Kickstart Monday #5: UBS now asks applicants for AI skills.
Anyone starting as a junior banker at UBS in 2027 has to show they can work with AI. Not operate ChatGPT, but deliver better results with it. Also: The tech industry is cutting more jobs than ever, New York bans AI in schools through eighth grade. And Claude has made Fermat's Last Theorem machine-checkable.
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01 · What is new
UBS now asks applicants for AI skills
Anyone applying to the Swiss bank for the 2027 intake, as a graduate or an intern in investment banking, has to show AI literacyThe ability to use AI tools properly and to know their limits. The European AI Act requires companies to support their staff in developing it.. Being able to operate ChatGPT is not enough. What is asked for is evidence of using AI responsibly and of delivering measurably better results with it. The Financial Times reported it on Sunday.
UBS is one of the first large banks to write AI skills into its formal hiring criteria. Santander has already looked for advanced users on individual programmes. Behind it lies the fact that banks are handing the routine work of junior staff to software: financial analysis, research, presentations. Morgan Stanley expects around ten percent of European banking jobs to disappear by 2030, more than 210,000 of them.
Tech companies are cutting more jobs than ever
In the first eight months of the year, 264 technology firms worldwide cut more than 205,000 jobs. In the whole of the previous year it was around 124,000. In the Bay Area alone, 12,947 cuts had been announced by early September, 27 percent more than in the entire year before.
The largest single block there is Meta with 3,715 jobs, followed by Amazon, Cisco and Oracle. Oracle has cut around 21,000 jobs within twelve months, roughly 13 percent of its workforce. The reasons given are telling: at the start of the year seven percent of the announcements named AI, by spring it was 40 percent.
Norway's sovereign fund models losses of up to 35 percent
At the request of the Norwegian finance ministry, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund has worked through what happens if the profit expectations placed on AI companies and the hoped-for productivity gains fail to arrive. The result: a 18 to 35 percent fall in the value of its equity portfolio.
At the heart of it sits a concentration riskWhen a large share of a portfolio depends on a few similar holdings. If those go wrong, spreading the rest no longer helps much.. The fund deliberately weights US equities lower than its benchmark index, and their share is still 50 percent. It does not intend to introduce caps for individual markets or sectors for now.
02 · What changes
New York bans AI in schools through eighth grade
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels announced a ban on generative AIPrograms that produce new text, images or sound rather than only searching or sorting what already exists. Tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. for around 600,000 pupils on 2 September, from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. It runs for one year, starting with the current school year.
For more than 38 previously approved programmes, the AI components are being switched off. Teachers may go on using AI for lesson planning and administration. High schools run supervised pilots, and all pupils there get lessons twice a year on how the tools work, where they are biased and where they end. A commission is to examine in the meantime what the use does to learning.
Google puts music generation into the Gemini app
Since 4 September the music model Lyria 3.5 has been in the Gemini app and in the developer interface, worldwide and for every user. Tracks of up to three minutes can be generated, with vocals and arrangement.
Google says only licensed material was used as training dataThe material a model has learned from. Who owns it and whether it could lawfully be used is the subject of several lawsuits.. Which material that is, the company does not say. The emphasis is worth noting: the week before, Sony and Warner had sued Anthropic over song lyrics.
Deadlines at a glance
- until older AI tools have to label their output in machine-readable form
- until companies above 800,000 euros in prior-year turnover have to issue invoices to other companies electronically
Recalculated on every visit.
03 · The number of the week
13 million lines
That is how much code Claude wrote so that a proof assistantA program that recomputes every step of a mathematical proof and only lets through what follows from the premises without gaps. could check Fermat's Last Theorem end to end for the first time. The theorem has counted as proved since 1995, but it had never been verified by machine.
Dozens of agents worked largely on their own for eleven days and proved 29,500 intermediate theorems along the way. Anthropic puts the consumption at around six billion tokens and the cost at 100,000 to 300,000 dollars. The mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College calls the result an extraordinary achievement.
Poll
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Daniel Klantke · Kickstart Monday #5 · klantke.com/en/blog/kickstart-monday-05