Mass Layoffs Inside Microsoft Gaming Division

A few days ago, it was rumored that Microsoft was getting ready for a major round of layoffs within the Xbox team. Bloomberg is now reporting that employees in the company’s gaming division were informed of job cuts last 2 July morning. The PC giant has been on a cost-cutting mission lately, announcing it would let go of 3 percent of its global workforce earlier this summer, and announcing a further 9,000 job cuts.

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft’s Stockholm-based King division, famous for Candy Crush, is laying off 10 percent of its staff, representing roughly 200 jobs. While some other European gaming offices are also cutting, US units are reportedly being informed later.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, sent an email to all Microsoft Gaming employees regarding the layoffs, which was obtained by Windows Central and confirmed as authentic by Microsoft.

In it, Spencer said, "I recognize that these changes come at a time when we have more players, games, and gaming hours than ever before. Our platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger. The success we're seeing currently is based on tough decisions we've made previously. We must make choices now for continued success in future years and a key part of that strategy is the discipline to prioritize the strongest opportunities."

As part of the layoffs, several games, including Rare's Everwild, have been cancelled and The Initiative, the Xbox studio which was producing the Perfect Dark reboot, has been shut down. The news was broken to the team by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, who said Microsoft "did not make these choices lightly, as each project and team represent years of effort, imagination, and commitment."

Last year, Microsoft slashed almost 2,000 jobs from its gaming division, affecting employees across Xbox and Activision Blizzard. In the same year, it also shuttered a trio of ZeniMax game development teams after having acquired the video game holding company in 2021. This will be the fourth round of cuts at Xbox in the last 18 months. These layoffs come against the backdrop of Microsoft’s US$ 69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023.

The gaming industry has had a rocky couple of years, with an estimated 11 percent of game developers losing their jobs in 2024. Microsoft’s profits have been on a steady upward trajectory, with the company reporting over US$ 25 billion in net income in its last quarterly report. When asked for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told Engadget that the company "[continues] to implement organizational and workforce changes that are necessary to position the company and teams for success in a dynamic marketplace."

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Andy Jassy: "AI Isn't All Doom And Gloom" At Amazon

In an interview with CNBC published last 30 June, the Amazon CEO deemed AI "the most transformative technology in our lifetime." He said that it would change things not only for Amazon customers but also for its employees.

Andy Jassy said that AI technologies would create jobs in at least two areas of the company.

"With every technical transformation, there will be fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate," he said. "Are there going to be other jobs? We're going to hire more people in AI and more people in robotics, and there are going to be other jobs that the technology wants you to go higher that we'll hire over time too."

Jassy said that AI agents, which do tasks like coding, research, analytics, and spreadsheet work, would also change the nature of every employee's job.

"They won't have to do as much rote work," he said. "Every single person gets to start every task at a more advanced starting spot."

On LinkedIn, Amazon has added at least 500 open roles worldwide with the keyword "robotics" in the job title in the past month. Roles span internships to senior applied scientist positions.

The Amazon robotics senior applied scientist job description includes tasks like "developing machine-learning capabilities and infrastructure for robotic perception and motion" and "building visualization tools for analyzing and debugging robot behavior."

Jassy's comments came in response to a question about his June 17 memo, which outlined how AI would change the company's workforce.

"It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," he wrote.

Some Amazon employees were not happy with Jassy's message. In internal Slack channels, some called for leadership to share in the fallout, while others saw it as a layoff warning, Business Insider reported.

Amazon employs about 1.5 million workers, according to its website, and has cut almost 28,000 jobs since the start of 2022, per Layoffs.fyi.

From Jassy's latest memo ands interview, it is unclear which or how many Amazon employees would be affected by AI-driven job changes.

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Online Businesses and Franchises Being Scammed By Generative AI

Sometime last year, Ian Lamont's inbox began piling up with inquiries about a job listing. The Boston-based owner of a how-to guide company hadn't opened any new positions, but when he logged onto LinkedIn, he found one for a "Data Entry Clerk" linked to his business's name and logo.

As reported by Business Insider, Lamont soon realized his brand was being scammed, which he confirmed when he came across the profile of someone purporting to be his company's "manager." The account had fewer than a dozen connections and an AI-generated face.

He spent the next few days warning visitors to his company's site about the scam and convincing LinkedIn to take down the fake profile and listing. By then, more than twenty people reached out to him directly about the job, and he suspects many more had applied.

Generative AI's potential to bolster business is staggering. According to one 2023 estimate from McKinsey, in the coming years it's expected to add more value to the global economy annually than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom. At the same time, GenAI's ability to almost instantaneously produce authentic-seeming content at mass scale has created the equally staggering potential to harm businesses.

Since ChatGPT's debut in 2022, online businesses have had to navigate a rapidly expanding deepfake economy, where it's increasingly difficult to discern whether any text, call, or email is real or a scam. In the past year alone, GenAI-enabled scams have quadrupled, according to the scam reporting platform Chainabuse.

In a Nationwide insurance survey of small business owners last fall, a quarter reported having faced at least one AI scam in the past year. Microsoft says it now shuts down nearly 1.6 million bot-based signup attempts every hour. Renée DiResta, who researches online adversarial abuse at Georgetown University, tells me she calls the GenAI boom the "industrial revolution for scams" — as it automates frauds, lowers barriers to entry, reduces costs, and increases access to targets.

The consequences of falling for an AI-manipulated scam can be devastating. Last year, a finance clerk at the engineering firm Arup joined a video call with whom he believed were his colleagues. It turned out that each of the attendees was a deepfake recreation of a real coworker, including the organization's chief financial officer. The fraudsters asked the clerk to approve overseas transfers amounting to more than US$ 25 million, and assuming the request came through the CFO, he green-lit the transaction.

Business Insider spoke with professionals in several industries — including recruitment, graphic design, publishing, and healthcare — who are scrambling to keep themselves and their customers safe against AI's ever-evolving threats. Many feel like they're playing an endless game of whack-a-mole, and the moles are only multiplying and getting more cunning.

Last year, fraudsters used AI to build a French-language replica of the online Japanese knives store Oishya, and sent automated scam offers to the company's 10,000-plus followers on Instagram. The fake company told customers of the real company they had won a free knife and that all they had to do was pay a small shipping fee to claim it — and nearly 100 people fell for it. Kamila Hankiewicz, who has run Oishya for nine years, learned about the scam only after several victims contacted her asking how long they needed to wait for the parcel to arrive.

It was a rude awakening for Hankiewicz. She's since ramped up the company's cybersecurity and now runs campaigns to teach customers how to spot fake communications. Though many of her customers were upset about getting defrauded, Hankiewicz helped them file reports with their financial institutions for refunds. Rattling as the experience was, "the incident actually strengthened our relationship with many customers who appreciated our proactive approach," she says.

For now, small business owners should stay vigilant, says Robin Pugh, the executive director of Intelligence for Good, a non-profit that helps victims of internet-enabled crimes. They should always validate they're dealing with an actual human and that the money they're sending is actually going where they intend it to go.

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Google Hurricane Model Tries Forecasting Events

A few weeks ago, Google DeepMind and Google Labs released the latest AI hurricane model to the public. The Google team claims its AI model performs better than traditional hurricane models on both track and intensity forecasts.

This AI model is not a traditional physics-based model like the ECMWF (European) or the GFS (American) model.

Models like the ECMWF (European) use numerical weather prediction, solving fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and radiation equations on a high-resolution global grid. This requires immense computational resources and supercomputer infrastructure. Just one run can take several hours for the supercomputers to finish. (It is worth mentioning that ECMWF also has an AI model)

The Google AI Model is built on a trained neural network, which mimics the human brain, that can make inferences almost instantly after training. It learns from decades of vast historical weather data – essentially doing very advanced pattern recognition, thus it outputs forecasts without solving the complex differential equations of physics. So the process takes just a minute to complete a 15-day forecast.

Just like the ECMWF (European) model, Google’s AI model produces 50 ensemble members. The ensemble members are solutions that are each slightly perturbed. Think of it as a family of solutions rather than just one track and intensity.

Google claims that in tests for 2023–24 storms in the North Atlantic and East Pacific, its 5-day track forecasts were ~85 miles closer to actual tracks than ECMWF’s ENS ensemble and their AI model outperformed NOAA’s best intensity model – the HAFS model – on intensity forecasts, matching or exceeding high-resolution physics-based accuracy.

To truly be able to judge the accuracy of the Google AI model – or any model – researchers need lots more data. So, this 2025 hurricane season, expect many scientists to monitor the model to see how it performs.

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About 16 B Passwords Were Compromised

There were about 16 billion passwords to Apple, Facebook, Google, and other social media accounts, as well as government services, that were leaked in what researchers are calling the largest data breach ever, according to reports.

The leak exposed 16 billion login credentials and passwords, prompting both Google to tell billions of users to change their passwords and the FBI to warn Americans against opening suspicious links in SMS messages, according to a report published a few days ago in Forbes.

Researchers at Cybernews, who have been investigating the leak, found "30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each."

All but one of these datasets have not been previously reported as being exposed, so the data impacted is all considered new.

"This is not just a leak – it’s a blueprint for mass exploitation," the researchers said. And they are right. These credentials are ground zero for phishing attacks and account takeover. "These aren’t just old breaches being recycled," they warned, "this is fresh, weaponizable intelligence at scale."

Most of that intelligence was in the format of a URL, followed by logins and passwords. That information then allowed access to "pretty much any online service imaginable, from Apple, Facebook, and Google, to GitHub, Telegram, and various government services."

While worrisome, the researchers found that the datasets were exposed very briefly – with enough time for them to be discovered, but not long enough for researchers to figure out who was controlling the data.

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