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U.S. employers added a surprisingly solid 119,000 jobs in September, the government said, issuing a key economic report that had been delayed for seven weeks by the federal government shutdown. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4% in September, the highest since October 2021 and up from 4.3% in August, the Labor Department said Thursday. The unemployment rate rose partly because 470,000 people entered the labor marketeither working or looking for workin September and not all of them found jobs right away. The increase in payrolls was more than double the 50,000 economists had forecast. But Labor Department revisions showed that the economy lost 4,000 jobs in August instead of gaining 22,000 as originally reported. Altogether, revisions shaved 33,000 jobs off July and August payrolls. The data, though late, was welcomed by businesses, investors, policymakers, and the Federal Reserve. During the 43-day shutdown, they’d been groping in the dark for clues about the health of the American job market because federal workers had been furloughed and couldnt collect the data. The report comes at a time of considerable uncertainty about the economy. The job market has been strained by the lingering effects of high interest rates and uncertainty around Trumps erratic campaign to slap taxes on imports from almost every country on earth. But economic growth at midyear was resilient. Healthcare and social assistance firms added more than 57,000 jobs in September, restaurants and bars 37,000, construction companies 19,000 and retailers almost 14,000. But factories shed 6,000 jobsthe fifth straight monthly drop. The federal government, targeted by Trump and billionaire Elon Musks DOGE cost cutters, lost 3,000 jobs, the eighth straight monthly decline.. Average hourly wages rose just 0.2% from August and 3.8% from a year earlier, edging closer to the 3.5% year-over-year increase that the Federal Reserve’s inflation fighters like to see. The latest reading on jobs Thursday makes a rate cut by the Federal Reserve at their next meeting in December less likely. Many Fed officials were already leaning against a cut next month, according to minutes of their October meeting released Wednesday. Steady hiring suggests the economy doesnt need lower interest rates to expand. The September jobs report will be the last one the Fed will see before its Dec. 9-10 meeting. Officials are split between those who see stubbornly high inflation as the main challenge they need to address by keeping rates elevated, and those who are more concerned that hiring is sluggish and needs to be supported by rate reductions. Economists expected to see a continuation of what was happening in the spring and summer: weak hiring but few layoffs, an awkward pairing that means Americans who have work mostly enjoy job security but those who dont often struggle to find employment. The job market has been strained this year by the lingering effects of high interest rates engineered to fight a 2021-2022 spike in inflation and uncertainty around Trumps campaign to slap taxes on imports from almost every country on earth and on specific productsfrom copper to foreign films. Labor Department revisions in September showed that the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March. That meant that employers added an average of just 71,000 new jobs a month over that period, not the 147,000 first reported. President Donald Trumps crackdown on illegal immigration is expected to reduce the number of people looking for work, which means that the economy can create fewer jobs without sending the unemployment rate higher. With September numbers out, businesses, investors, policymakers and the Fed will have to wait awhile to get another good look at the numbers behind the American labor market. The Labor Department said Wednesday that it wont won’t release a full jobs report for October because it couldn’t calculate the unemployment rate during the government shutdown. Instead, it will release some of the October jobs dataincluding the number of jobs that employers created last monthalong with the full November jobs report on Dec. 16, a couple of weeks late. Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. Im Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, Im focusing on gathering some informed opinions from people trying out Googles new Gemini 3 Pro AI model. I also look at another circular AI investment agreement. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. What smart people are saying about Google’s Gemini 3 The so-called generative AI boom is only about three years old. It has been characterized by some breakthrough moments, chief among them the release of OpenAIs ChatGPT in late 2022. A relatively small number of AI labs have been competing to release frontier models that beat all others. The top spots on the rankings of benchmark test scores seem to change names every six months or so. But the release of Googles new flagship Gemini 3 Pro model (in preview), along with its impressive benchmark test scores, seem like a moment well remember. Now, peoplemany of them developerswho immediately began testing the new model are beginning to weigh in on how well Gemini 3 performs in real-world use. Here is a selection of their impressions. Thumbs-up Gemini 3 . . . shows significant gains in reasoning, reliability in multi-step agent workflows, and an ability to debug tough development tasks with high-quality fixes. In early evaluations, it improved Warps Terminal Bench state of the art score by 20%. Zach Lloyd, CEO of Warp I simply asked Gemini 3 Pro to diagnose and fix its own code. It reasoned through the problem in exactly the way I would expect from a thoughtful junior engineer game developer Josh English on MediumBest creative and professional writing Ive seen. I dont code, so thats off my radar, but for me the vibes are excellent. Intelligence, nuance, flexibility, and originality are promising in that distinct way that excites and disturbs me. Havent had this feeling since 11/30/22. Brett Cooper on X Gemini beat my own previously unbeaten personal test. The test involves a fairly long list of accurate to year information, ordered properly, many opportunities for hallucination and then used to achieve a goal. I need a new test, so yeah I think Geminis impressive. Richard Knoche on X Its a great model, as far as LLMs go, topping most benchmarks, but its certainly not AGI. Its haunted by the same kind of problems that all earlier models have had. Hallucinations and unreliability persist. Visual and physical reasoning are still a mess. In short, scaling isnt getting us to AGI. AI skeptic Gary Marcus on Medium I found the answer, and its actually terrifying (in a good way) The uptake of Gemini has been wild We are talking about a model that is delivering rich visuals, deeper interactivity, and agentic vibe coding. CodeToDeploy on Medium [We] created the first open-source evaluation framework to test how leading AI models respond to self-harm and mental health crisis scenarios, and the results were alarming, said Sean Dadashi, cofounder of the AI journaling app company Rosebud. Gemini 3 [is] the safest AI model weve seen yet. Thumbs-down Thoroughly benchmaxxed (optimized to do well on benchmark tests), very mid model. Makes so much errors, I have strong doubts they are serving the model they ran the benchmarks on. Infrecursion on X My experience with the Gemini [command line interface] has been dreadful. It craps out at least half of the time. When it works it is ridiculously fast so I keep trying it. But it has proven very inferior to the Claude code experience in my usage. Reddit user dinkleberg Was much worse than GPT-5.1 for find me research on [x]-type queries. It kept trying to do my thinking (synthesis) for me, which is not what I want from it. It gave me individual research results if I explicitly asked but even then it seemed to go way less wide than GPT-5.1. Robert Mushkatblat on X The free-for-all continues: Anthropic takes $15 billion from Microsoft, Nvidia, with strings Someone on Twitter (X) said it best (Peter Wildeford): After the breakup, both Microsoft and OpenAI are seeing different people . . . also Nvidia is sleeping with everybody.In other words, after doubling down on its bet on OpenAI, Microsoft has begun investing in other AI model developers too. Anthropic is the most recent. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced it would be taking a new $5 billion in investment money from Microsoft and $10 billion from Nvidia. As part of the deal, Anthropic will purchase about $30 billion of compute capacity from Microsofts Azure cloud service, which is powered by Nvidia chips. Anthropic says its now the first frontier model to be available within all three major cloud servicesMicrosoft Azure, Amazons AWS, and Google Cloud. Anthropic will work with Nvidia to optimize its models to run well on Nvidia chips. In September, Anthropic raised another $13 billion in funding, after which it was valued at $183 billion.So, as it has done with OpenAI, Microsoft becomes both an investor in, and a major supplier to, Anthropic. In a less direct way, so does Nvidia. Its the latest example of the kind of circular financial arrangements that have become commonplace in the world of big AI. In September, Nvidia announced a $100-billion investment in OpenAI, which the chip supplier will pay in installments that are contingent on OpenAI buying a certain number of chips from Nvidia. So Nvidia gets guaranteed chip sales and a 2% share of OpenAI. These investments might be circular and raise related party concerns, as Nvidia may own shares in a customer that will likely use such funds to buy more Nvidia gear, Morningstar equity analyst Brian Colello wrote at the time. OpenAI struck a similar deal with Nvidia rival AMD in early October. OpenAI agreed to buy large quantities of AMDs Instinct AI chips on a set schedule over the next decade. If it keep to the schedule, itll get the option of buying a 10% stake in AMD. The group of companies pouring billions into the coming AI revolution isnt really getting any bigger, and many of the participants seem to be placing bets on each other. The big spenders are Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon, and some big financiers like Softbank. A larger and more diverse set of players would give confidence that the burgeoning AI industry isnt just a big hype bubble. Survey: Trust in AI is breaking along class divides Edelman is out with a new survey report, titled Trust in AI report, AI Trust at a Crossroads, which finds that humans trust of AI isnt growing quickly, and that trust levels break along class lines. Edelman surveyed 5,000 people in the U.S., Brazil, China, Germany, and the U.K. More than half of low-income respondents (54%) feel theyll be left out and left behind in the move toward AI, the survey finds. Thats compared to the 44% of middle-income, and the 31% of high-income people. The study found a strong connection between higher trust in AI tools and higher usage of them. Low trust in AI stems from worries over how the systems will use and whether they will protect personal data. People, especially in developed countries, also worry about how they might be manipulated by AI. At work, only a quarter of non-managers use AI tools weekly, versus 63% of managers. Tech (55%) and finance (43%) employees are most open to AI at work, while adoption is lowest in healthcare (28%), education (25%), food & beverage (23%), and transportation (20%). Across all countries, 62% of younger people ages 18 to 34 say they generally trust AI, while 57% of people ages 3554, and 40% of people 55 and older say they trust it. Interestingly, only 40% of 18-to-34 year olds in the U.S. say they trust AI. More AI coverage from Fast Company: Gemini 3 may be the moment Google pulls away in the AI arms race Misinformation sites have an open-door policy for AI scrapers AI browsers need the open web. So why are they trying to kill it? A battle against the AI oligarchy is brewing in this wealthy New York district Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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A beloved Christmas tree tradition is returning to Manhattan for the holiday season next week. No, its not the towering spruce at Rockefeller Center, which is lit in early December. The comparatively smaller Origami Holiday Tree thats delighted crowds for decades at the American Museum of Natural History opens to the public on Monday. The colorful, richly decorated 13-foot (4-meter) tree is adorned with thousands of hand-folded paper ornaments created by origami artists from around the world. This years tree is inspired by the museums new exhibition, Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs, which chronicles how an asteroid crash some 66 million years ago reshaped life on Earth. Talo Kawasaki, the trees co-designer, said the trees theme is New Beginnings, in reference to the new world that followed the mass extinction. Located off the museums Central Park West entrance, the artificial tree is topped with a golden, flaming asteroid. Its branches and limbs are packed with origami works representing a variety of animals and insects, including foxes, cranes, turtles, bats, sharks, elephants, giraffes and monkeys. Dinosaur favorites such as the triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex are also depicted in the folded paper works of art. We wanted to focus more not so much the demise of the dinosaurs, but the new life this created, which were the expansion and the evolution of mammals ultimately leading to humanity, Kawasaki explained on a recent visit. The origami tree has been a highlight of the museums holiday season for more than 40 years. Volunteers from all over the world are enlisted to make hundreds of new models. The intricate paper artworks are generally made from a single sheet of paper but can sometimes take days or even weeks to perfect. The new origami pieces are bolstered by archived works stored from prior seasons, including a 40-year-old model of a pterosaur, an extinct flying reptile, that was folded for one of the museums first origami trees in the early 1970s. Rosalind Joyce, the trees co-designer, estimates that anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 origami works are embedded in the tree. This year theres a lot of stuff stuffed in there, she said. So I dont count. Joseph B. Frederick and Philip Marcelo, Associated Press
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