You've probably seen the headline that AI is quietly gutting entry-level hiring. That's real, but it's not the whole story.

A new report out this week looked at 34,000 small businesses and found the ones using AI are hiring more, not less. We'll break down what's actually driving that gap, plus a jobs report dropping tomorrow, Palantir's earnings tonight, and a fresh read on how fast recent grads are actually landing roles.

Let's get into it.

Palantir reports Q2 earnings tonight after market close. Analysts expect $1.81 billion in revenue, with government revenue up 65.7% year over year and commercial up 98%. The company has beaten EPS estimates eight straight quarters running.

About $123 billion in SpaceX shares unlock this week as the post-IPO lockup period expires. The stock was already trading below its $135 IPO price heading into the unlock, so there's real risk of more downward pressure as early investors cash out.

June's JOLTS report drops tomorrow morning. May showed job openings flat at 7.6 million, and forecasters expect a slight dip to 7.5 million for June. It's the last major data point before Friday's jobs report, so tomorrow's number will shape how people read that one.

2026 layoffs are still happening, but they're running well below last year's pace. 322 layoff events have hit roughly 206,000 workers so far this year, about 40% fewer than the same point in 2025. The latest WARN notices came from Intel (101 workers, effective Aug 15), Verizon (about 211 workers between Aug 1 and 7), and FedEx Supply Chain (Aug 1).

Function Health raised $450 million in a Series C led by General Catalyst on July 31, the latest sign that health and longevity startups are still pulling in serious capital even as other funding categories cool off.

Funding

Contracts

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If you've read a headline this year about AI wiping out jobs, it was probably about a large company. A new report flips that story for small businesses.

Intuit's 2026 AI Impact Report surveyed more than 34,000 small and mid-size business owners and pulled anonymized data from 5.3 million QuickBooks businesses across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. The finding: businesses using AI are four times more likely to say it helped them hire than say it led to cuts. 78% report AI improved their productivity, 43% say it increased revenue, and only 2% report the opposite.

That's a different pattern than what you see at the enterprise level, where big companies cite AI in layoff announcements almost weekly. The difference seems to come down to scale. A 12-person shop that saves 10 hours a week on bookkeeping or customer service doesn't cut a headcount line, it reinvests that time into growth, because there wasn't slack to cut in the first place. A 12,000-person company with a redundant layer of middle management has room to cut and still call it "AI transformation."

Roughly 7 in 10 businesses across those four countries now use AI regularly, and daily use has more than doubled in some markets. That's a lot of small employers making hiring decisions with AI already baked into how they operate, not as a headline initiative but as a normal tool.

Why it matters: If you're job hunting and only looking at large companies, you're seeing the layoff-heavy side of this story. Small and mid-size businesses that have already adopted AI are a genuinely different hiring pool right now, worth targeting specifically if you can show you know how to work alongside the tools they're already using.

Two things are true about the entry-level job market at once. The share of salaried jobs open to candidates with no experience has fallen 73% over four years, down to about 1 in 50 openings from 1 in 15 in 2022. And yet 77.2% of recent grads landed a role within three months of graduating, up from 63.3% just a year ago.

That's not a contradiction so much as a sorting effect. Fewer roles are open to truly inexperienced candidates, but the grads who do land something are landing it faster, likely because they came in with internships, projects, or AI fluency that made them look less "entry-level" on paper. Employers reviewing Class of 2026 resumes are specifically screening for teamwork, problem-solving, and communication evidence, not just a degree.

Why it matters: If you're early-career or advising someone who is, the bar has moved from "have a degree" to "show you've already done the job in some form." Volunteer projects, freelance gigs, and AI-assisted portfolio work all count as evidence now.

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Turn one AI-assisted work habit into interview proof. Open a new chat with Claude or ChatGPT and paste this prompt: "Here's a task I completed this week using AI: [describe it]. Help me turn this into a 3-sentence resume bullet that leads with the business outcome, not the tool, and quantify the time or cost saved if I can estimate it." Save every bullet it generates in a running doc. By the time you're interviewing, you'll have a stack of concrete, AI-fluent proof points instead of a vague "comfortable with AI tools" line.

Will SpaceX stock recover above its $135 IPO price this week, or drop further as $123 billion in shares hit the market?

Venus may still be tearing itself apart -- new 3D simulations suggest some of its giant rift valleys formed more recently than thought. (ScienceDaily)

An interstellar comet just raced past Mars -- China's Tianwen-1 orbiter caught 3I/ATLAS's tail and glowing coma on camera. (ScienceDaily)

A 1,600-year-old mummy held a piece of Homer -- a fragment of the Iliad turned up reused as embalming material in Egypt. (ScienceDaily)