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👋Welcome! What if the biggest opportunity isn't replacing workers but replacing busywork? Today's post examines whether AI's greatest contribution may be freeing people from the layers of process that often get in the way of meaningful work!
AI & TECH
🤖 Taiwan Considers Robot Patrol Dogs for Disputed Islands
Taiwan’s top military weapons institute demonstrated three versions of a Ghost Robotics quadrapedal robot dog configured for reconnaissance, surveillance, and firepower, aimed at patrolling its strategic South China Sea outposts. The military cited a pressing need for automated security on the Pratas and Spratly Islands to counter escalating Chinese coast guard and drone activity.
🤖 Scorsese Partners With AI Startup Black Forest Labs
Martin Scorsese has joined AI image-generation startup Black Forest Labs as a partner and adviser. The star director, who has traditionally hand-drawn his own storyboards, is adopting the tech strictly to accelerate pre-visualization and communicate with his production teams. The partnership signals a major shift as Hollywood’s initial resistance to generative AI continues to soften.
🤖 Google Launches Anti-Deepfake Call Detection
Google is rolling out an automatic "fake call detection" feature globally on Android to combat AI-powered spoofing and voice-cloning scams. The system silently verifies if an incoming call actually originates from a contact's real device. If a scammer attempts to impersonate a trusted contact or family member, the phone triggers an instant warning to hang up.
🤖 Trump Signs AI Cybersecurity Order
President Trump signed an executive order to evaluate powerful AI models for security vulnerabilities prior to release. Facing tech industry pressure, the administration reduced a drafted 90-day review window to a 30-day voluntary period, pivoting toward national security risk mitigation over purely ideological AI restrictions.
THE DAILY TECH WATCH
Stop Fine-Tuning Models You Don’t Need
Fine-tuning sounds like the answer until you factor in the cost, the data pipeline, and the six months before a bigger model makes yours obsolete. Most of the time, prompt engineering or better context gets you there. But sometimes it doesn't — and that's where things get interesting.
In this free night session, Aaron Gallant covers the real tradeoffs behind fine-tuning LLMs, from synthesizing training data with frontier models to running PEFT and QLoRA on constrained hardware. You'll learn when smaller, specialized models actually beat throwing money at a bigger one — and why data curation is the work nobody wants to talk about. Built for engineers who want to make the right call, not just the cool one.
Live and remote. Wednesday, June 3 at 5 PM CT. Register now.
CAREER & GROWTH
📌 CBA Warns of Surging AI Costs and 'Work Slop'
Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn warned that corporate AI expenses will rise unpredictably as tasks shift toward complex reasoning, causing token costs to scale non-linearly. Comyn predicted a global wave of corporate budget scrutiny through 2026, noting that compute costs might have the positive side effect of curbing low-value automated output, or "work slop."
📌 Highest-Paying Teen Jobs Revealed
Report identifies car technician/mechanic as the highest-paying job for U.S. teenagers, with a median hourly wage of $23.88. Babysitter ($23.08) and retail supervisor ($22.75) round out the top 3, outperforming other entry-level roles. Experts emphasize that long-term teen roles offer strong avenues into higher-paying positions for those demonstrating reliability and communication skills.
📌 Top AI Adopters Struggle With Immediate ROI
A new report from the AIDE Institute reveals that while tech and energy giants like Nvidia, SLB, Amazon, and Meta are the heaviest users of AI, they aren't yet seeing clear, tangible returns on investment. The data highlights a growing trend of AI concentration among massive corporations with deep capital reserves, leaving smaller businesses struggling to find clear pathways to profitability.
JOBS & OPPORTUNITIES
Today's opportunities are brought to you by RightSide.
Aerospace Systems Engineer | Full Time | Windsor, CT | In Person
Performance Engineer | Contract | Englewood, CO | In Person
Field Support Technician | Full Time | Pensacola, FL Vegas, NV | In Person
Senior Process Architect | Full Time | Las Vegas, NV | Hybrid
Design Engineer | Full Time | Columbus, IN | In Person
Drafter/Designer | Full Time | Irvine, CA | In Person
Delivery Manager | Contract | Los Angeles, CA | Hybrid
Your next great hire lives in Slack.
Viktor is an AI coworker that connects to your tools and ships real work. Ask Viktor to pull a report, build a client dashboard, or source 200 leads matching your ICP. Most teams hand over half their ops within a week.
MONEY IN MOTION
Ex-Anduril engineer raises $42M Series A for Layup Parts.
Impulse Space raises $500M Series D to expand workforce.
ZeroDrift raises $10M seed round for AI compliance.
Alphabet plans to raise $80B via stock sales for AI infrastructure.
BIG THINK
The Frictionless Workplace: AI vs Administrative Work
One of the most common fears about AI is that it will replace jobs. Headlines often focus on automation, layoffs, and machines taking over human tasks. But there is another possibility worth considering. What if much of AI’s impact is not eliminating work, but eliminating the layers of administrative friction that have accumulated inside modern organizations? Recent workplace research suggests employees still spend significant portions of their time on repetitive reporting, documentation, scheduling, and information retrieval rather than on the core work they were actually hired to do.
If you have worked in a large company, you probably recognize the pattern. Forms generate other forms. Meetings create follow-up meetings. Reports summarize previous reports. Entire processes exist largely because older processes already existed. AI appears unusually well suited for these kinds of tasks because they are repetitive, rule based, and often disliked by the people performing them. Surveys from 2026 show that many employees using AI report spending less time on administrative work and more time on higher value activities requiring judgment, creativity, or relationship building.
That does not mean the transition will be painless. Some roles are heavily built around the very processes AI can streamline. Some organizations may use efficiency gains as justification for reducing headcount. Those concerns are real. Yet history shows that productivity improvements often reshape jobs before they eliminate them. The spreadsheet did not eliminate finance. Email did not eliminate office work. Instead, both changed what people spent their time doing. The same may happen with AI, though likely at a faster pace.
The deeper question may be whether modern work has accumulated too much organizational overhead in the first place. Many professionals already feel buried under notifications, compliance requirements, documentation, approvals, and digital bureaucracy. If AI can remove some of that weight, its most important contribution may not be replacing workers. It may be helping people spend more time on the parts of work that actually feel human. The challenge will be making sure the hours saved are reinvested into meaningful work rather than simply filled with new layers of process.
NOW WHAT?
Identify Process Waste
Look for repetitive administrative tasks that consume time without creating real value.Automate the Friction
Use AI to reduce reporting, documentation, scheduling, and information retrieval burdens.
How relevant was today's BIG THINK to your interests?
“Who is this person again?”
You’ve had that moment. Walking into a call, scrolling through old emails, trying to remember what you promised. Lindy texts you a brief 15 minutes before: attendee context, past discussions, open items, talking points. All pulled automatically. Try Lindy free.
STOCHASTIC DROP
GENERATIVE COMEDY
“Border security just learned new tricks”.
THE NUMBER
was the record-shattering time the solar-powered Zephyr S continuously cruised through the stratosphere, smashing a half-century-old aviation endurance record in 2025.
WISDOM
“It is easier to run down the hill with company, than to run up the hill alone.”
YOUR WEEKLY POOL
What's your natural approach to making big decisions?
Last week’s winning choice:
How do you prefer to tackle your biggest goals and projects?
🌊 THE WAVE RIDER: Working intuitively only when inspiration strikes - (33.33%)
Got a friend who values AI, tech, and everything in between? Forward them today's read!