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★ TOP STORY[ ATA ]Model·1d ago

The hidden cost of Google's AI defaults and the illusion of choice

Many people are hoping—nay, praying—that the potential AI bubble will burst soon. But to hear Google tell it, generative AI is the future, and the company’s products have to change to keep up with the technical reality. As a result, Gemini is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Google ecosystem. Generative AI feeds on data, and Google has a lot of your data in products like Gmail and Drive. What does that mean for your privacy, and what happens if you don’t want Gemini peeking over your shoulder? Well, it’s kind of a mess. The amount of data Gemini retains depends on how you access the AI, and opting out of data collection can mean running straight into so-called “dark patterns,” UI elements that work against the user’s interest. This is the future? Google doesn’t train AI with…

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1d ago
Researchers try to cut the genetic code from 20 to 19 amino acids
The genetic code is central to life. With minor variations, everything uses the same sets of three DNA bases to encode the same 20 amino acids. We have discovered no major exceptions to this, leading researchers to conclude that this code probably dated back to the last common ancestor of all life on Earth. But there has been a lot of informed speculation about how that genetic code initially evolved. Most hypotheses suggest that earlier forms of life had partial genetic codes and used fewer than 20 amino acids. To test these hypotheses, a team from Columbia and Harvard decided to see if they could get rid of one of the 20 currently in use. And, as a first attempt, they engineered a portion of the ribosome that worked without using an otherwise essential amino acid: isoleucine. Changing the code…
1dResearch#codingby John Timmer
1d ago
Meta cuts contractors who reported seeing Ray-Ban Meta users have sex
In February, numerous workers from a company that Meta contracted to perform data annotation for Ray-Ban Meta reported viewing sensitive, embarrassing, and seemingly private footage recorded by the smart glasses. About two months later, Meta ended its contract with the firm. According to a BBC report today, “less than two months” after a report from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa came out featuring Sama workers complaining about watching explicit footage shot from Ray-Ban Metas, “Meta ended its contract with Sama.” Sama is a Kenya-headquartered firm that Meta contracted to perform data annotation work, including working with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems for Ray-Ban Metas. Sama claims that Meta’s cancellation of the contract affected 1,108 workers. A Meta spokesperson told BBC that Meta “decided to end our work with Sama…
1dResearch#multimodalby Scharon Harding
1d ago
Elon Musk's 7 biggest stumbles on the stand at OpenAI trial
Elon Musk seems tired and cranky. On Thursday, he took the stand for the third day in a four-week trial stemming from his lawsuit alleging that OpenAI abandoned its mission and should be blocked from taking the company public later this year. If Musk plays his cards right, Sam Altman could be ousted and OpenAI would remain a nonprofit forever. But Musk stumbled at least seven times in ways that possibly put his chances at winning in jeopardy. Most notable, 1) OpenAI’s lawyer managed to get him to make several concessions over his own lawyer’s objections. 2) He also lost a fight to keep xAI’s safety record off the table, calling his reputation as a supposed AI savior defending OpenAI’s mission into question. 3) He repeatedly appeared dishonest, as OpenAI’s lawyer showed documents contradicting his testimony. And he twice appeared…
1d#safetyby Ashley Belanger
2d ago
Sam Altman is “the face of evil” for not reporting school shooter, says lawyer
OpenAI could have prevented one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada’s history, a string of seven lawsuits filed Wednesday in a California court alleged. Ultimately, the AI company overruled recommendations from its internal safety team. More than eight months prior to the school shooting, trained experts had flagged a ChatGPT account later linked to the shooter as posing a credible threat of gun violence in the real world. In those cases, OpenAI is expected to notify police—which, in this case, already had a file on the shooter and had proactively removed guns from their home previously—but that’s not what happened. Apparently, OpenAI decided that the user’s privacy and the potential stress of an encounter with cops outweighed the risks of violence, whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal. Leaders rejected the safety team’s urgings and declined to report the user…
2d#gpt#local#safetyby Ashley Belanger
2d ago
Drone strikes on data centers spook Big Tech, halting Middle East projects
A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries. The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.” Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from…
2dHardware#codingby Jeremy Hsu
2d ago
OpenAI Codex system prompt includes explicit directive to "never talk about goblins"
The system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to “never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of “base instructions” for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to “use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed” and to “never use destructive commands like ‘git reset --hard’ or ‘git checkout --’ unless the user has clearly asked for that operation.” Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not…
2dOpen Source#coding#open-sourceby Kyle Orland
3d ago
The great American data center divide
In Tazewell County, Illinois, Michael Deppert depends on a natural pool of water beneath the sandy soils of his farm to irrigate the pumpkins, corn, and soybeans growing in his fields. So when a data center was proposed about eight miles away, he feared it would tap the same aquifer, potentially eroding crop yields and profits. Deppert, who is also the president of the local farm bureau lobby group, says locals were also “nervous” about how a data center would affect the “good, clean drinking water.” Residents launched a fierce opposition campaign, packing city council meetings and mounting petitions. After several months, the project, led by developer Western Hospitality Partners, was scrapped. “You just can’t lay down and let everybody do whatever they wish,” Deppert says. It is just one of the many pockets of resistance opening up across rural…
3dInfraby Susannah Savage, Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Eva Xiao, and Zehra Munir, FT
3d ago
GitHub will start charging Copilot users based on their actual AI usage
GitHub has announced that it will be shifting to a usage-based billing model for its GitHub Copilot AI service starting on June 1. The move is pitched as a way to “better align pricing with actual usage” and a necessary step to keep Copilot financially sustainable amid surging demand for limited AI computing resources. GitHub Copilot subscribers currently receive an allocation of monthly “requests” and “premium requests,” which are spent whenever they ask Copilot for help from an AI model. But those broad categories cover many different AI tasks with a wide range of total backend computing costs, GitHub says. “Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount,” the Microsoft-owned company wrote in its announcement. And while GitHub says it has “absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that…
3dOpen Source#inference#codingby Kyle Orland
3d ago
Humanoid robots start sorting luggage in Tokyo airport test amid labor shortage
Humanoid robots are getting a new gig as baggage handlers and cargo loaders at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport—part of a Japan Airlines experiment to address a human labor shortage as airport visitor numbers have surged in recent years. The demonstration, set to launch in May 2026, could eventually test humanoid robots in a wide range of airport tasks, including cleaning aircraft cabins and possibly handling ground support equipment such as baggage carts, according to a Japan Airlines press release. The trials are scheduled to run until 2028, which suggests that travelers flying into or out of Tokyo may spot some of the robots at work. This marks the latest foray for humanoid robots after they have already begun pilot-testing in workplaces such as automotive factories and warehouses. Most robotic productivity so far has relied on robotic arms and similarly specialized robots…
3dResearchby Jeremy Hsu
4d ago
China kills Meta’s acquisition of Manus as US-China AI rivalry deepens
China has blocked US tech giant Meta’s acquisition of the AI company Manus that was founded by Chinese tech entrepreneurs. That development indicates how difficult it has become for US and Chinese tech companies to strike and sustain such deals as government authorities on both sides take an increasingly hard line amid the deepening US-China AI rivalry. The Chinese government formally asked Meta to unwind the acquisition on April 27 after deciding to ban foreign investment in Manus based on national security concerns. It had already spent months officially scrutinizing Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus that took place in December 2025—Chinese regulators announced they were reviewing the deal in January 2026 and instructed the two Manus cofounders to not leave China while the investigation was ongoing, according to The Wall Street Journal. Manus burst onto the scene in March…
4dby Jeremy Hsu
4d ago
EU tells Google to open up AI on Android; Google says that's "unwarranted intervention"
In January, the European Commission began an initial investigation, known as a specification proceeding, into how Google has implemented AI in the Android operating system. The results are in, and the EU says Android needs to be more open, which is not surprising. Meanwhile, Google says this amounts to “unwarranted intervention,” which is equally unsurprising. Regardless of Google’s characterization of the investigation, the commission may force Google to make Android AI changes this summer. This action stems from the continent’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping law that designates seven dominant technology companies as “gatekeepers” that are subject to greater regulation to ensure fair competition. Google has consistently spoken against the regulations imposed under the DMA, but it and the other gatekeepers have been subject to the law for several years now, and there’s little chance the commission backs away…
4dModel#geminiby Ryan Whitwam
4d ago
OpenAI ends its exclusive partnership with Microsoft
Since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, the exclusive partnership between the two firms has been one of the strongest and most consequential in the AI industry. Today, though, OpenAI and Microsoft jointly announced an amended agreement that will allow the company to go beyond Microsoft’s Azure and “serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider.” The announcement clarifies that Microsoft will continue to have a license for OpenAI’s IP and models through 2032 and that Azure will remain the “primary cloud partner” for OpenAI during that time (should Microsoft continue to be able to honor that). But Microsoft’s license “will now be non-exclusive,” the announcement reads, letting OpenAI make its models available through other major cloud providers going forward. While OpenAI will continue to make the same 20 percent revenue share payments to Microsoft under…
4dby Kyle Orland
4d ago
Musk and Altman face off in trial that will determine OpenAI's future
A hotly anticipated trial starts this week, where Elon Musk will attempt to prove that OpenAI, under Sam Altman, has abandoned its mission to remain a nonprofit in order to ensure that artificial intelligence serves humanity, and not just billionaires. Many view the lawsuit as a grudge match between Musk—who left OpenAI after serving as an early major donor and advisor—and Altman—who currently runs OpenAI, despite insiders’ allegedly growing distrust in his commitment to the dominant AI firm’s mission. But the lawsuit is about much more than a couple billionaires’ big egos. The outcome could radically change the AI landscape, impacting how OpenAI runs and what resources the firm will have to uphold its mission. If Musk wins, OpenAI’s hopes of growing a for-profit arm that can fund the nonprofit could be dashed. Additionally, Brockman and Altman could be dropped…
4dInfra#inferenceby Ashley Belanger
7d ago
Report: Samsung execs worried company could lose money on smartphones for the first time
Selling smartphones used to be easy—everyone wanted one, and every new phone was a lot better than the one that came before. Things are different now that smartphones are mature products. Plenty of manufacturers have thrown in the towel, leaving big players like Samsung to sell a new phone every couple of years. But even Samsung may find it tough to turn a profit in 2026 due to the ongoing race to build more AI capacity. According to Money Today (Korean), Samsung MX (mobile experience) head TM Roh has warned company leadership that it could be headed for the first net loss on smartphones in the company’s history. Even during times of economic strife or amid pandemic-related supply chain chaos, Samsung still made money on smartphones. The skyrocketing price of DRAM and NAND may be what finally breaks the streak…
7dby Ryan Whitwam
7d ago
Google will invest as much as $40 billion in Anthropic
Google will invest at least $10 billion in Anthropic, and that amount could rise to $40 billion if Anthropic meets certain performance targets, Bloomberg reports. The investment follows Amazon’s $5 billion initial investment in Anthropic a few days ago; the Amazon deal also leaves the door open to further investment based on performance. Both investments value Anthropic at $350 billion. Anthropic has seen rapid growth in the use of its Claude models and related products, such as Claude Code, which promises to significantly increase the speed and efficiency with which companies or individuals can develop software. (The reality varies from big improvements to setbacks, depending on the nature of the project and company, how Claude Code is used, and many other factors.) Several factors contributed to Anthropic’s success in recent months, including controversies around OpenAI and its ChatGPT product and…
7dModel#gpt#claude#codingby Samuel Axon
7d ago
Man faces 5 years in prison for using AI to fake sighting of runaway wolf
A 40-year-old man was arrested after using artificial intelligence to generate a fake image of a runaway wolf that South Korean authorities said obstructed an urgent investigation, the BBC reported. After Neukgu, a 2-year-old wolf, burrowed out of a zoo in Daejeon city, officials launched an all-out effort to bring him back. The third-generation descendant’s safe return was deemed critical to a yearslong effort to revive wolf populations after native South Korean wolves became extinct in the wild in the 1960s. Concern increased nationwide, with animal rights activists worried the wolf would be injured in the wild or perhaps killed during his rescue. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, promised that rescue teams would prioritize Neukgu’s safety, The Guardian reported. Drones, police, emergency workers, and veterinarians all joined the search, alongside community members whose footage documenting the wolf’s movements helped…
7dOpen Source#safetyby Ashley Belanger
8d ago
US accuses China of “industrial-scale” AI theft. China says it’s “slander.”
The US is preparing to crack down on China’s allegedly “industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. Since the launch of DeepSeek—a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models—other AI firms have accused global rivals of using a method called distillation to steal their IP. In January, Google claimed that “commercially motivated” actors not limited to China attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper copycats. The next month, Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic to generate “over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts.” Also in February, OpenAI confirmed that most attacks it saw originated from China. For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten…
8dHardware#claude#geminiby Ashley Belanger
8d ago
Greenhouse gases from data center boom could outpace entire nations
New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Emissions estimates from air permit documents examined by WIRED show that these natural gas projects—which are being built to power data centers to serve some of the US’s most powerful AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI—have the potential to emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. As tech companies race to secure massive power deals to build out hundreds of data centers across the country, these projects represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential climate cost of the AI boom. The infrastructure on this list of large natural gas projects reviewed by WIRED is being developed to largely bypass…
8dInfraby Molly Taft, wired.com
9d ago
Anthropic tested removing Claude Code from the Pro plan
Anthropic caused a stir among developers with what appeared to be a surprise change to its pricing plan: The company signaled that Claude Code, the popular agentic development tool, would no longer be available to subscribers on the $20-per-month Pro plan. Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic’s pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) Some new users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption. After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a “small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups.” As for the reasoning, he explained: When we launched Max a year ago, it didn’t include Claude…
9dModel#claude#codingby Samuel Axon
9d ago
Google unveils two new TPUs designed for the "agentic era"
Most of the companies that have fully committed to building AI models are gobbling up every Nvidia AI accelerator they can get, but Google has taken a different approach. Most of its cloud AI infrastructure is based on its line of custom Tensor processing units (TPUs). After announcing the seventh-gen Ironwood TPU in 2025, the company has moved on to the eighth-gen version, but it’s not just a faster iteration of the same chip. The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the “agent era” is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference). Before…
9dHardware#agents#inference#trainingby Ryan Whitwam
9d ago
Indian med student rakes in thousands with AI-generated MAGA hottie
Like many medical school students, Sam was broke. The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online. Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online? But when Sam started posting generic photos of a beautiful,…
9dResearch#geminiby Ej Dickson, wired.com
10d ago
Florida probes ChatGPT role in mass shooting. OpenAI says bot "not responsible."
OpenAI now faces a criminal probe after ChatGPT advised a gunman ahead of a mass shooting at a university in Florida, where two people were killed and six were wounded last year. In a press release, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier confirmed that the investigation into OpenAI’s potential criminal liability was launched after reviewing shocking chat logs between ChatGPT and an account linked to the suspected gunman, Phoenix Ikner. The 20-year-old Florida State University student is currently awaiting trial “on multiple charges of murder and attempted murder,” Politico reported. At a press conference, Uthmeier revealed that the logs showed that ChatGPT provided “significant advice” before Ikner allegedly “committed such heinous crimes.” The attorney general emphasized that under Florida’s aiding and abetting laws, “if ChatGPT were a person,” it too “would be facing charges for murder.” For OpenAI, the probe will…
10dRelease#gptby Ashley Belanger
10d ago
Pentagon wants $54B for drones, more than most nations’ military budgets
The US military’s massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries’ defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel. Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget…
10dInfra#agentsby Jeremy Hsu
10d ago
Mozilla: Anthropic's Mythos found 271 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 150
Earlier this month, Anthropic said its Mythos Preview model was so good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company was limiting its initial release to “a limited group of critical industry partners.” Since then, debate has raged over whether the model presages an era of turbocharged AI-aided hacking or if Anthropic is just building hype for what is a relatively normal step up on the ladder of advancing AI capabilities. Mozilla added some important data to that debate Tuesday, writing in a blog post that early access to Mythos Preview had helped it pre-identify 271 security vulnerabilities in this week’s release of Firefox 150. The results were significant enough to get Firefox CTO Bobby Holley to enthuse that, in the never-ending battle between cyberattackers and cyberdefenders, “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.” “We’ve rounded the curve” Holley didn’t…
10dResearchby Kyle Orland
10d ago
Report: Meta will train AI agents by tracking employees' mouse, keyboard use
Meta will begin tracking the mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes of its US employees to generate high-quality training data for future AI agents, Reuters reports. The news organization cites internal memos posted by the Meta Superintelligence Labs team in reporting on the new Model Capability Initiative employee-tracking software. That software will operate on specific work-related apps and websites and also make use of periodic screenshots to provide context for the AI training, according to the memo. “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” the memo reads, in part, Reuters reports. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters that the collected training data will help Meta’s AI agents with tasks that it sometimes struggles with, including “things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.” “If we’re building agents to…
10dModel#trainingby Kyle Orland
10d ago
Anthropic gets $5B investment from Amazon, will use it to buy Amazon chips
Amazon has significantly boosted its multibillion-dollar bet on Claude developer Anthropic by investing an additional $5 billion—enabling Anthropic to eventually secure up to 5 gigawatts’ worth of AI chips from Amazon to help train and run its popular Claude AI models. Amazon is already one of Anthropic’s largest investors, having previously invested $8 billion in the AI startup. The latest move brings Amazon’s immediate investment up to $13 billion, and the companies have agreed to the possibility of Amazon committing another $20 billion in the future if the partnership achieves certain commercial milestones, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. The large cash infusion and prospect of obtaining more computing resources come at a crucial time for Anthropic, given the massive surge in paid subscriptions for Claude-related services early this year. That demand spike and strain on the existing cloud compute…
10dHardware#claudeby Jeremy Hsu
11d ago
Anthropic's Mythos AI model sparks fears of turbocharged hacking
Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is raising concern among governments and companies that it could outpace current cyber security defenses, turbocharge hacking, and expose weaknesses faster than they can be fixed. The San Francisco-based startup released a cyber-focused model this month, which has shown the ability to detect software flaws faster than humans but also demonstrated it can generate exploits needed to take advantage of them. In one alarming case, the Mythos model showed it could break out of a secure digital environment to contact an Anthropic worker and publicly reveal software glitches, overriding the intention of its human makers. This week, OpenAI also released its own advanced cyber model with similar capabilities. The developments have led senior international financial officials and government ministers around the world scrambling to understand the dangers, in some cases seeking access to the new…
11dReleaseby Cristina Criddle, Financial Times
11d ago
Robot runner handily beats humans in half-marathon, setting new record
Humanoid robots outran the fastest human competitors while surpassing the human world record during a half-marathon event held in Beijing on April 19. The demonstration of fast-improving robotic speed and autonomy comes as China’s tech industry is rapidly scaling up mass production of humanoid robots to explore possible uses in the real world. The fastest robot from Chinese smartphone-maker Honor notched a winning time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds while autonomously navigating the 13-mile (21-kilometer) route, according to the Global Times. That beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds recently set by Ugandan long-distance runner Jacob Kiplimo during the Lisbon Half Marathon. The winning robot design took inspiration from top human athletes by incorporating long legs measuring approximately 37 inches (95 centimeters) in length, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer for Honor, who spoke…
11dInfra#agentsby Jeremy Hsu
11d ago
Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent
Music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music have become the primary way people listen to music, which can be a lot more convenient than buying individual albums. However, this also makes it easier for AI-created tracks to worm their way into your playlists. Most streamers don’t go out of their way to label AI music, but Deezer has worked to develop technology to identify that content. In a recent update, the company says AI music is approaching half of all new uploads, and most of the supposed listeners of those streams are AI themselves. AI-generated music has taken off in the last few years, but it doesn’t get as much attention as other parts of the AI ecosystem. That’s due, in part, to the fact that AI music can fly under the radar. With the right context and prompting,…
11dby Ryan Whitwam
14d ago
Meta's AI spending spree is helping make its Quest headsets more expensive
The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19. In announcing that price increase on Thursday, the company cited the “global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—[that] is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR.” But unlike many of the other tech companies that have been pushed into similar price increases in recent months, Meta’s own spending priorities are at least partly to blame for the rising prices of those components. The company’s recent hard pivot to the “AI superintelligence” race has directly contributed to the conditions that are now making its own Quest headsets more expensive. Spending like a drunk sailor In January, Meta announced that it plans to…
14dReleaseby Kyle Orland
14d ago
Satellite and drone images reveal big delays in US data center construction
Silicon Valley has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building ever-larger AI data centers that require as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of US homes—but that massive buildout faces significant construction and power challenges along with growing local resistance. Now satellite imagery is showing that nearly 40 percent of US data center projects may fail to be completed this year as scheduled. The Financial Times drew upon satellite imagery from the geospatial data analytics company SynMax showing how much progress has been made in clearing land and laying building foundations for each data center project. It also cross-checked project progress against public statements and permit documents compiled by the industry research group IIR Energy. The resulting analysis revealed how major projects from tech companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenAI are “likely to miss completion dates by…
14dResearch#localby Jeremy Hsu
15d ago
Mozilla launches Thunderbolt AI client with focus on self-hosted infrastructure
Mozilla is the latest legacy tech brand to make a play for the enterprise AI market. But the company behind Firefox and Thunderbird isn’t releasing its own standalone AI model or agentic browser. Instead, the newly announced Thunderbolt is being sold as a front-end client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure without relying on cloud-based third-party services. Thunderbolt is built on top of Haystack, an existing open source AI framework that lets users build custom, modular AI pipelines from user-chosen components. Thunderbolt acts as what Mozilla calls a “sovereign AI client” on top of that underlying infrastructure. The combo promises to let users easily plug into any ACP-compatible agent or OpenAI-compatible API (including Claude, Codex, OpenClaw, DeepSeek, and OpenCode). The system can also integrate with locally stored enterprise data through open protocols and…
15dInfra#open-sourceby Kyle Orland
15d ago
OpenAI starts offering a biology-tuned LLM
On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI’s Life Sciences Product Lead, said the system was designed to tackle two major roadblocks faced by current biology researchers. One is the massive datasets created by decades of genome sequencing and protein biochemistry, which can be too much for any one researcher to take in. The second is that biology has many highly specialized subfields, each with its own techniques and jargon. So, for example, a geneticist who finds themselves working on a gene that’s active in brain cells might struggle to understand the immense…
15dModel#agentsby John Timmer