🍭 Everyone Got Fired, They Got A Raise 📈

Good morning. Samsung's chip workers just voted themselves a deal that includes a six-digit bonus and shared profit for a decade.

The intern asked if we could try what they did in here. HR said no.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Samsung chip workers secured the industry's first labor profit-sharing deal

• China now requires permission before AI researchers leave the country

• Trump pulled an AI safety executive order at the last minute

• Chinese models lead global AI usage for a fifth straight week

Samsung’s
💸 Bonus Heard Round The World

The Bite:

Samsung Electronics' largest union voted to approve a 2026 wage deal on Wednesday, ending a five-month standoff that came within 90 minutes of triggering the biggest strike in semiconductor history.

Nearly 74% of the 62,616 unionized workers backed the agreement, which creates a special bonus pool equal to 10.5% of operating profit from Samsung's semiconductor division.

The deal is locked in for 10 years.
Samsung shares rose as much as 8% in Seoul on the news.

Snacks:

• SK Hynix set the precedent last September with 10% profit-sharing — its workers are projected to earn $460K–$477K this year

• Samsung paid zero performance bonuses in 2024 after its chip unit posted losses throughout the memory downturn

• About 200 Samsung employees defected to SK Hynix in the four months before the deal

• A one-day walkout in April dropped foundry output 58% and memory fab output 18%

• Samsung makes a third of the world's DRAM and is one of only three companies that produce HBM chips for AI

• South Korea's presidential policy chief publicly proposed a national "citizen's dividend" from AI profits during the dispute

Why it Bites:

Every week we are looking through another round of AI-driven layoffs.

The pattern has been clean and consistent: record AI profits go up, headcount comes down, and the savings get redirected into more compute.

Workers are the variable cost in the margin expansion story.

Samsung's chip workers just flipped that script.

They looked at the same record profits everyone else is celebrating and said:

We built these things GPUs can't run without, and we want a cut, in writing.

The deal matters less for its specific numbers and more for what it demonstrates.

This wasn't just a negotiation over a raise.
It was a structural claim on AI wealth.

Backed by the credible threat of shutting down a third of the world's memory supply at the worst possible time. And it worked.

In a season where AI's labor story has been written almost entirely in pink slips…

Samsung's union just proved there's a second kind of draft available.

Steal This Prompt
✏️ Industrial Design But Make It Look Expensive

Turn a half-baked product idea into sleek industrial concept art that looks like it escaped a $200K design agency deck.

Use it to:

• Brainstorm product ideas before prototyping

• Mock up futuristic hardware or consumer tech

• Make your startup idea look suspiciously fundable

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Industrial Concept Design 

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your idea/concept and details

4. Watch it cook: suddenly your thought has industrial designer energy

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
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_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🛡️ EU Reaches AI Act Omnibus Deal, Delays High-Risk Rules To 2027
→ The European Parliament and Council agreed on May 7 to push high-risk AI compliance deadlines to December 2027, ban AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, and extend SME protections to small mid-cap companies.

🧳 China Restricts Overseas Travel For Top AI Talent
→ Beijing now requires government approval before AI researchers, founders, and executives at Alibaba and DeepSeek can travel abroad, extending restrictions previously reserved for nuclear scientists to the private AI sector.

📊 Chinese AI Models Lead Global Usage For Fifth Straight Week
→ OpenRouter data shows Chinese models hit 9.2 trillion tokens in weekly usage, a 19.89% month-over-month increase, with total global AI model invocations reaching 28.9 trillion tokens.

🏛️ Trump Postpones AI Safety Executive Order
→ The White House pulled a planned signing ceremony for an executive order establishing voluntary pre-release review of AI models, with Trump saying he "didn't like certain aspects" that could block U.S. competitiveness against China.

🏭 Samsung Union Approves $340K AI Chip Bonus Deal
→ Nearly 74% of Samsung's 62,616 unionized workers voted to accept a deal that includes a 10-year special bonus pool equal to 10.5% of semiconductor operating profit, averting a strike that threatened global chip supply.