Welcome back! Uber runs on AI, and it just put its own engineers on a spending limit because it can't prove the bill is worth it. Meanwhile OpenAI wants your whole office building apps in Codex, no developers required. Microsoft used its Build stage to show it can make its own frontier models instead of borrowing OpenAI's. And GitLab is cutting 14% of its staff for the "agentic era" after AI's biggest names swore it isn't taking jobs.
In today's Generative AI Newsletter:
Uber's AI cap: Why is one of the most AI-hungry companies in tech putting its own engineers on a budget?
Codex for non-coders: What can your marketing team ship now without waiting on a developer?
Microsoft at Build: What did Microsoft actually launch this week?
GitLab's 14%: Who keeps insisting AI won't take jobs while the layoffs pile up?
Uber just capped how much its engineers can spend on AI coding tools, because it can't prove the spending works.
Each employee now gets $1,500 a month per tool for agents like Claude Code and Cursor, tracked on an internal dashboard, and anyone who needs more has to ask permission.
We covered the setup last month. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, and COO Andrew Macdonald called it a head-exploding moment.
More code was shipping, but he couldn't draw a line from the tokens to better rides. "That link is not there yet," he said.
The overspend wasn't an accident. Uber ran an internal leaderboard that ranked teams by how much AI they used, so people did exactly what they were rewarded for.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says agents now write about 10% of Uber's code.
A cap stops the bleeding. Uber rewarded usage and got usage. Paying for outcomes instead of tokens is the harder problem places like Uber are facing right now.
Speaking of going over budget, most people who tried AI agents and walked away unimpressed were winging it without any structure.
Marc Daou, a Google I/O speaker and lead developer of Picacity AI who trained under Google engineers on Gemini, put out a free video covering the three things to get right.
It walks through:
Normal agents
Sub-agents
Agent teams
When to use each so you don't burn tokens you didn't need to
Watch the free video here. Click the link, scroll down a bit and it's there.
A marketer on your team can describe a campaign dashboard, get back a working interactive version and share it with everyone as a link. They don’t need a developer or to wait for the next sprint.
That is the pitch behind OpenAI's biggest Codex update yet, which turns its coding agent into something the whole office can use.
Codex passed 5 million weekly users, and about 20% of them are non-developers now, analysts, marketers, operators and bankers, growing three times faster than the engineers.
OpenAI shipped three things for them.
Plugins: Six role-specific bundles for sales, data analytics, creative production, product design, equity investing and investment banking, packing in 62 apps like Figma, Salesforce and Snowflake plus 110 ready-made skills.
Sites: Describe a dashboard, planner or review hub and Codex builds it as a hosted interactive page you share by URL. In preview for Business and Enterprise.
Annotations: Point at one chart on a slide or one line in a doc and tell Codex what to change, so refining work feels like marking up a draft.
This points Codex straight at no-code builders like Replit and Lovable, which OpenAI is also partnering with on Sites, so it is competing and co-opting at once.
The catch is trust. When someone ships an app the rest of the team can't read the code behind, a wrong number looks identical to a right one until it costs you. OpenAI is betting speed wins that argument, and for most office work it probably will.
Microsoft used its Build conference Tuesday to make one point. It can build frontier AI itself instead of leaning on OpenAI or Anthropic.
The headline was seven new in-house MAI models, led by MAI-Thinking-1, the company's first reasoning model.
MAI-Thinking-1 runs on 35 billion active parameters and was trained without distilling from a bigger model, Microsoft's way of saying it did the real research rather than copy its way to a model.
Alongside it came MAI-Code-1 for GitHub and VS Code, plus new image and transcription models.
The other launch was Scout, the first of Microsoft's "Autopilots," long-running agents that work in the background.
Scout preps meetings and clears scheduling conflicts across Teams, Outlook and SharePoint, and developers can use it today.
The Copilot super app everyone expected didn't show. Satya Nadella teased it for summer, promising to fold coding into all knowledge work in one app.
AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wants Microsoft back at the frontier by 2027.
A reasoning model built from scratch is a harder flex than another wrapper on someone else's weights, and it is the part that decides whether Microsoft still needs OpenAI in three years.
GitLab is laying off about 350 people, roughly 14% of its staff, and pulling out of 22 countries.
The company calls the plan "Act 2" and frames it as a pivot to the "agentic era" of software, where AI writes more of the code.
The cuts came alongside a strong quarter. Revenue rose 23%, and the stock still fell 8%.
The timing is awkward, because the people who profit most from AI spent the past few weeks insisting it isn't the thing taking jobs:
Altman: OpenAI's CEO walked back his own jobs-apocalypse warning in Sydney, saying he's "delighted to be wrong."
Huang: Nvidia's CEO called the AI-job-loss narrative "complete nonsense" and "too lazy."
Dohmke: GitHub's CEO says the smartest companies will respond by hiring more developers.
The reassurances and the layoffs come from the same industry in the same month.
GitLab's numbers were fine, which makes the "agentic era" label read less like strategy and more like cover for a cost cut. Trade reporters have already started calling this move AI-washing. The cuts are real whatever you name them, and they keep landing on the people who built the thing.
RemyAI is a phone assistant for real estate agents who live on calls and lose the evening to admin. It records every client call, transcribes it and writes an AI summary, then turns the conversation into your next steps, the viewing to book or the follow-up to send, without you typing a thing.
It runs on a dedicated business line so work and personal stay separate, handles your client texts with the calendar built in, and keeps every transcript and message in one thread you can pick back up months later.
Try this yourself:
Download RemyAI from the App Store or Google Play and set up your business line.
Take a client call through the app and let it record and transcribe in the background.
Open the summary afterward and check the follow-ups and contact updates it pulled out.
Send a follow-up text from the same thread, with your calendar right there to lock the viewing.
Who it's for: real estate agents and any solo closer who runs the whole business from a phone and forgets half of what got said by the end of the day.
ChatGPT crossed a billion: ChatGPT hit 1 billion monthly app users in May, the fastest any app has ever reached the mark, past the pace once set by Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Barclays flags the top: The bank told clients the AI-driven stock rally is increasingly vulnerable to a correction and that downside hedges are cheap right now.
Meta eases its employee tracking: After an internal backlash, Meta will let US staff pause the keystroke and mouse logging it feeds to its AI models for 30 minutes at a time, having already gathered weeks of it.
Trump wants the first look at frontier models: A new executive order asks AI companies to voluntarily submit their most powerful models for government testing up to 30 days before release, and Sam Altman and Anthropic both backed it.
OpenAI lands on Bedrock: OpenAI's GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 and Codex are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, with its Daybreak security tools next in line.
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