May 5, 2026 AI Update: Coinbase and PayPal lay off thousands and replace them with AI

Coinbase and PayPal announced AI-driven layoffs of thousands of workers the day of recording. The episode references Sam Altman's recent tweet that he hopes people are ready for life to change. The hosts argue that institutions and individuals still are not. OpenAI's Greg Brockman says the company is about 80 percent of the way to AGI. Grok 4.3 ships with cheaper inference and custom voice cloning. China's open-weight MiMo 2.5 Pro matches Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks using 40 to 60 percent fewer tokens. An Anthropic co-founder targets full recursive self-improvement around 2028. Microsoft, Google, and xAI will give the U.S. government early access to frontier models for pre-release safety review. Anthropic with Blackstone and Goldman and OpenAI are launching mid-market services arms. UAE plans to run 50 percent of government on agentic AI within two years. China deployed humanoid robots over the Mayday holiday. Meta bought a robotics company. Anthropic and Google have hired consciousness researchers. A Chinese court ruled companies cannot fire workers just to replace them with AI. Altman is cooling on UBI. The hosts note that people are unready for the moral dilemmas the technology forces, including those around