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The IRS will furlough nearly half of its workforce on Wednesday as part of the ongoing government shutdown, according to an updated contingency plan posted to its website. Most IRS operations are closed, the agency said in a separate letter to its workers.The news comes after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to fund federal operations, and the government shutdown has entered its second week, with no discernible endgame in sight.The agency’s initial Lapsed Appropriations Contingency Plan, which provided for the first five business days of operations, stated that the department would remain open using Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act funds.Now, only 39,870 employees, or 53.6%, will remain working as the shutdown continues. It is unclear which workers will remain on the job.Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that taxpayers should expect increased wait times, backlogs and delays implementing tax law changes as the shutdown continues.“Taxpayers around the country will now have a much harder time getting the assistance they need, just as they get ready to file their extension returns due next week,” she said. “Every day these employees are locked out of work is another day of frustration for taxpayers and a growing backlog of work that sits and waits for the shutdown to end.”She urged the Trump administration and Congress to “reach an agreement that reopens government and restores the services that Americans need and deserve.”The notice to workers states that furloughed workers and those who remain on the job will receive back pay once the shutdown ends. This is notable since the Republican administration on Tuesday warned of no guaranteed back pay for federal workers affected by a government shutdown.Last week, Trump said roughly 750,000 federal workers nationwide were expected to be furloughed across agencies, with some potentially fired by his administration.Representatives from the IRS, the Treasury and the White House did not comment on the furlough plans.Earlier this year the IRS embarked on mass layoffs, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, affecting tens of thousands of workers. At the end of 2024, the agency employed roughly 100,000 workers and currently that hovers around 75,000. Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
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Creativity has always been governed by timenot just how long it takes to bring an idea to life, but how long a creator can stay in flow. Every designer knows the frustration of an idea hanging in digital limbo. But those pauses, once accepted as inevitable, are now starting to vanish. Figma, the cloud-based interface design tool, and Google Cloud, the computing and storage platform, have announced the integration of Googles Gemini 2.5 Flash directly into Figmas design platform. The collaboration aims to let designers generate visuals and make edits almost instantly, eliminating the lag between an idea and its execution. For users, that means faster collaboration, smoother iteration, and a more natural creative flow.The economic significance of latency in AI is far greater than just speedits about changing the commercial viability and product experience for every application built on a generative model, says Matt Renner, president of global revenue at Google Cloud. Lower latency, in turn, decreases computational and financial expenses, allowing the AI tools to become more scalable and efficient for high-volume tasks, he added. Gemini 2.5 Flash (also known as Nano Banana”) rose to prominence for its ability to merge multiple images, keep characters consistent across edits, and generate a wide range of styles, from lifelike portraits to classic art, in mere seconds. Google claims that in early integrations of Gemini 2.5 Flash, Figma users saw a 50% reduction in latency for the platforms Make Image feature, unlocking faster image generation capabilities for its users.In Figma, every second AI can return to the user, whether its time saved renaming layers, editing images or even generating multiple images at the same time, frees them up to focus on the kind of higher-level problem solving and deep iteration thats at the root of all great design, says Abhishek Mathur, vice president of platform engineering at Figma. The partnership signals a deeper strategic shift for Google Cloud. Rather than competing for user attention, the company aims to embed its AI models, including Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.0, and Imagen 4, directly into third-party creative ecosystems like Figma to make Gemini an unseen accelerant that enhances existing tools instead of forcing users to switch platforms.Our focus is on helping users go from idea to production, and we see AI as core to how this workflow will evolve moving forward, Mathur adds. Googles ecosystem strategy to scale Gemini Over the past year, Google has woven Gemini into a broad range of partner products, from workspace tools to data analytics suites, positioning the speed and security of its AI models and ease of integration as its defining edge. Salesforce has integrated Gemini into its Agentforce platform to power AI agents across Google Cloud and Salesforce environments. Oracle now supports Gemini models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build multimodal AI agents that can process text, images, motion, and audio data. Googles underlying bet is simple: If AI feels secure and frictionless, widespread adoption will feel inevitable.Released in June, Gemini 2.5 Flash is known for generating high-quality visuals quickly and affordably (one-third the price of Gemini Pro). The model can deliver its first reply in under half a second, making it ideal for fast-moving creative apps, chatbots, or customer support systems. Moreover, the latest Gemini 2.5 Flash updates have improved its accuracy in following instructions, made responses more concise, and boosted speed by up to 40%, making it one of the fastest, most efficient AI models available.Experts caution, however, that faster performance alone may not be enough for Figma to win over creative professionals.Drops in latency will certainly encourage tool usage and support the kind of cross-discipline collaboration Figma has been building toward for years, says AJ Joplin, senior analyst at Forrester, who focuses on experience design, design organizations, and design leadership. But taste still matters. The efficiencies gained from generative tools can quickly disappear if teams dont pair that time saved with the ability to critically assess what the AI produces. The AI design race is heating up The Google-Figma partnership comes amid an escalating AI-design race. Adobe has integrated AI models from Google Cloud, OpenAI, and others like fal.ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika, and Runway to power its Firefly platform and Sensei AI features, including generative fill, AI video editing, 3D design, and smart stock tools. And Canva has become an AI-first platform.Announced at OpenAIs Developer Day on Oct. 6, Canva is now a pilot partner for ChatGPT app integration, allowing users to create and edit designs directly within ChatGPT. The move aims to bring visual design tools to the chatbots 800 million weekly users.If Gemini 2.5 Flash delivers on its promise, the future of design wont just be more intelligent; it will feel instantaneous. And in the new economy of creativity, that sense of speed may prove to be the ultimate edge.
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We’ve been expecting the tsunami of AI-generated videos ever since we first got a taste of AI’s image-making abilities several years ago. The results until recently were underwhelming. But now our social feeds are awash in increasingly realistic AI-created video. OpenAI, Meta, and Google have entered the game. At the end of September, Meta introduced Vibes, an AI-only video feed, in the newest version of its Meta AI app. It allows users to share videos created by the company’s generative tools in the Meta app, as well as on Facebook and Instagram. Five days later, OpenAI unveiled its Sora app, which, beyond creating videos from a prompt, is focused on allowing users to insert themselves, their friends, and even public figures who allow it into hyperrealistic scenarios. More than any other challengereven Google’s Veo3, which the tech giant launched over the summer and quickly integrated into YouTube shortsSora is positioning itself as the TikTok of AI, leaning heavily into the ability for users to have a fully synthetic version of themselves to appear in their content. The app quickly shot to the top of Apple’s App Store, logging 164,000 downloads within 48 hours of launch. Sora’s playbook might be new to the tech world, but it’s familiar to Demi Guo, the 26-year-old founder of the AI video company Pika, whose vision for the trajectory of social AI video predicted the current moment. Launched in November 2023, Pika is known for its Pikaffects app, which offers users a library of viral AI video effects. They include the straightforwardly named “Squish It,” which turns the subject of a video or photo into a squishy toy manipulated by a pair of AI-generated hands, and “Cake-ify It,” which slices up a subject and gives it the innards of cake. The company is so committed to its vision of letting users insert themselves into shareable scenarios that it launched its own social video creation app, Pika: AI Video & Trend Maker, at the end of the summer. “We really believe AI will be the next way for people to express themselves and will define the next social platform,” Guo said the day after Sora launched. “That’s the reason we launched our app two months ago.” With a $470 million valuation, Pika is a smaller, but prophetic player in AI video. Guo’s next move could offer another glimpse at the future of the fast-moving industry. Matan Cohen-Grumi remembers the first time he experienced the squish. The founding creative director of the generative AI video platform Pika was playing around with a new suite of effects the company had just come up with. One tool took an image and made it look like two sets of fingers were literally squishing the subjectbe it a cat, a cup, or a persons headin a delightfully (and terrifyingly) realistic way, complete with scrunching sound effects. There was something very surprising about it, says Cohen-Grumi, a former TV and commercial director who first discovered the magic of generative AI in 2023, when he used Midjourney to make a short film for his (now defunct) rock band. I remember saying to everyone, Ive been playing with AI for so long. Ive never laughed so hard. I hope this will translate. It did. When Pika released its Pikaffects tools in October 2024, the internet was flooded with metamorphosing bicycles, pets, and body parts. Tattoo artist Christopher Mirandas video of what appeared to be a knife cutting into a mans tattooed head, revealing a yellow layer cake inside, received 1.9 million views on Instagram. Even brands got in on the fun: Fashion house Balenciaga posted a video squishing one of its 6XL sneakers, racking up nearly 20,000 likes on Instagram. Pika says the virality of the new tools translated into an 800% increase in users. The success of Pikaffects was an aha moment for the company. Cofounded in April 2023 by Guo and Chenlin Meng, who dropped out of Stanfords artificial intelligence PhD program to start Pika, the company was originally focused on being a tool for professional-quality video. But now it saw an opportunity to become the go-to AI platform for the TikTok crowd focused on social-media-friendly templates for easily shareable short videos. This approach allowed Pika to distinguish itself from the longer-form tools, aimed at more professional creators, from companies like Midjourney, Runway, and Luma. With its ready-made library of special effects and videos that average only about 7 seconds, Pika would go after Gen Z social media users looking to createor at least jointhe latest viral trend. [Photo illustration: Michelle Watt. This image includes elements generated with GPT-4.] Pika was early to chart a path for its video-generating tools on social media. But it’s no longer aloneand its rivals are substantially better resourced. Beyond billion-dollar coffers, companies like Google also have access to their own social media platforms that they can use to mainstream their AI tools. Google did just that when it began integrating Veo 3 into YouTube Shorts in July, reaching the platforms 2 billion monthly users. Vibes users can share across Meta apps, and while Sora videos can be downloaded to share elsewhere, OpenAI is positioning the app as a platform that can stand alone. How long Pika will be able to stand alone in an increasingly crowded corner of the AI industry is an open question. (There were rumors over the summer of a possible Facebook acquisitionwhich Vibes seems to have put to rest.) Pika’s nearly half-billion-dollar valuation is not on the scale of Runway, which is valued at $3 billion and is expected to generate $300 million in 2025, let alone OpenAI. With monthly subscriptions that start at $8 and go up to $76, Guo will say only that revenue is in the eight figures. But the company has a respectable 16.4 million registered users, and average monthly active users across the web and mobile apps totaled 1.4 million in the first half of 2025. However, the company says fewer than a quarter million of them are paying subscribers. As it looks to grow, Pikas challenge will be continuing to spawn irresistible social-friendly effects that users cant find elsewhere. Following the success of Pikaffects, the company has doubled down on creating templates geared to making short, meme-friendly videos that can be quickly shared on TikTok and Instagram without requiring any AI skills. Over the summer, Pika gave users a new thrill by offering the ability to Labubu-fy an image intothe adorable furry-eared beast that has been all the rage with Gen Alpha. Ben Woods, a creator-economy analyst with MIDiA Research, says Pika’s approach is a smart response to the tyranny of creative possibilities that AI tools impose on users. Most AI video generators give us that blank box and say Create whatever you want. But some consumers come to that and dont know what to create, he says. Theres too much possibility. Pikas templates help winnow those possibilities. Pikas social-first messaging isnt subtle. Last May it released a provocative brand film dubbed Pikapocalypse. It featured a young woman using the app to inflate her cat, turn a potted flower into a balloon, and transform a pile of clothes into butterfliesoblivious to an apocalyptic wasteland outside her window. Guo says the point of the video was to underscore how, with AI platforms, people create their own reality. It generated buzz in part for toying with the idea that this alternate reality can itself be a mindless, self-insulated hole. The company garnered more attention in June, when Adobe integrated Pikas tools into its generative AI app Fireflytargeted at video professionals and social creatorsalong with other video models, including Veo 3, OpenAIs Sora, and Luma. Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe, sees Pika as a dynamic means of creating social content. Pika offers a unique type of model with a unique personality, he says. One issue that Pika will have to wrestle with is cost. The company’s free version of Pikaffects has been criticized for being laggyand because it allows users to make only a limited number of videos, users often find themselves needing to upgrade to a paid version, which starts at $10 per month. Meanwhile, Pika’s new Sora-like social app has a standard paid tier for $95.90 per year and an “artist” tier for $389 annually. For younger kids and teens to be interested in Pika, it would almost have to be completely free to use because youre not going to see kids and teens paying those prices for videos, said Kai Turner, a former Netflix and Sony executive who focuses on generative AI video. Cost is, at least for now, not a factor with Sora and Vibes. Both are currently free, though ChatGPT Pro users have access to an experimental Sora 2 Pro model that isn’t in wide release. Guo acknowledges this challenge, saying that Pika is brainstorming different monetization models, including offering certain premium features for a cost while greatly lowering the price for basic users. At the same time, the social video creation app shows that Guo is pushing ahead with a wider vision for Pika than just viral tools. That puts her in more direct competition with Sora and otherswhich might be a harder space in which to carve out a niche. MIDiA’s Woods says Pika’s strength remains its ability to cull the endless possibilities of AI video into easy-to-use, viral-ready features. “OpenAI now is positioning itself to compete with TikTok and Youtube, as opposed to being an AI creator tool app, which is still what I see Pika as,” Woods says. Guo notes that Sora’s launch brought a spike in downloads of Pika’s app, though she doesn’t specify how many. And despite her having predicted this moment for AI video, she still seems to be figuring out her next moves. (In a conversation the day after Sora’s launch, Guo noted that the company’s user base skews femalesomething she seems ready to lean into, though she didn’t detail how.) One thing Guo is clear about: She doesn’t want her app associated with the AI slop that’s invading social platforms and blurring the lines between fact and fiction. “Our app is not just about random videos, slop videosit’s really about yourself, your identity,” she says, noting that Pika focuses on letting users center themselves in their own creations. It’s an idea that also animates the new Sora app and its cameo-based videos. “I think there’s a chance that Open AI was potentially inspired by this idea to bring a user’s identity inside their app as well,” Guo says. “It’s very validating that a big company like OpenAI also realizes that. We’re really proud to be an underdog in the spaceand the first to inspire everyone.” A version of this article appears in the Fall 2025 print edition of Fast Company.
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