Want to send thoughts or suggestions to\u00a0Fortune Tech?\u00a0Drop a line\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Coinbase lays off 14% of staff in favor of \u2018player-coaches\u2019 Chris Ratcliffe\/Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is adapting the company<\/a> for the AI age, cutting 14% of employees and reimagining its org chart to bring the company back to its startup roots.<\/p>\n Armstrong said the layoffs, which may affect about 700 employees, are partly due to a crypto downturn.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet the main motivator is making the company\u2019s leadership structure flatter, enabling its employees to work fast, with AI at the forefront.<\/p>\n In practice, this means cutting what Armstrong dubs \u201cpure managers,\u201d opting instead for \u201cplayer-coaches\u201d who oversee team members but are also strong individual contributors.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company is also planning to leverage its most AI-savvy employees by creating \u201cAI-native pods,\u201d which could even include one-person teams directing agents that encompass the responsibilities of engineers, designers, and product managers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not just reducing headcount and cutting costs, we\u2019re fundamentally changing how we operate: rebuilding Coinbase as an intelligence, with humans around the edge aligning it,\u201d Armstrong wrote in a social media post.<\/p>\n As Coinbase flattens its org chart, it is also increasing its employee-to-manager ratio, with each leader responsible for 15 or more reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n This follows the recent \u201cmegamanager\u201d trend sweeping corporate America, where managers now oversee an average of 12.1 employees, up from 10.9 in 2024, according to Gallup. Meta may be the starkest example, with its new applied engineering team sporting a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. \u2014Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez<\/p>\n Dario Amodei shifts the \u2018AI white-collar bloodbath\u2019 narrative<\/p>\n For most of last year, Dario Amodei was one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most prominent doomsayers on AI and employment. The Anthropic CEO said publicly and repeatedly that AI could eliminate half of entry-level, white-collar knowledge work within years.<\/p>\n So it was notable, sitting onstage<\/a> in Lower Manhattan alongside JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon on Tuesday, when Amodei reached for a very different intellectual framework.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you automate 90% of the job,\u201d he said, recalling recent arguments by University of Chicago economist Alex Imas and Apollo Global Management\u2019s Torsten Slok, \u201cthen everyone does the 10% of the job. And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10Xs their productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n Amodei invoked two competing laws of physics-meets-economics to describe what AI might do to human labor.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first was the Jevons Paradox\u2014the 19th-century observation that efficiency gains expand demand rather than contract it, suggesting AI will ultimately create more work than it destroys.\u00a0<\/p>\n The second was Amdahl\u2019s Law, a principle from computer science holding that the speed of a system is limited by its slowest component\u2014implying that even if AI automates most of a job, the remaining human bottleneck becomes the binding constraint.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it was Dimon who put the argument in the clearest terms. \u201cThe capitalist society is very good at recreating jobs and recreating things,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd life is better. Not always if that town loses a factory, but in general better.\u201d \u2014Nick Lichtenberg<\/p>\n Supermicro CEO: \u2018No one\u2019 else was involved in alleged smuggling scheme<\/p>\n Supermicro CEO Charles Liang spoke out during<\/a> the computer server maker\u2019s third quarter earnings call on Tuesday to deliver a message.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNo one\u201d at the company besides three indicted employees\u2014including co-founder Yih-Shyan \u201cWally\u201d Liaw\u2014were involved, he said, in what prosecutors have called an elaborate scheme to smuggle servers to China in violation of U.S. export controls.<\/p>\n Supermicro shares rose 18% in after-hours trading.<\/p>\n The earnings call was the company\u2019s first since Liaw and two other defendants were indicted in a criminal investigation.<\/p>\n In March, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Liaw and two other workers with illegally routing servers with Nvidia GPUs to China.\u00a0<\/p>\n Federal prosecutors accused Liaw of concealing the scheme from auditors and the company, while successfully fooling inspectors attempting to verify export compliance with a warehouse he allegedly organized and filled with thousands of fake servers. The scheme allegedly involved $2.5 billion in server hardware and highly coveted Nvidia GPUs.<\/p>\n Liang and Supermicro were not named in the indictment. Liaw has pleaded not guilty and is free on a $5 million bond. \u2014Amanda Gerut<\/p>\n More tech<\/p>\n \u2014Apple settles for $250 million<\/a> to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising in 2024 about a \u201cpersonalized\u201d Siri voice assistant.<\/p>\n \u2014AMD shares jump 7%<\/a> after the chipmaker posts Q1 revenue (and a Q2 revenue forecast) that handily beats Wall Street estimates.<\/p>\n \u2014Google, Microsoft, and xAI<\/a> join OpenAI and Anthropic in granting the U.S. government pre-release access to their AI models.<\/p>\n \u2014Daemon Tools<\/a>, the popular disk app, has been compromised with malicious updates, Kaspersky says.<\/p>\n \u2014ChatGPT\u2019s default model gets an update.<\/a> OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.5 Instant promises (what else?) smarter, more accurate responses.<\/p>\n![\"Coinbase](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2256691685.jpg\"\/)
<\/a>Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 20, 2026.<\/p>\n