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Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block Inc, is not only laying off nearly half of the companys workforce, but he wants investors to think hes an AI-focused trailblazer for doing so. In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, Dorsey shared that Blocks workforce is shrinking from over 10,000 people to just below 6,000 people, with some employees entering consultation. Dorsey credits intelligence tools with motivating the change, explaining that these tools and a significantly smaller team will allow the company to be better and do more. Block owns fintech brands such as the Square point-of-sale system, Cash App, and Afterpay, along with the music streaming service Tidal. A familiar story If the idea of laying off employees in favor of leaner operations sounds familiar, dont tell Dorsey that. He frames his announcement to embrace AI and put thousands of people out of a job as a forward-looking decision. I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late, Dorsey states. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. I’d rather get there honestly and on our own terms than be forced into it reactively. Block investors cheer the news All of this came in a letter dedicated to Blocks quarter four of 2025. Dorsey shared that Blocks gross profits doubled from quarter one to four immediately after announcing the layoffs. Shares of Block Inc (NYSE: XYZ) were up more than 20% in premarket trading on Friday in the wake of the news. However, as of Thursday’s close, the stock was down more than 16% year to date. It has been trading far below the high point it had reached during the early COVID era. Dorsey took to X (formerly Twitter, which he cofounded) to share his note to employees, using his standard no-capitals style. In the post, Dorsey says that laid-off employees in the U.S. will receive 20 weeks of salary, plus a week for every year of work. They will also get six months of healthcare, equity vested through the end of May, their corporate devices, and $5,000 to soften the transition. As is typical, employees outside the U.S. will receive different severance based on local (and typically better) requirements. It will likely not come as a great relief to those losing their jobs that, as Dorsey states, We’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. He adds that Block wont disappear employees from Slack and email, instead giving them until the vague time of Thursday evening (pacific) to get things in order. Dorsey claims he will send an additional note on Friday to all remaining employees. Reactions to the Block layoffs are pointed Unsurprisingly, many people didnt respond favorably to the news of Blocks layoffs. As we’ve reported before, the key to understanding Jack Dorsey is how much he follows other tech figures and executives that came before him. He used to idolize Steve Jobs. Now he idolizes Elon Musk, New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac wrote on Bluesky. Many users took issue with the lowercase format that Dorsey used to deliver such important news on X. Imagine you get canned and your CEO posts a tweet about it without any uppercase letters like he’s an early 20s girl, one user responded on X. On Bluesky, another user put it succinctly: This reminds me of the old adage, Never work for Jack Dorsey under any circumstances.
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E-Commerce
OpenAIs Codex AI coding assistant is having a growth spurt. OpenAI tells Fast Company that its weekly active users have tripled since the start of the year, while overall usage (measured in tokens) has increased fivefold. The surge is likely driven by the release of new modelsGPT-5.2 last December and GPT-5.3-Codex in early Februaryas well as the launch of Codexs app version a few weeks ago. OpenAI says the app has been downloaded more than a million times. Across all access pointsincluding the cloud, app, and command linemore than a million developers and other users now rely on Codex at least once a week, according to the company. Generating computer code has emerged as one of the first AI applications making a measurable impact in business. But tools like Codex and Anthropics Claude Code have evolved far beyond simple code generators. Powered by more capable models, they function more like assistant engineersable to converse with developers in plain language about a new software project and iteratively develop a plan. The agent can then execute that plan, which may include analyzing a broader codebase, writing and revising code, conducting research, running tests, and producing documentation. When finished, it can explain its reasoning and the decisions it made to the human engineer. More importantly, Codex has evolved into an agentic platform, where multiple agents can carry out many of these tasks simultaneously across different pieces of a software project. They can hunt for bugs, for example, while an engineer reviews progress, focuses on another assignment, or steps away for lunch. Peter Steinberger, the OpenClaw creator and an elite-level coder, calls this new mode of working agentic engineering. Thibault Sottiaux [Photo: OpenAI] The tools have evolved quickly. Codex and Claude Code both launched in the first half of 2025. OpenAI had previously introduced a Codex model in 2021the system that powered the early AI coding assistant GitHub Copilotbut the Codex coding assistant that exists today debuted in May 2025. Thibault Sottiaux, who leads the Codex group at OpenAI, says the product got a major boost with the December 2025 release of the GPT-5.2 model, which he says can hold more project data in memory and reason over it more effectively than earlier versions. The model was more reliableworking by itself autonomously and reaching really good results, he tells Fast Company. Codexs user base broadened again with the February 2 release of the Codex desktop app for Mac, which OpenAI describes as a command center where users can deploy and manage multiple agents. The company says more than half a million people are now accessing Codex through ChatGPTs Free and Go subscription tiers, and it believes many of them are non-coders, since power users typically rely on higher-priced plans that offer greater usage limits and faster speeds. The biggest bang came with the February 5th launch of GPT5.3Codex, which substantially improved Codexs coding chops, as well as its capacity for reasoning its way through complex, long-running tasks that involve research and tool use. In X posts and Reddit discussions many developers raved about the tools capacity for quickly writing usable code for real-world projects, often on the first try. Codex vs. Claude Code Many of the AI coding agents on the market are powered by third-party models, but OpenAI and Anthropic, along with Google and its Gemini Code Assist product, are each trying to leverage the strengths of their own frontier large language models to deliver the most capable and reliable coding tool. OpenAIs Codex and Anthropics Claude Code share some broad similarities. Both can build large features or even entire apps based on plain-English conversations with a user. Both also allow developers to break complex projects into subtasks and assign those to agents. But there are differences. One major distinction is the look and feel, or what some describe as the personality, of the tools. Steinberger says Claude Code is more conversational and iterative than Codex. It includes, for example, a dedicated planning phase before any code is written. Codex, by contrast, does not formally separate planning and coding and instead tends to dive directly into the codebase to gather context and begin working. Steinberger (comically) described the difference this way on a recent episode of Lex Fridmans podcast: Opus [Anthropics flagship Claude model] is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but its really funny and you keep him around,” he said, “and Codex is like the weirdo in the corner that you dont wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done. (OpenAI has since acquired Steinbergers OpenClaw agent platform, and Steinberger now works at OpenAI.) The pragmatic personality has always been the personality that we have on Codex, Sottiaux says, which is very much focused on having the model point out flaws and being as correct as possible when it comes to discussing something and being a very reliable tool. The personality and interaction habits of AI agents can reflect the markets theyre designed to serve. We were just really focused on this professional software engineering audience and . . . on getting to a powerful agent that can do tasks independently, Codex product manager Alex Embiricos says. But those target markets can shift. Embiricos says that while a pragmatic approach works well for experienced developers, less experienced or first-time coders may prefer a more empathetic, conversational interface. And that audience is growing as Codex evolves into a tool for general information work. Thats one reason the Codex team decided to give users more choice within the app. “In January we said Okay, were doing great on intelligence; obviously theres more to do, but now were going to actually spend a few more cycles on personality,'” Embiricos says. With the arrival of the GPT-5.3-Codex model, Codex now offers the default pragmatic personality as well as a new empathetic or friendly mode, which is designed to be more conversational and interactive. Why are AI models so good at coding? At the most basic level, computer code is made up of words, the same kind of data large language models are designed to process. And because the people building AI models are themselves programmers, they have strong incentives to make their systems excel at coding. Computer code is also in training and evaluating models. While theres creativity involved in software engineering, code ultimately either works or it doesnt. That creates a large supply of training examples with clear right and wrong answers. Theres lots and lots of examples out there with a problem statement and a solution, and being able to tell whether the solution is correct or not, Sottiaux explains. So you can at the very least use that for evaluations to understand the performance of models over time, and drive that performance up. Amelia Glaese [Photo: OpenAI] Codex is still a young product, and OpenAI says its improving quickly. But its still a work in progress, and in the weeks since the GPT-3.5-Codex model upgrade, developers have reported problems in some coding scenarios. Some users say GPT-5.3-Codex can lose focus during long or complex tasks, get stuck in loops, freeze, or repeatedly ask for approval instead of completing work. Others say it can hallucinate plausible-looking code, especially in front-end fixes, that doesnt actually work. These accounts are anecdotal and not systematically measured, but they underscore a common practice among developers of keeping AI-generated code separate from production systems until its reviewed. The Codex team has been focused on identifying and removing near-term bottlenecks that limit usefulness, according to research scientist Amelia Glaese, who leads development of the models underneath Codex. You know, three months ago, people were using Codex, but they were using it a lot less than they are using it now, Glaese adds. There were changes that we made two months ago and two weeks ago that made it so much more useful to people. At the same time, tools like Codex and Claude Code require developers to adapt. Working with an AI coding assistant is a different mode of software engineering, one that involves guiding and collaborating with an agent rather than writing every line directly. Its not the case that theres like one right way of solving an engineering problem, Sottiaux says. Its all a question of trade-offs and exploring those trade-offs, and so when you have an agent thats capable of helping you explore those trade-offs, its a very useful tool for an engineer. Increasingly, these assistants are capable of contributing to the development of the next generation of AI models themselves. If AI systems eventually handle more of the process of building, training, evaluating, and deploying models, the pace of performance improvements could accelerate significantly. Not just coding Both Codex and Claude Code are evolving into tools for general information work. Anthropic has drawn significant attention as it rolls out new Claude Cowork plugins (bundles of information-work skills) such as for sales, finance, and legal work. Cowork appears as a separate tab, alongside Claude Code, within the Claude chatbot interface. Anthropics skills announcement helped trigger a sell-off in software stocks, reflecting investor fears that traditional software-as-a-service products could be displaced by AI tools sooner than expected. OpenAI is also adding information-work skills to Codex, if more quietly. Skills bundle instructions, resources, and scripts so Codex can reliably connect to tools, run workflows, and complete tasks according to your teams preferences, the company wrote in the blog post announcing the GPT-5.3-Codex model. The Codex app includes a dedicated interface for creating and managing these skills. OpenAI already has a large and expanding portfolio of products, but it considers Codex important enough to feature in its You Can Just Build Things Super Bowl ad this year. Glaese, for her part, points out that software engineers themselves have a natural incentive to expand Codex beyond coding tasks. Much of their workday involves general information work rather than writing code. We have to do research, we have to understand the market, we have to read news, we have team meetings, we do performance reviewswe do all of the things that people who don’t code also do, she says. The glaring question around agents like Codex and Claude Code is how they will affect human jobs, especially those of younger engineers. OpenAI wants its agent to behave like a talented assistant engineer but stops short of saying it will replace people. Instead, Sottiaux sees coding agents as a way to expand how teams approach problems and develop new ideas, particularly when less experienced engineers use them to experiment and push beyond conventional approaches. “And then they come up with completely new ideas that you might not have if you anchor too much on your decades of experience, he says.
Category:
E-Commerce
Since taking over the coffee chain in 2024, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been on a mission to go back to Starbucks and rekindle the feeling of warmth inside the coffee giant. Thats led to new store designs, new employee training, new uniforms, new menu items, and new staffingwhich have helped the company break out of a two-year sales rut. But as part of this deep strategic exploration, Niccol made two specific asks for Starbuckss cross-discipline design team that are being revealed today: an iconic new cup and a new plush chair. As the literal touchpoints between the consumer and the company, they are the biggest signals we have of warmth, comfort, and generosity, says Dawn Clark, SVP of global concepts and design at Starbucks. The new Starbucks cup (ceramic in every size) [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] The new Starbucks cup is not just one cup, but five different glazed ceramic optionseach offered to customers who stay to enjoy their coffee. Built to accommodate drinks ranging from a single shot of espresso to a venti latte, the cups come in white (inspired by their takeaway cup, with a hand-painted green siren and rim), and green (where the siren is embossed). Notably, the cups all share the same tapered silhouette. Clark says the cup design took inspiration from a blend of Italys espresso culture and Starbuckss own mercantile and coffee trading history. The result lands somewhere between European sensibility and American utility. After concepting different designs, they came up with four frontrunners which they 3D printed and shared with various stakeholders across the companyranging from corporate executives to on-the-ground baristas. They refined the designs and rendered them in ceramic before making the final choice. The company knew it wanted a single, strongly branded silhouette across every size, which limited what could work. Its a really big design challenge because not all those forms that looked good in a short or tall looked great in a mini or large size, Clark says. The other, perhaps bigger problem was drinkability. Different geometries affect how the coffee flows into your mouth, and those geometries dont always scale well. They also needed to survive countless rounds of dishwashers. [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] The wide-mouth, tapered design won out because it satisfied every above requirement. But most of all, Clark says it was just a really nice vessel for drinking, shaped to make the coffee go with the flow perfectly from the cup to your lips. From what I gathered, Starbucks may eventually choose to sell these mugs as merch, and its easy to imagine the company introducing special colorways for limited-time offerings. A toasty orange version for PSL season feels almost inevitable. The new Starbucks chair (in green this time) [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] While cups are intrinsic to coffee, the new Starbucks chair requires a bit more explanation. Even brand devotees may have forgotten a piece of lost history in Starbucks lore. In the 90s, when Starbucks took lattes mainstream across America, many stores had one or two special, extra-wide, purple velvet chairs. They were an almost Dr. Suessian take on the hyper plush living room seating of that decade, meant to shake up the rigidity of Starbuckss design at the time while urging you to stay a while. What was great about that chair is it was oversized; it wasn’t practical. It was very much like you could maybe have two people sit in it, you could put your feet up, swing your legs over the arm. There were a lot of ways to occupy it, Clark says. That was a big part of the inspiration [for a redux]and also the lushness of the texture. Indeed, Niccol told me last year that an updated chair needed to imbue something akin to FOMO when sitting down at Starbucks: Its got to be the seat that when you walk in, youre like, Man, I cant wait for him to get up. Im hopping in that chair the second he does. Starbucks landed on a design that resurrects hefty 90s furniture and adds a dollop of midcentury design. I find myself sucked back into 1996 just looking at it. You see the same voluptuous arm silhouettes from the original chair (dont worry, theyre stll fixing that ruching), but its framed in wood (albeit with far more weight than youd see in traditional midcentury designor even the rest of Starbuckss midcentury-inspired furnishings). The visual heft of the entire chair is intentional, built to exude confidence that it can accommodate your most leisurely posture. [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] Its a little overly generous in its invitation to be comfortable, Clark says. Like the cup, Starbucks developed the new chair in-house. The process began with an adjustable ergonomic model. Built from a CMF frame and sparse cushioning, it looks straight out of IKEA, but the system allowed the team to study how it would feel to sit (and eat and drink) at various angles. From there, they built a cardboard massing model to lock in its curves and proportions. For the final production sample, the company went with its rich Starbucks green because, gosh is that purple a statement. But more colors could enter the mix in the future. No doubt, this is a premium chair for a QSR restaurantmost stores may get one or two. Its inevitable cost and maintenance is probably why Starbucks ditched their purple chair years ago, which I recall looking pretty gnarly before they up and disappeared. Clark believes its new velvet fabric will be easier to clean, and that Starbucks locations can get five to ten years out of a chair before retiring it or even reupholstering it. However, she also insists that isnt their chief concern. Part of what were in a way saying, it doesn’t exist to be convenient or easy to maintain. It exists to provide comfort. And were willing to take on the challenge, Clark says. Of course we designed it to be up to the test for all the use it gets, and well have to take care of it . . . but its something were committed to. The new cups and chairs will arrive in U.S. stores toward the end of 2026, while the cups are slated to go abroad in 2027. And theyll undeniably add a little more oomph to Starbuckss turnaround, as it works to make its cafes once again a place you want to sit and stay a while. I think that it really is more than just a chair or cup, Clark says. These are the most intimate things. These are the things you occupy or touch. We feel these are really intrinsically linked to everything about our brand.
Category:
E-Commerce
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