Welcome

Sora is dead, 30,000 corporate jobs are gone, and AI robots are taking over Australian solar farms. From massive tech restructuring to brilliant local engineering, here is everything you need to know about the state of AI this month. 

The Tech

OpenAI, arguably the world’s biggest player in AI, has abruptly announced they’re shutting down Sora, their AI video generator, effectively exiting the video generation business. This comes just six months after launching their standalone app, which jumped all the way up to the number one spot on the App Store. The technology was impressive, but met with severe backlash. Even after outlining safety guardrails, Sora faced heavy criticism over its generation of deepfakes, misinformation and copyright-infringing material. The most immediate casualty of this abrupt shutdown is OpenAI's landmark partnership with Disney.

The massive three-year deal, signed just three months ago to allow users to generate videos using licensed Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters, has officially been terminated by the studio. While Disney stated they respect OpenAI's shifting priorities, the collapse of such a high-profile licensing agreement highlights the volatility of the current AI landscape. This doesn’t mean OpenAI is slowing down, quite the opposite in fact.

On February 27, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history, $110 Billion, pushing their valuation to a staggering $730 Billion. The very next day, they signed a deal with the US Pentagon for classified, cloud-only deployment, prompting government agencies like the State Department to migrate away from Anthropic and onto OpenAI's systems.

The Fallout

The explosive growth of AI has long sparked anxiety about job security and the threat of human skills becoming obsolete. In late February, fintech giant Block (parent company of Square and Aussie-born Afterpay) abruptly cut roughly 40% of its workforce, about 4,000 employees. CEO Jack Dorsey said the quiet part out loud in his shareholder letter, explicitly stating that intelligence tools have changed what it means to run a company, allowing a "significantly smaller team" to do the exact same amount of work. (Though, amusingly, LinkedIn has since been flooded with reports of Block quietly rehiring some of those fired staff due to "clerical errors" when the AI couldn't actually pick up the slack). 

Local tech company Atlassian just announced it is shedding 10% of its global staff (roughly 1,600 people, including 500 in Australia) to "reshape its skill mix" around AI. Even more aggressively, Sydney-based logistics software giant WiseTech Global is cutting 2,000 jobs, a third of its total workforce, over the next two years, claiming they will now rely heavily on AI to automate their coding tasks. Then there is Oracle, which announced plans to cut up to 30,000 jobs (nearly 20% of its workforce). However, unlike Block and WiseTech, this isn't about AI doing the work. As US banks pull back from financing risky AI infrastructure, Oracle is slashing its workforce to free up $10 billion in cash flow. Why? To fund a massive $156 billion data center buildout to meet their commitments to Sam Altman’s OpenAI. They are literally trading human capital to pay for GPUs. 

The AI In Aus

Here in Australia, we are seeing a brilliant, highly practical application of autonomous AI in the renewable energy sector. Australia's national science agency (CSIRO) has just rolled out autonomous, AI-powered robots to maintain massive outback solar farms. 

Instead of humans trekking across baked, uneven ground in the scorching heat, these repurposed mining rovers use thermal cameras to map the terrain. The onboard AI processes the visual data in real-time to detect electrical hotspots, physical damage, and even dust build-up or bird droppings on the panels. It catches faults before they impact the grid, drastically improving safety and efficiency. But did anyone actually lose their job to these rovers? Surprisingly, no. Unlike the corporate tech sector where AI is being used to actively shrink headcount, the Australian solar industry is facing the exact opposite problem: an acute labor shortage. Solar farms are massive, and located in harsh, remote regional areas. Developers literally cannot find enough people willing to do the dangerous, blistering work of walking the grid to manually check for broken panels. Instead of causing layoffs, these AI rovers are forcing a skills transition. The robots are taking on the heavy, high-risk, and repetitive tasks, which allows the existing human workforce to be upskilled and transitioned into safer, higher-paying technical roles. Rather than battling heatstroke to check for loose wiring, workers are moving into air-conditioned control rooms to focus on data analysis, remote supervision, and maintaining the robotic systems themselves. 

The Producers © 2026