Amazon confirmed Wednesday that it laid off an unspecified number of employees in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) organization, the division working on the company’s advanced AI models.
The move, first reported by Reuters, comes as the company invests heavily in programs to help businesses implement AI effectively, including a $1 billion initiative to embed AWS engineers with customers building agentic AI systems.
It’s part of a larger shift in the industry as tech giants and AI frontier labs look to make sure the enormous sums they’re spending on AI pay off in tools businesses actually use.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said building large AI models remains “one of the most important things we’re working on,” but said the company is also “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts.”
“That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers’ future,” the spokesperson said.
It’s the latest in a series of changes in Amazon’s AGI group, which despite its name has always been focused more on frontier models than on what the industry considers AGI, the still-theoretical systems that would match or surpass human intelligence.
Rohit Prasad, the senior executive who oversaw Amazon’s AGI work, left the company late last year, and AGI Lab head David Luan departed in February. In December, Amazon folded the AGI group into a larger organization led by senior vice president Peter DeSantis that also includes chip development and quantum computing.
The cuts are the latest in a series of smaller reductions since January, when Amazon eliminated 16,000 jobs across the company. Amazon said U.S. employees whose jobs are cut will receive 90 days of pay and benefits, outplacement support and transitional health coverage, along with eligibility for severance.
Tablets are great. You can use them for anything from browsing the web to watching your favorite shows. They're incredibly versatile, but that versatility can come at a cost. There are plenty of things that a jailbroken Kindle can do better.
A painting of Jimothy, the viral raccoon, by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward. (@henry_beyond_museums via Instagram)
Jimothy isn’t just a viral internet sensation — he’s a cause for good.
A painting of the beloved raccoon by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward attracted a winning bid of $6,543.21 in an informal Instagram auction this weekend, with all proceeds directed to the Ballard Food Bank.
The winning bidder for the 24-by-24-inch painting was identified by Ward as Angela Galdabini, who posted a picture of the painting hanging on her wall.
Now the auction gift is going viral in its own way, attracting a matching donation from Amazon, which encouraged other Seattle-area companies to follow suit. According to the tech giant on Monday, T-Mobile, Alaska Air and Brooks have all gotten on board.
“When we saw a local artist giving back to the Ballard Food Bank, inspired by a little raccoon that’s brought so much joy, we wanted to help,” Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Amazon is proud to match the winning bid, and we’re calling on other Seattle-based companies to join us.”
Update: On Tuesday, Microsoft let us know that they, too, had committed funds to the food bank.
Jimothy seemed destined to be captured by Ward, a prolific muralist whose colorful, whimsical work is seen across the Seattle region on buildings, fences, garage doors and elsewhere. His art frequently features a variety of animals and other characters, including Sasquatch.
Ward called Jimothy “the hero we needed” in his Instagram post on Saturday, and said he was giving to Ballard Food Bank because the organization helped him through some of his hardest times.
The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when the raccoon was spotted in Ballard and a video attracted millions of views on Instagram. The craze spread around the world and other videos have emerged online, sparking immense curiosity and adoration, and a flood of memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry, songs and more.
An AWS software bug showed some customers billing estimates in the billions and trillions. Here is what failed, why invoices were unaffected, and what IT teams should know.
Life is busy, and I don't always have time to sit and read articles when I discover them. Pocket used to allow me to save these articles and read them later, but it's sadly long gone. I decided to set up a Pocket replacement using a mini PC and my Kindle.
If there are three things folks typically know about me, it's that I love Linux, I'm an avid reader and I have a bit of an obsession with modding Kindles and Fire Tablets. I would say, "Hey, I resemble that remark!" and then wait patiently while no one catches the reference. One Kindle has eluded me all these years, but I finally found one: a Kindle Fire 7 (2012). I tried to mod it, with a little help from Claude.
Dave Brown, the departing AWS senior vice president, has been a member of its senior leadership team. (Amazon Photo)
One of Amazon’s top cloud leaders will be joining Meta as the Facebook parent company considers turning its massive AI buildout into a cloud business of its own.
That’s the report from the Wall Street Journal overnight, quoting anonymous sources saying that Dave Brown, the senior Amazon executive who led AWS compute and AI services, will join Meta in the coming weeks to work on its data center build-out.
Meta hasn’t committed to becoming a cloud provider, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the idea is on the table. He told shareholders in May that companies were regularly approaching Meta to pay for access to its AI models or spare computing capacity — a business that would put Meta in competition with cloud providers it now relies on, including AWS.
At Meta, Brown will report to infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, according to the WSJ report. Janardhan co-leads Meta Compute, an initiative Zuckerberg launched in January to plan the company’s data center buildout. Meta has said it expects to spend $125 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it tied to AI data centers.
Amazon isn’t commenting on the report. We’ve contacted Meta for confirmation and details.
Brown’s departure from AWS was announced on Wednesday, with a warmly worded message from AWS CEO Matt Garman giving no indication that Amazon would try to challenge or restrict his new role on competitive grounds.
AWS has gone to court before to enforce noncompete agreements against departing executives, suing two AWS leaders who left for Google Cloud in 2019 and 2020, respectively. But such agreements have grown harder to enforce. California bars them almost entirely, and Washington — Amazon’s home state — enacted a near-total ban this year, though it doesn’t take effect until mid-2027.
Garman’s message said Brown had decided to take “a new role outside of the company” but did not say where he was going. He’s remaining at AWS through the end of July to help with the transition.
At AWS, Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a longtime Amazon executive who has run the technology behind the company’s retail operations and spent 27 years at Microsoft before joining Amazon in 2016. He takes over AWS Compute and ML Services on Aug. 1.
Amazon briefly listed HTC’s VIVE Eagle smart glasses for a September 1 US launch at $499, then removed the pages before HTC had confirmed the expansion beyond Taiwan.
Dave Brown, departing AWS executive, in 2023. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
[Update, Friday, July 17: Brown is joining Meta, the WSJ reported. More here.]
Dave Brown, who joined Amazon Web Services as one of its earliest EC2 engineers and rose to lead its compute, AI and machine learning services, is leaving after nearly 19 years.
AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees in a memo posted publicly Wednesday that Brown will depart at the end of July for an unspecified “new role outside of the company.” Amazon exec Dave Treadwell, who joined the company in 2016 after 27 years at Microsoft, will take over the group Aug. 1.
Dave Treadwell. (Amazon Photo)
Brown’s exit comes about three months after Amazon promoted him to senior vice president. Brown had been on the company’s senior leadership team since 2023.
His tenure stretched back to the early days of the cloud. He joined AWS in 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon based part of its early EC2 engineering, before relocating to the Seattle area.
In an interview with GeekWire earlier this year, as the company marked the AWS 20th anniversary, Brown recalled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, then the company’s top cloud executive, gathering the small Cape Town team in those days and telling them the business could one day be worth a billion dollars.
Brown said he could barely grasp the figure at a time when the service was bringing in tens of dollars a day: “I couldn’t even imagine how much a billion dollars was. It sounded like a lot of money.”
AWS today runs at roughly $150 billion in annualized revenue, and grew 28% in its most recent quarter — its fastest pace in nearly four years.
Brown’s role grew with the business. After starting as an engineer on EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, he went on to lead its broader compute organization, including close collaborations with the executives running Amazon’s custom silicon business. His purview also expanded to include the machine learning and AI services now central to AWS, such as the Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.
Treadwell has run Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation, the technical backbone of the company’s online retail operations, since joining in 2016. Before that he spent 27 years at Microsoft, where as a corporate vice president he worked on Windows, Xbox, and the .NET software framework.
In his memo, Garman described Treadwell — known internally as “Tread” — as one of AWS’s largest and most vocal internal customers, someone who pushed the cloud group to innovate and will now lead it.
Brown will remain through the end of July to help with the transition. In his own farewell note, he said it felt like the right time to begin a new chapter. “I’ll be cheering you all on from the sidelines,” he wrote.
If you have even the slightest interest in open hardware e-readers, you’ve certainly heard of [Joey Castillo]’s Open Book project. We’ve covered his efforts to develop an affordable reader that delivers a Kindle-like experience without the Orwellian megacorp trappings for several years now, and watched with great interest as the core hardware has evolved.
So we were particularly excited over the weekend to see the Open Book Touch finally hit Crowd Supply, and judging by the fact that the campaign for the $149 device has already blown past 60% of its funding goal in just a few days, it seems like we weren’t the only ones.
As the name implies, this latest iteration of the e-reader does away with physical navigation buttons and introduces an intuitive touch-based interface. Those who like to enjoy their open source hardware under the covers will be glad to hear that not only does this new version of the Open Book finally include an illuminated display, but it even allows you to adjust the color temperature and brightness of the LEDs with the swipe of a finger.
While the hardware improvements over the previous Open Book are impressive, the software has really come a long way as well. The user interface lets you organize your books on virtual shelves and browse through their covers, providing the sort of slick experience that you’d expect from a modern e-reader. You can also look up the definitions of words, or dog-ear favorite pages so you can return to them later.
But what you won’t get is locked down with DRM — the Open Book Touch uses standard EPUB and TXT files loaded from a micro SD card, and thanks to the WiFi-enabled ESP32 at its heart, it offers up a web interface that lets you manage your collection over the network.
It’s been nearly a decade since the Open Book first graced our pages, and though we’re not in the habit of picking favorites here at Hackaday, this is one project where the stakes are so high that we can’t help but feel invested. Reading shouldn’t require a subscription fee, or depend on a proprietary piece of hardware that can get ejected from its own ecosystem once its maker decides you need a new one. Obviously the Open Book Touch won’t even make a dent in the market share that Amazon’s Kindle enjoys, at least there will be an option available for those who wish to keep reading on their own terms.
— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.
The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.
“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.
Preeti Somal. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.
The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.
Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.
The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
Michelle Graff. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.
Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.
Ken Hoang. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.
Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.
Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.
— Monica Lazois now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.
— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.
And some departures from Big Tech:
Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
Jeff Nienaberis departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.
Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.
The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.
Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:
Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.
Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.
Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.
That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.
Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.
OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.
Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.
Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.
Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.
The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.
Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.
The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.
Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.
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