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🚀Microsoft’s $500 M AI Savings Stir Post-Layoff Backlash

PLUS: Cloudflare Squares Off With Google, Circle-to-Search Goes Gamer — and More!

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Welcome, readers!

Today’s headlines show AI’s power and growing pains. Microsoft is celebrating half-a-billion dollars in cost cuts just days after deep layoffs, while Cloudflare is publicly pressuring Google to give publishers more control over AI crawlers. Google, meanwhile, is turning its Circle-to-Search tool into a mobile gaming companion, YouTube is tightening the screws on “AI-slop,” Google Research is open-sourcing beefed-up health models, and AWS is rolling out monster Grace-Blackwell GPU servers. Let’s dive in.

1. Microsoft Flaunts $500 M in AI Savings After 9 000 Layoffs

In an internal presentation, chief commercial officer Judson Althoff boasted that Copilot-powered automation saved more than $500 million in call-center costs last year. The memo landed awkwardly: only a week earlier, Microsoft cut 9 000 jobs in its third 2025 layoff round (about 15 000 positions year-to-date). Yet profits keep climbing—$26 billion on $70 billion revenue in Q1—and the company has earmarked $80 billion for AI infrastructure this year, pushing its market cap to $3.74 trillion.

2. Cloudflare Challenges Google Over AI-Overview Crawlers

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says the company will “get Google to provide ways to block Answer Box and AI Overview without hurting classic search,” urging Google to split its AI crawler from the standard Googlebot so publishers can opt out of content reuse. Ars Technica reports Google is unlikely to budge, setting up a high-stakes standoff over how web data feeds AI assistants.

3. Circle-to-Search Adds AI Mode and In-Game Help

Google is rolling out AI Mode directly inside Circle-to-Search, now live on 300 million Android devices. Users can ask follow-up questions after an AI Overview or invoke the feature in Lens. A second upgrade targets gamers: long-pressing the nav bar while playing delivers context-aware tips and videos without leaving the game, launching today in the U.S. and India.

4. YouTube to Demonetize “Mass-Produced” AI Content

Starting July 15, updated YouTube Partner Program rules will explicitly bar revenue for “inauthentic, repetitive or mass-produced” videos—material that generative-AI tools have made cheap and plentiful. YouTube’s Rene Ritchie calls it a “minor update,” but critics note the platform is preparing for large-scale bans as low-effort AI compilations, voice-overs and deepfake news clips flood the service.

5. Google Releases MedGemma 27B Multimodal and MedSigLIP

Google Research has added two open-weight health models to its Health AI Developer Foundations suite:

  • MedGemma 27B Multimodal handles text + imaging EHR data and scores 87.7 % on MedQA at one-tenth the inference cost of larger rivals.

  • MedSigLIP, a 400 M-parameter image–text encoder, matches specialist models across dermatology, X-ray and histopathology while running on a single GPU.

Both are free to fine-tune via Hugging Face and can even run on mobile hardware.

6. AWS Debuts P6e-GB200 UltraServers With 72 Blackwell GPUs

Amazon’s new EC2 P6e-GB200 UltraServers bundle up to 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, delivering 360 FP8 PFLOPS and 13.4 TB HBM3e in one NVLink domain. Backed by 28.8 Tbps EFAv4 networking, the Dallas-zone machines target trillion-parameter model training and are available today via Capacity Blocks for ML, with SageMaker Hyperpod and EKS support out of the box.

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Zephyr