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Today's topics:

Uber hits AI budget wall - Uber’s internal adoption of coding agents surged so fast it reportedly exhausted its early-2026 AI budget, despite measurable code output gains. Keywords: Uber, AI coding tools, Claude Code, costs, R&D.

GenAI productivity paradox returns - A large NBER survey finds most executives report little to no productivity or employment impact from generative AI so far, echoing the historic “productivity paradox.” Keywords: NBER, productivity, J-curve, adoption, trust.

Atlassian trains AI on work - Atlassian plans to collect more customer metadata and some in-app content by default in cloud products to train AI features, raising governance and compliance questions. Keywords: Atlassian, Jira, Confluence, data training, opt-out.

Public backlash and uncanny AI - An essay argues rising anti-AI sentiment is partly driven by an ‘uncanny valley’ effect across text, voice, and video that feels almost human—but not quite. Keywords: public trust, uncanny valley, deepfakes, chatbots, education.

Doctorow critiques AI doomsday framing - Cory Doctorow warns that treating superintelligent-AI risk like a Pascal’s Wager can justify endless spending, while today’s real threat is corporate power and accountability erosion. Keywords: Doctorow, governance, digital public goods, regulation, power.

Open-source security reports surge - curl’s maintainer says AI-assisted tooling is driving a flood of credible vulnerability reports, shifting open-source security work toward relentless triage. Keywords: curl, vulnerabilities, AI tooling, triage, open source.

LLMs outperform compilers in microbench - Performance testing suggests LLMs can sometimes propose surprisingly fast low-level optimizations for narrow tasks, beating typical compiler output in a benchmark—though correctness risks remain. Keywords: ARM64, Apple M4, SIMD, assembly, benchmarking.

Swiss open-science foundation models - The Swiss AI Initiative opened another major call to fund open-science artifacts for foundation models and societal applications, backed by national compute and research partners. Keywords: Switzerland, open science, foundation models, GPUs, ETH/EPFL.

AI hardware boom fuels e-waste - Analysts warn AI’s fast GPU and server refresh cycles could add millions of tons of e-waste by 2030, with disposal burdens often shifting to developing countries. Keywords: e-waste, GPUs, Basel Convention, India, recycling.

-Uber Blows Through 2026 AI Budget After Surge in Anthropic Claude Code Use
-AI’s Productivity Payoff Still Elusive, Echoing the 1980s Solow Par