Ron Johnson doubts Silicon Valley's bet on AI shopping agents

Simons Foundation International, XTX Markets, and the Siegel Family are backing arXiv with $17.2 million over three to five years as it spins out as an independent nonprofit.

Recruiter emails show Amazon's AI agent organization, led by AWS VP Swami Sivasubramanian, invited former AI/ML employees to return via "Swami's Boomerang Reengagement Initiative." Amazon has cut more than 30,000 jobs over the past year; a spokesperson called boomerang hiring a longstanding practice, not an AI-specific program.

Databricks released a CLI to deploy and manage coding agents at scale. The post cites GPT-6, Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 3.8, and Grok 4.7 as models shipped in the last six months.

ElevenLabs is reportedly valued at $22 billion by its backers four years after founding, and says it is pacing at $600 million in annual recurring revenue. CEO Mati Staniszewski said businesses should tell customers when they're talking to an AI, and that he'd accept further gross-margin pressure to expand market share.

AWS published a technical how-to for running WhisperX on SageMaker AI to add speaker diarization and word-level timestamps to speech-to-text. It targets contact-center calls, meetings, podcasts, depositions, and broadcast media, where standard transcription returns only utterance-level timestamps.