Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is setting policy from inside the White House, but a legal group he co-founded is shaping policy from the outside, through legal complaints and lawsuits against corporations and even the Trump administration itself.
Why it matters: The group — America First Legal — is the latest example of how Miller has amassed power in the new administration.
At first glance, it seems like DOGE's work to slash the federal workforce mainly impact the solidly Democratic areas in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Then you dig a little deeper.
Why it matters: Of the 60 congressional districts with the most federal workers, a slight majority are actually represented by Republicans — many of whom are publicly cheering on Elon Musk's hack-and-slash efforts.
New York, Seattle and San Jose had the most overall AI job openings this past January, by one estimate.
Why it matters: Amid lots of consternation about AI taking people's jobs, at least some people are finding new roles working with the emerging technology.
Apple said Friday that additional AI-powered enhancements to Siri are taking longer than projected and are now planned to arrive "in the coming year."
Why it matters: Apple was already later to generative AI than other big tech companies when it unveiled its highly personalized Apple Intelligence approach AI last year — and the new delay raises fresh doubts about its competitiveness in the field.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and his leadership deputies said Friday they will not lend their support to the stopgap spending bill being proposed by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Why it matters: Democrats are holding out for language that will restrict President Trump and DOGE from being able to slash government programs already authorized and funded by Congress.
President Trump said in a Truth Social post Thursday that he's directed Cabinet secretaries and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to work together for "very precise" cuts of federal workers.
"We say the 'scalpel' rather than the 'hatchet,'" Trump asserted — the opposite of the approach until now.
Shortly after OpenAI released GPT 4.5 last week, I saw examples posted on social media of the chatbot waxing poetic describing "a day in the life" for a variety of people.
The results were so entertaining, I stayed up late asking the chatbot for more.
While many AI insiders are betting on some kind of all-in-one AGI breakthrough within a handful of years, on-the-ground progress has clearly split into two diverging paths: optimizing AI to write code and do math, or improving AI's "soft" skills with words and creativity.
The big picture: On the one hand, the latest wave of "reasoning models" excel at computer programming and quantitative analysis. They're AI's nerdy tech geniuses.
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