AI Brain Frying, Year of Anthropic, Atlassian Layoffs, and Lightning
Your Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
📊 AI in Healthcare
🧠 AI Frying Our Brains?
👩🔬 Cognitive Science
🤝 Year of Anthropic
📈 Anthropic Revenue
👩💼 Atlassian
⚡️ How Hot is Lightning?
Podcast
Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora
In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle Evans interviews RJ Kedziora, co-founder of Estenda, a company specializing in custom software and data analysis for healthcare. We discuss RJ’s journey in technology and entrepreneurship, the importance of energy management over time management, and the role of AI in healthcare. RJ shares insights into the challenges and future of AI applications, the need for ethical considerations, and the potential for personalized healthcare solutions. He also offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make a difference in the industry.
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News and Useful Reads
AI can fry our brains, even when it’s helping
More AI isn’t necessarily better for productivity. It can actually cause us to perform far worse at our jobs.
As many companies push their employees to test out the AI waters, new research warns of the effects of diving too far into the deep end. According to a new study published in the Harvard Business Review, AI tools can increase productivity, but overuse can lead to mental fatigue that makes it harder to focus and make decisions.
It’s tempting to offload your thinking to AI. Cognitive science shows why that’s a bad idea
It’s becoming easier and easier to offload cognitive tasks to AI. But if we do that, will we be able to maintain our judgement and cognitive abilities?
Such increased offloading has raised the fear that people will become overly reliant on AI. This could have unintended consequences, such as eroding our critical thinking skills and declining our overall cognitive ability.
The year of Anthropic
As a long-time ChatGPT user who has now shifted over to Claude, I can see how this really is going to be the year of Anthropic.
Anthropic spent years being the responsible AI company. In 2026, it became the most disruptive one.
Anthropic could surpass OpenAI in annualized revenue by mid-2026
Speaking of Anthropic, it seems like their growth has put them on track to surpass OpenAI this year if it continues.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue has been growing at 10× per year since reaching $1B, outpacing OpenAI’s growth of 3.4× per year. Anthropic will pass OpenAI by mid-2026 if these trends continue. However, Anthropic’s growth may be slowing—since July 2025 it has only grown at a rate of 7× per year.
Atlassian is cutting 1,600 jobs and replacing its CTO
Atlassian, the maker of Jira, has been caught up in the SaaSpocalypse and seen its share prices fall in 2026. So, unsurprisingly, they just announced layoffs to shore up that stock.
On 11 March 2026, Mike Cannon-Brookes sent a memo to staff announcing 1,600 redundancies, approximately 10% of the company’s global workforce, framed as a necessary adaptation to the AI era.
Other Interesting Finds
How hot is lightning?
My son was asking about lightning a few days ago, which led to a discussion about temperature, plasma, and the movement of electricity.
How hot is lightning?” is a bit of a trick question. Lightning itself doesn’t have a temperature, because it’s just the movement of electrical charges in the atmosphere. (You can think of it as one big spark of electricity that happens when positive and negative charges build up within a cloud, between clouds, or between a cloud and the ground.) But that doesn’t stop lightning from heating up whatever it passes through — in this case, air.