Connex AI - Extended Version - From Monday 9th June 2025

Your inside track on AI breakthroughs (plus a pinch of market insight to stay sharp)

If you didn’t catch it earlier, here’s a quick clip (link below) from my recent podcast — we dive into how to understand and approach agentic systems, and why they matter for the future of AI. Jesper Lowgren

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7338703691736039424-o85b?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACJRSrgBh93en7ALnPNJriqNOgwtKYOrN3E

🔥 This Week’s AI Power Plays

• Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro Gets Smarter: Google has rolled out an upgraded preview of Gemini 2.5 Pro, their “most intelligent model yet,” showing sharp gains in reasoning, coding, and STEM. With improved creative writing and “thinking budgets” for cost control, it's now live in AI Studio and Vertex.
• Anthropic Boss Issues Stark AI Warning: CEO Dario Amodei says AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within 5 years, coding included. He’s pushing for a token tax on AI companies and urgent skilling programs to prevent a socioeconomic cliff dive.
• Meta Drops $14.3B on Scale AI and ‘Superintelligence’: Meta’s taken a huge bite of Scale AI, bringing on CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new AGI lab. It’s a bold move to catch up to OpenAI and stake a claim in the next era of general-purpose AI.
• Apple’s Siri Delay Costs $75B in Market Cap: Apple’s WWDC teased sleek design updates and incremental AI enhancements, but the real story? Siri’s full AI overhaul won’t arrive until 2026. Wall Street wasn’t thrilled. $75B got shaved off Apple’s value.
• UK Goes Big on AI with £750M Supercomputer Investment: The UK is plowing £750M into a next-gen exascale supercomputer in Edinburgh, aimed at putting Scotland at the core of AI R&D. It’s a strategic infrastructure play with global research ambitions across medicine, climate, and beyond.

📉 Market Pulse Check (a.k.a. What's Shaking the Global Economy)

• Crude Oil Spikes on Israel-Iran Escalation: Tensions flared again after Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Brent surged to $73.12, the highest since January, reminding everyone how fast geopolitics can rattle commodities.
• All Eyes on the Fed: Markets are twitchy ahead of the next US Federal Reserve decision. Sticky inflation and ambiguous forward guidance have investors guessing on whether hikes are still on the table.
• Retail Wobbles, Robotaxis Arrive: US retail sales data is weaker than hoped, while Tesla prepares to roll out its long-promised robotaxi. It’s another sign AI is bleeding into real-world consumer shifts.
• Entry-level university graduate roles: rapidly being automated, contributing to a spike in graduate unemployment, and reshaping the early-career job market.

TL;DR: The AI arms race continues to heat up across Big Tech and national governments. But the macro backdrop isn’t quiet either. Buckle up.

🧠 Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro Gets Smarter

Update: Google’s latest Gemini 2.5 Pro preview just landed. It’s sharper, faster, and built to handle longer chains of thought with higher accuracy across STEM, reasoning, image tasks, and code.

What’s New

• Major gains on LMArena and WebDevArena leaderboards
• Fixes performance issues in creative writing and general-purpose tasks
• Introduces “thinking budgets” to optimize API cost and latency
• Rolled out to AI Studio, Vertex AI, and public Gemini app

What This Means Google’s changed its playbook. Frequent previews are the new launch strategy, and they’re pushing hard to be the enterprise-friendly alternative to OpenAI. This one’s a win for devs.

⚠️ Anthropic Boss Issues Stark AI Warning

Update: Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, didn’t mince words in front of lawmakers: AI is coming for entry-level white-collar jobs at scale — fast.

Key Points

• Predicts AI will handle 90% of software dev in 6 months
• Entry-level roles in tech, finance, legal, and consulting are most at risk
• Proposed ideas include an AI “token tax” and widespread reskilling initiatives

Why You Should Care This is more than a workforce shake-up. It’s a structural reset. Businesses relying on traditional hiring models at the junior level need to start planning... yesterday.

💰 Meta Drops $14.3B on Scale AI and ‘Superintelligence’

Update: Meta just acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI and installed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead a new internal AGI lab aimed at building superintelligence.

The Details

• $14.3B investment into Scale AI
• New AI division separate from Meta’s existing FAIR group
• Focused on building highly general, agentic AI systems
• Wang to lead both companies simultaneously

Strategic Angle Meta’s no longer just reacting to OpenAI — it’s rebuilding its AI ambition from the ground up. This lab could be the most important AI unit outside of OpenAI by year-end.

🍎 Apple’s Siri Delay Costs $75B in Market Cap

Update: WWDC 2025 gave us pretty updates and new AI features, but Siri’s next-gen brain won’t arrive until 2026. And Wall Street didn’t take that lightly.

Breakdown

• iOS, macOS, and iPadOS updates landed smoothly
• AI features like text summarization and mail sorting added
• Siri’s major language model update pushed to next year
• $75B market cap wiped in 48 hours

Where This Lands Apple’s slow and steady AI approach works for consumers, but not investors. This gap between expectation and execution will keep the pressure on Tim Cook’s AI roadmap.

🏗️ UK Goes Big on AI with £750M Supercomputer Investment

Update: The UK Government is reviving its AI ambitions with a mega investment in an Edinburgh-based exascale supercomputer.

What’s Happening

• £750M committed to the project
• Will be 50x faster than current UK computing capacity
• Located at the University of Edinburgh’s EPCC
• Expected to support AI training, climate models, and advanced research

Real-World Relevance This isn’t just about national pride. It’s about AI sovereignty. The UK’s creating infrastructure to compete with the US and EU on AI research turf.

💼 Hot Jobs in AI & Cloud

1. Presales Digital Solutions Architect – Sydney Lead solution Presales/design across Azure, Apps/Dev, Data and AI for enterprise clients. Strong presales and stakeholder engagement needed. Hybrid role.

2. Senior AI Developer – AWS GenAI Stack Hands-on with Bedrock, SageMaker, LangChain, and RAG systems. Build GenAI tools and agents. Fully remote across Australia.

3. Senior AI/ML Engineer – AWS – Sydney or Melbourne Develop and deploy ML models using SageMaker, Textract, Comprehend. Python-heavy role in a hybrid setup.

Got thoughts on this week’s AI drops? Building your tech team? Hiring in AI or cloud and want to feature your role here? Or just curious where the market’s heading next?

Hit reply or drop me a message. Always keen to chat, share insights, or help you find that needle-in-a-haystack candidate.

Until next week, Alex | ConneX AI