $6.13 billion. This isn't a company in trouble. It's a company making a big financial bet on AI infrastructure, and workers are being pushed out to fund it.
Oracle isn't alone. Meta has been looking at cuts of up to 20% of its workforce. Amazon has been shifting resources away from non-AI teams. Google, Microsoft, and others have all quietly reduced headcount in areas that don't touch AI. The pattern is clear: big tech is using AI as cover to trim jobs that executives believe AI will eventually replace anyway. Some researchers call it "AI whitewashing," where companies rebrand cost-cutting as a necessary part of an AI transition, even when profits are healthy. Oracle was raising $45 to $50 billion in new debt to fund AI data centers while simultaneously telling workers their roles no longer existed.
Its Significance:
It puts a human face on a trend that's been building for a while. It's not just about Oracle. When some of the most profitable companies in the world start eliminating tens of thousands of jobs in order to spend more on AI, it's worth asking who is actually benefiting from the AI boom. Workers who spent years building Oracle's products woke up to a cold email with no warning. At the same time, the company's stock rose in premarket trading when the layoffs became public, because investors see it as freeing up cash for more AI investment. That is the math many big companies are doing right now: fewer workers, more servers. If this trend keeps growing, it will touch a lot more people than just Oracle employees.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge looked at more than 6,000 AI data centers and found they are raising temperatures in surrounding areas by an average of 2 degrees Celsius, with some spots seeing spikes of up to 9 degrees Celsius. The warming extends up to 6.2 miles from each facility and may already be affecting more than 340 million people worldwide.
Your takeaway: Every time you use an AI tool, it generates heat. The more AI grows, the more that heat adds up. With major tech companies planning hundreds of billions in new data center spending in 2026 alone, researchers are warning we may be making heat waves worse in communities that never signed up to host an AI server.
The story: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled 30 new AI upgrades for Slack at an event in San Francisco. The biggest change is a souped-up version of Slackbot that can now transcribe meetings, monitor your desktop activity, connect to outside tools, and build reusable automated workflows. Salesforce says some employees using the new features are saving up to 90 minutes a day.
Your takeaway: If you use Slack at work, your AI assistant is about to get a lot more involved in your day. It can now watch what you're doing on your computer and offer suggestions without you asking. Some people will love that. Others will want to know exactly how much it sees, and Salesforce says users can adjust those permissions.
The story: Google launched Veo 3.1 Lite, a new AI video generation model available through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. It costs less than half of their previous Veo 3.1 Fast model while running at the same speed. Developers can create 4 to 8-second clips in 720p or 1080p for as little as five cents per second.
Your takeaway: AI-generated video is getting cheaper fast. This is good news for small businesses and creators who want to make video content without a production budget. It also means we're about to see a lot more AI-made video showing up in ads, apps, and social media feeds in the coming months.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🌐 BrowserOS Free and Open Source: An entirely open source and privacy focused web browser built on Chromium that runs powerful artificial intelligence agents locally to automate your web research and repetitive online tasks without sending your data to the cloud. (Alternative to Google Chrome)
👤 Personify Freemium: A sophisticated coaching platform that creates an artificial intelligence clone of your expertise and personality to interact with clients and answer questions using your exact methodology twenty four hours a day.
🏝️ Tropic Paid: A powerful enterprise platform that helps businesses design and scale intelligent agents for customer support and sales by automatically optimizing prompts and integrating with your uploaded knowledge.
💃 Stamp Paid: A reimagined email client that acts as an artificial intelligence secretary to prioritize your messages and draft replies in your voice while managing your complex calendar tasks automatically.
TRENDING
Alexa+ Can Now Order Your Food for You — Amazon's Alexa+ can now place food orders from Uber Eats and Grubhub through a natural back-and-forth conversation, including browsing menus, swapping items, and tracking delivery. The feature works on Echo Show 8 and larger screens. Worth noting: Amazon paid over $30 million in federal fines in 2023 for keeping children's voice recordings and allowing third-party employees to access user data without consent, a reminder that voice assistants doing more also means they're collecting more.
Anthropic Signs AI Partnership with Australia — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to sign a formal agreement focused on AI safety, research, and economic data sharing. As part of the deal, Anthropic is investing AUD $3 million in credits for four Australian research institutions working on disease diagnosis and genomics. Anthropic also plans to open a Sydney office in 2026.
Google Is Rolling Out an AI Inbox for Gmail — Powered by Gemini 3, Google's new AI Inbox feature for Gmail is now in beta for Google AI Ultra subscribers. Instead of showing emails in time order, it organizes them into a smart summary of what matters most, highlighting tasks like appointments and bills. Ultra costs $249.99 a month in the US.
ChatGPT Is Now on Your Car Dashboard — ChatGPT has become the first major AI app to launch on Apple CarPlay, available now on iOS 26.4 with the latest ChatGPT app update. The experience is voice-only by Apple's rules, so there's no text on screen. You tap the app, start talking, and get spoken answers through your car's speakers.
OpenAI Codex Is Now Open Source on GitHub — OpenAI's Codex CLI, a lightweight AI coding agent that runs in your terminal, is now fully open source and available on GitHub. Developers can install it with a single command and use it to write code, fix bugs, run tests, and more, all from the command line. OpenAI has also launched a $1 million fund to support open source maintainers who use it.
Nothing Is Building Smart Glasses and AI Earbuds — London-based phone maker Nothing is reportedly planning to release AI-powered smart glasses in the first half of 2027, complete with cameras, microphones, and speakers. A pair of AI earbuds is expected to arrive even sooner, later this year. CEO Carl Pei was previously resistant to the smart glasses idea but has since shifted toward a multi-device strategy.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🗺️ A visual decade planner that maps your goals across 10 years and five life categories so you can see your whole future on one blueprint
Build a decade planner app. Features: 10-year timeline grid where columns are years and rows are life categories (Career, Health, Relationships, Finance, Personal), goals pinned as color-coded pills to specific year/category cells, click any empty cell to drop a goal directly into that slot, goal status system (Dream / In Progress / Achieved) with colored dot indicators, milestone flag that adds a star badge to the goal, fullscreen celebration animation when a goal is marked Achieved, category filter buttons to isolate one life track, toggle between timeline grid view and chronological list view, stats strip showing total/dream/in-progress/achieved/milestone counts, add/edit/delete goals via modal, current year highlighted with a red indicator line, generic sample data seeded on first load. Blueprint theme: deep navy background, fine architectural grid lines, Bebas Neue + Barlow Condensed + Share Tech Mono fonts, glowing blue accent. Single self-contained HTML file, data persists in localStorage.What this does:
A 10-year grid where each column is a year and each row is a life category (Career, Health, Relationships, Finance, Personal). Goals appear as color-coded pills in the grid cell for their target year. Click any empty cell to drop a goal directly into that year and category. Milestone goals get a star badge. Status changes from Dream to In Progress to Achieved, and marking a goal as Achieved triggers a fullscreen celebration flash. Toggle between the timeline grid and a clean list view. Category filter buttons let you isolate one track. Seeded with 12 generic goals spread across the decade.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Order your dinner, transcribe your meetings, and monitor your desktop activity, all at the same time.
❌ Still Can't: Provide enough economic activity to keep tens of thousands of laid-off workers in their jobs
✅ AI Can Now: Generate affordable video clips for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per clip.
❌ Still Can't: Cool down the neighborhoods being heated up by the data centers running all of this.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Max Fisher spent years as a New York Times correspondent watching social media radicalize people across the world, from Myanmar to Germany to the United States, and this is his attempt to explain why. The argument is that recommendation algorithms aren't neutral pipes delivering content but active systems optimizing for engagement, and that outrage and extremism are simply more engaging than calm. It's reported rather than theoretical, built on interviews with researchers, former platform employees, and people whose lives were derailed by algorithmic rabbit holes. Very relevant now that these algorithms come with chatbots in the mix.
Viktor Ships While You Sleep
This is Viktor, an AI coworker with its own computer. It lives in Slack, connects to 3,000+ tools, and does all the work: writes the code, handles the API calls, and deploys a live app. One message. Real output.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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