Larry Dignan

Raspberry Pi rolled out its 3GB Raspberry Pi 4 for $83.75 and raised prices due to increased memory prices. The company outlined new prices increases for a series of systems. That news isn't all that surprising, but this tidbit is: Raspberry Pi said it will reverse the increases once memory prices ease.

Raspberry Pi said:

"We’ve said a number of times now that memory prices won’t remain at their current very high level indefinitely; the circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can."

You may hear something similar from other hardware vendors, but I kinda doubt it.

Hasbro said in an SEC filing that it was hit by a cybersecurity attack that forced the company to take certain systems offline.

In the filing, Hasbro said it discovered unauthorized access to its network March 28. Hasbro added:

"The Company’s investigation is ongoing, and it is working diligently to resolve the matter and determine the full scope of impact. The Company has implemented and continues to implement business continuity plans to enable it to continue to take orders, ship product and conduct other key operations while it resolves this situation. The need to run these interim measures may continue for several weeks before the situation is fully resolved and may result in some delays."

Oracle has cut anywhere between 20,000 to 30,000 jobs, or 18% of its workforce, and the emails to affected employees are sprinkled throughout X and LinkedIn. The roundup of coverage is here.

The company has a heavy debt load and negative cash flow due to its AI infrastructure buildout. Oracle raised $50 billion in debt and equity for its data center buildout earlier this year.

In a nutshell, Oracle is clearly choosing GPUs over people. It remains to be seen whether AI has enabled Oracle to simply be more efficient or the company needs to cut costs anyway it can. Free cash flow on a trailing 12-month basis is horrid.

Another argument for Oracle layoffs is that the company is simply rightsizing after the Cerner acquisition. In 2019, which I use as a primary benchmark due to the COVID hiring spree, Oracle had 136,000 employees. At end of fiscal 2025, the company had 162,000.

• Oracle Q3 better than expected, raises outlook amid AI demand
• Oracle to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in debt, equity for data center buildout

Salesforce said it is adding 30 new capabilities to Slackbot, which is the linchpin of positioning Slack as a work OS for agentic AI.

New capabilities include meeting transcription and note taking, reusable AI skills defined by teams, the ability to act as an MCP client and route work or questions to Agentforce and access to Customer 360 interfaces and data.

Blue Yonder's Supply Chain Compass report provides a sobering look at the supply chain and how leaders are adapting to frequent disruptions. In a survey of 700 supply chain pros, Blue Yonder found that 66% of leaders are ready for the future, down from 73% last year.

The No. 1 priority for supply chain leaders was improving efficiency and productivity with faster and better decision-making No. 2, up from No. 7 a year ago. Geopolitical disruptions were a big concern with only 20% of leaders being able to develop and deploy a response within 24 hours.

Oracle NetSuite launched the NetSuite AI Connector Service so customers can bring their own AI assistants via Model Context Protocol (MCP). The service will connect AI assistants to NetSuite apps as well as the NetSuite Analytics Warehouse.

NetSuite said a NetSuite AI Connector Service Companion will help AI assistants understand NetSuite data for permissions, workflows and grounding. The connector service companion will also include a library of more than 100 finance-specific prompts, best practices and governance for various roles.

Alibaba released its Qwen 3.5 Omni LLM with support for more than 10 hours of audio input. The omnimodal LLM supports understanding of text, images, audio and audio-visual content.

OpenAI is not only losing the buzz race against Anthropic it's increasingly seeing its missteps chronicled.

Today's episode of OpenAI is in a tailspin includes:

• WSJ's detailed account on the demise of Sora and how the Disney deal never really happened.
• Bloomberg notes that ChatGPT's app store has more than 300 app integrations, but adoption is sluggish.
• Microsoft launches a new Critique tool for its Researcher agent where Anthropic grades OpenAI.

US PC shipments grew 3% in the fourth quarter as buyers procured systems for Windows 11 commercial refreshes and stocking up ahead of higher memory and storage prices, according to Omdia. In 2026, PC shipments are expected to decline 13% due to memory and storage shortages and the higher prices that go with them.

Uber said it will acquire Blacklane in a move that expands its premium offerings to luxury and executive travel.

Blacklane operates in more than 500 cities across 60 countries. Uber recently launched Uber Elite to get into the chauffeur sector.

Palantir said it inked a new 5-year deal with Stellantis to support its AI and data initiatives. Palantir said Stellantis will broaden its use of Palantir Foundry and Palantir AI Platform (AIP). Stellantis has already established its data ontology in Foundry as the two companies have worked together since 2016.

• Palantir delivers strong Q4, sees 2026 US commercial revenue surge ahead
• Palantir and Nvidia build sovereign, on-premises AI reference architecture

Stanford published a study in Science on LLMs that found that AI affirmed users' actions 49% more often than humans on average including in cases involving deception, illegality and other harms.

The short version from researchers is here, but the paper is a better and more nuanced read.

The conclusion:

"AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences. Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making. Yet because it is preferred by users and drives engagement, there has been little incentive for sycophancy to diminish. Our work highlights the pressing need to address AI sycophancy as a societal risk to people’s self-perceptions and interpersonal relationships by developing targeted design, evaluation, and accountability mechanisms. Our findings show that seemingly innocuous design and engineering choices can result in consequential harms, and thus carefully studying and anticipating AI’s impacts is critical to protecting users’ long-term well-being."