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AI NewsQNu Labs Validates its Quantum Key Distribution Performance for Encrypted Communication
5:47 PM IST · April 9, 2026
The study shows secure key generation over 200 km and compatibility with existing telecom networks.
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The era oftokenmaxxingis over. After the AI industryencouraged companiesto max out their AI budgets earlier this year, and some companieseven built employee leaderboards to encourage internal AI usage— they are now realizing just how easy it is to spend huge sums of money on AI and get little in return. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing. Recent news has been rife with stories aboutAI cutbacksand now 404 Mediareports thatconsulting firm Accenture has been attempting to stop its employees from depleting its token reserves by using AI to do basic tasks — like converting PDFs into presentation slides. The cutbacks take place not long after Accenture threatened that employees would “risk losing out on promotions” if they didn’t use AI, 404 writes. 404’s reporting is based on leaked audio from a recent internal meeting involving Accenture’s agentic AI strategy lead, Justice Kwak. “We’re hitting this inflection point where AI is becoming material to the cost structure,” Kwak says. “Spend is becoming very unpredictable; and leadership, especially at the CFO, COO, and CIO level, are still asking the question of whether they’re getting value from what we’re spending on in the context of AI.” The cost of tokens has thrown into doubt the AI business model — as evidenced by what’s being called the “AI selloff” which has battered some AI-dependent businesses the last few days, especially memory chip makers. The AI industry has reached the stage where it can’t just be exciting and new anymore. It has to prove its worth.
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The AI boom has fueled dozens of new startups and minted a new class of billionaires. It has also produced a serious shortage of memory chips — a critical component for compute-hungry AI models — which some predict could persistthrough 2027. This era ofRAMageddonisn’t just a corporate problem. As demand spikes and squeezes supply, prices are rising and trickling down to consumers. Apple CEO Tim Cook warned just a week ago thatprice increasesfor its products are unavoidable. But amid this Mad Max-esque fight for memory chips, some companies are coming out ahead. Micron, the largest U.S. computer-memory chip maker — with a market cap of $1.2 trillion — is one of them. That hasn’t always been the case. The company’s shares were trading around $83 in early 2024 (with a market cap of about $91 billion) and closed today at $1,048.51. The company reportedthird-quarter earningsafter markets closed Wednesday, and the results sent shares soaring more than 13%. Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company’s profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year. The Idaho-based company also gave investors a positive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion. The strong results arrive the same week Microninked a dealto supply AI lab Anthropic with memory and storage chips. Micron also disclosed that it participated in Anthropic’s Series H funding round, though it didn’t disclose how much it invested.
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Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, according toBloomberg. Per the report, Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model. TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment. These departures are part of a concerning trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcherNoam Shazeerannouncedthat he wasleaving Googlefor OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building hiscontroversialchatbot startup, Character.AI (which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini). Just days after Shazeer made his announcement, Google DeepMind directorJohn Jumpersaid he was leaving Google for Anthropic. Alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Jumper won the 2024Nobel Prize in Chemistryfor his work on AlphaFold, which can predict 3D protein structures from animo acid sequences. As OpenAI and Anthropicprepare to go public, this trend could continue — it’s a great time for the companies to recruit top AI talent with a promise of equity.
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Whether AI is already replacing jobs is the subject of fierce debate. Tech layoffs hit theirhighest single monthtotal in years in May, and AI was the most-cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. However, researchers at venture firm SignalFire say the hiring data tells a different story. “The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,” said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.” SignalFire’s analysis, which tracked the careers of millions of employees across more than 80 million companies, suggests that engineering was the most resilient job function in 2025. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because people often delay updating their employment status after job cuts, SignalFire examined hiring data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends. While total hiring across large tech companies dropped 25% compared to 2019 levels, engineering roles saw a much smaller decline of just 11%, according to SignalFire’s latest “State of Talent Report.” In fact, engineers comprised 55% of all new hires in 2025 across the 12 companies SignalFire classifies as “Tech Majors” — Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. This is a significant jump from 2019, when engineers represented only 46% of new recruits, according to the report. The continued need for engineers was even more evident at early-stage startups, which collectively brought on 7% more engineers in 2025 than they did in 2019, SignalFire’s data shows. If AI were truly substituting for engineering talent, Bantock argued, engineering hiring would be the first to fall amid the current tech hiring contraction. Instead, SignalFire’s data shows that engineering headcount is growing faster than most other job functions in tech. While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI couldwipe out halfof all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within five years, the company’s own head of economics, Peter McCrory,told TechCrunchin March that he had not yet seen any significant AI-driven effects on the workforce. Said McCrory at the time: “There’s at least no larger material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for the “most central task of their job in automated ways” — like technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers — and workers in jobs less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further still, outright rejecting the theory that AI will replace engineers. “Somebody said that AI is going to destroy all of the software engineering jobs,” Huang said in aninterviewat the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. He then argued the opposite is true. Now that all engineers at Nvidia are using agentic AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said. Huang added that while agents are writing code near instantaneously, they are constantly pushing engineers to generate “the next idea.” For now at least, it seems that armed with AI, engineering has become a classic example of the Jevons paradox — the idea that greater efficiency doesn’t reduce demand for a resource; it increases it, because the work expands to fill the new capacity. As Bantock said of engineering talent in this moment: “They’re suddenly a lot more productive, and there’s endless work for them to do.”
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