The latest jobs report recently confirmed what economists had already suspected: The labor market has not been doing so hot lately.

Whether that big summer hiring slowdown has anything to do with AI disruption is still somewhat of an open question, however. Some recent data suggest that the technology’s impact may be disproportionately hitting younger entry-level workers. Other reports aren’t clear on whether AI has much of a detectable effect.

“It’s very difficult to disentangle, you know, what is the impact of AI, compared to what is the impact of the uncertainty in the economy in general,” Columbia Business School professor Stephan Meier said.

Some recent studies on AI and jobs attempted to tease it out:

• A headline-grabbing working paper from Stanford University traced a 6% decline in employment for early-career workers—those between the ages of 22 and 25—in fields considered most exposed to AI since 2022. Those jobs included software developers, customer service reps, and accountants. The findings are “consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers,” the economists wrote.
• The above study was based on an analysis of ADP payroll data. ADP itself also issued a report showing a jobs slowdown in August, with “AI disruptions” pinned as one possible culprit for “whipsawed” effects.

Before too much panic sets in, however, other reports paint a different picture.

Keep reading here.—PK

Amid Trump administration cuts to federal science funding, one government program is still pushing forward with a mission to democratize AI research.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to spend $35 million annually for up to five years to establish an operations center for the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), in a move that could further cement what’s currently a pilot program. The NSF created NAIRR early last year in a bid to give researchers more access to computing resources through partnerships with top tech companies.

Why it matters: For decades, many of the biggest breakthroughs in AI came from academia. But in the ChatGPT era, the cost and resource demands of creating a massive cutting-edge model have ballooned, and the scales have tipped decisively toward big, closed-off companies that can better afford such undertakings.

“Today, no university in the world can build a frontier AI system on par with industry,” the authors of a Stanford University policy brief wrote late last year.

That disparity might limit AI developed in the public interest and close doors to research questions that can’t be readily commercialized, the authors said. Academics like “AI godmother” and Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li have been pushing for a national research cloud of this sort for more than half a decade now.

Keep reading here.—PK

Traffic from generative AI-powered links to retail websites has surged in recent months, up 4,700% in July, according to the latest data from Adobe.

“We’re seeing the momentum increase each month; we’re seeing the growth continue to scale,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, told Retail Brew. The surge, Pandya added, is being driven by consumer trust in the links shared by generative AI-powered platforms like Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, among others being tracked by Adobe.

“We also ran a survey—in addition to the Adobe analytics platform data that’s informing the traffic spikes that we’re observing—and there, the consumers are saying that they really trust the links we see,” he said. “More than 90% of them trust the responses they’re given from these LLM [large language models] and that’s what’s really driving the surge.”

Adobe spotted the first big wave of generative AI-driven traffic to US retail sites during the holiday season. In 2024, from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, clicks from AI sources jumped 1,300% YoY—and on Cyber Monday alone, visits spiked 1,950%. While still small compared with channels like paid search or email, the surge marks a significant shift. The data is based on Adobe’s analysis of the universe of chat services and AI-powered browser experiences.

​​Momentum carried into 2025 as generative AI traffic to retail websites rose 1,100% in January and 3,100% in April, compared to July 2024—the earliest point traffic was large enough to serve as a baseline.

Keep reading here.—VC

OpenAI, nearing its 10th anniversary, is navigating a shift from nonprofit roots toward for-profit growth, with strategic partnerships like Microsoft’s evolving. These changes impact developers, enterprises, and the broader AI ecosystem, shaping competition, alliances, and innovation. Stay informed on how OpenAI’s structural pivots could influence the future of generative AI and the emerging tech landscape.

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