Bausch + Lomb’s CEO Brent Saunders has issued a simple ultimatum to employees: Get a clue when it comes to AI, or kiss your bonus goodbye.
Observes writer Francisco Velasquez: “By tying bonuses to (AI) education, Saunders is essentially legislating the end of resistance.
“He also noted that employees risk becoming ‘irrelevant’ should they fall short of implementing AI in their career pursuits.”
In other news and analysis on AI writing:
*Cattle Call: Finally, a Place We Can All Go to Serve Our AI Overlords: Wired reports that ‘RentAHuman’ – a new Web site where mere flesh-bags can get work from AI-powered agents – has already signed-up a half-million-plus souls.
The site witnessed a meteoric rise during the past few weeks after the release of OpenClaw, AI agent software that ‘empowers’ AI agents to work in an extremely independent way — and even dole-out money to achieve their missions.
Observes writer Kyle Macneil: “These humans seem stoked. Sapien workers are already offering to pick things up, take meetings, sign contracts, conduct recon, host events and snap photos for the bot bosses.”
*WordPress Gets a New AI Assistant: The world’s most popular Web authoring software now has a new, AI-powered assistant. Think AI-powered image generation, editing, translation and more.
Observes writer Stevie Bonifield: “To try out the AI assistant, users have to manually enable it by going into their site’s settings and toggling on ‘AI tools.’”
“Sites that were made with the AI website builder WordPress launched last year will have AI tools enabled by default.”
*Dead in the Water: Apple Intelligence?: An informal poll by writer Roland Moore-Colyer finds that 96% of Apple users surveyed don’t use the company’s AI tool, Apple Intelligence.
Observes Moore-Colyer: “Given that the world and its virtual dog seems to be using AI or talking about it — either positively or negatively — I’d have expected at least a good percentage more people to be using Apple Intelligence.
“But it seems that Apple just isn’t scratching the AI itch in the way people expect.”
*Microsoft Exec: AI to Automate Virtually All White Collar Tasks in 18 Months: Given all the headlines lately, it’s hard not to be wistful for the days when AI was packaged as a warm-and-fuzzy office helper.
Case in point: A decree from Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, declaring that by the close of 2027, AI will be capable of handling most of all white collar work.
Even so, writer Frank Landymore also observes “many companies, however, are arguably using the pretense of AI to fire employees for purely financial reasons — a practice that some are calling ‘AI washing.’”
*ChatGPT Still an Ace at Making Things Up: While AI like ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful writer when working with documented data, trusting its research is still a fool’s game.
(To be fair, it’s a failing of all generative AI, including Gemini, Claude, Grok and others.)
Specifically: A new study from PAN finds that only 69% of ChatGPT links ‘documenting’ facts, trends and other supposed knowledge actually lead to real and correctly attributed info.
The take-away: Unless you’re sure, always demand a hotlink for ‘facts’ generated by ChatGPT – and always manually check the link.
*Trump to AI Titans: Pony-Up for the Power Costs: Writer Willow Tohi reports that fears of high electricity costs triggered by the coming onslaught of new AI data centers may be quashed by the Trump Administration.
Observes Tohi: Trump “is developing a policy to require major tech companies to fully cover the electricity, water, and grid infrastructure costs of their expanding AI data centers.
“The move aims to prevent these costs from being passed on to utility ratepayers amid rising national energy prices.”
*Google Releases Upgrade: Gemini 3.1 Pro: In the endless leapfrogging for the title of best AI, Google is out with its latest contender, Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Observes Carl Franzen: “Already, evaluations by third-party firm Artificial Analysis show that Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro has leapt to the front of the pack and is once more the most powerful and performant AI model in the world.”
Gemini 3.1 Pro’s biggest gain came in advanced reasoning, according to Franzen.
*Claude Opus 4.6 Debuts: Anthropic has unveiled its new, flagship AI – Claude Opus 4.6.
Observes writer Vignesh R: “The company says the new model improves significantly in coding, reasoning, long-context understanding and real-world knowledge work.”
It’s also designed to plan tasks more carefully and work for longer periods of time without losing focus.
*Almost-As-Good Alternative to Claude Opus 4.6 Released: AI users willing to sacrifice a bit of smarts in exchange for AI that’s cheaper and faster may want to check-out Anthropic’s alternative, Sonnet 4.6.
Observes the company’s release notes: “Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most capable Sonnet model yet. It’s a full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design.”
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.
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