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The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a "basic expectation" for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand's government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK.
She characterized the nation's public service as "scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud" and said it operates a "complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions."
"Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies," she added.
Aotearoa's answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer "to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities."
Minister Willis mentioned a "recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients" as an example of the sort of thing she hopes to replicate.
She said the planned overhaul will therefore "reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings."
The government plans to cap departmental budgets and says that combined with redundancies it will save NZ$2.4 billion ($1.4 billion) over four years – less than one percent of all core government spending.
Plenty of tech companies have made substantial redundancies that they justify as necessary to create an appropriate workforce for the age of AI, an explanation we've seen deployed to explain deep cuts at Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Meta, and Arctic Wolf.
Few governments have done likewise, but one early high-profile effort – the Elon-Musk-led "Department of Government Efficiency" – hoped to use AI to improve government operations but left behind little evidence it had succeeded.
New Zealand is blessed with many resources and extraordinary natural beauty, but has a modest tax base – yet residents expect a high level of government services. Minister Willis's plan is therefore a very big bet on AI.
FreeBSD isn't Linux, but if you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was.
I'm not gonna lie: I don't give FreeBSD (or any of the BSDs) the attention they deserve. The reason for that is simple: I'm a Linux guy.
[...] FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that is descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and was developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable hardware. Since its inception, FreeBSD has been the most widely used BSD-derived operating system.
FreeBSD maintains a complete system: kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation. This is in contrast to Linux, which only provides a kernel and drivers while relying on third parties for system software.
Think of FreeBSD as a more challenging version of Linux. This operating system doesn't hold your hand, so you might learn a thing or two as you install it and the software you require.
Even for a seasoned Linux veteran like me, FreeBSD can often be a head-scratcher.
There's an old adage that goes something like this:
BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.
Essentially, FreeBSD is Unix, where Linux is based on Unix. To that end, FreeBSD (and most of the BSDs) make for amazing server operating systems. If you were to ask any long-in-the-tooth geeks about server operating systems, they'd likely say that BSD is what you want. There really isn't a more stable operating system on the planet.
And that's one of the big draws to FreeBSD: it is as rock-solid as they come.
To frame it better... [Ed. note: requisite car analogy follows]
Imagine two companies that make cars. One outsources all of its components from other manufacturers and assembles them in its warehouse. The second builds all of its components and also assembles them in its warehouse.
As you might assume, the second manufacturer's cars most likely work and perform better than the first because it knows every part that goes into creating the car and can make all sorts of adjustments to improve every aspect of it. The first manufacturer, on the other hand, doesn't have nearly the control over how those components are built.
FreeBSD is the manufacturer that builds everything in-house.
[...] Before I dive into this, I've covered a different flavor of BSD, GhostBSD, which was actually much easier than FreeBSD. GhostBSD is to BSD what Ubuntu is to Linux, whereas FreeBSD is to BSD what Arch is to Linux.
Although the FreeBSD installer is strictly command-line, it's not hard. In fact, once you start the installer, you can accept nearly all of the defaults simply by hitting Enter on your keyboard. Yes, you'll have to type/verify a root password and then create a standard user, but that's pretty much the gist of the installation.
However, once the installation is complete, all you wind up with is an operating system without a GUI. It's all commands at this point.
Naturally, I decided to dig in and install the KDE Plasma desktop environment on my FreeBSD installation, and it was not nearly as easy as it is on Linux. Here are the steps I had to take to add KDE Plasma to FreeBSD.
= Install all of the necessary packages with pkg install kde plasma6-sddm-kcm sddm xorg.
= Enable/start dbus with service dbus enable && service dbus start.
= Enable/start the login manager with service sddm enable && service sddm start.Once that was taken care of, I had a usable KDE Plasma desktop.
[...] In the end, I learned quite a bit after my experience with FreeBSD. First and foremost, FreeBSD is definitely not Linux, but my Linux skills certainly came in handy. As well, FreeBSD takes some extra effort to get up and running as a desktop OS, but the stability you gain for that time spent is well worth it.
FreeBSD is also really fast. I've seen Linux perform incredibly well, but FreeBSD kind of puts it to shame.
With all of that said, am I willing to make the jump from Linux to FreeBSD? Probably not. The biggest reason for that is the simplicity of Linux. Everything I do in FreeBSD takes considerably more time than it does on Linux. Given how busy I am these days, I don't have the extra time to spend getting a desktop functional, especially when on Linux it "just works."
However, whenever stability is absolutely key, you can bet FreeBSD will be my first choice.
So when all was said and done, it seems he didn't switch to BSD, but it would be interesting to hear from those who have switched from Linux to a BSD flavor and what your transition experience was.
FBI will pay vendors to help it track and search for vehicles nationwide:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced plans to buy nationwide access to a network of license plate readers, saying it will award contracts to one or more vendors that can offer "near real time" information from cameras across the US. The proposed contract is for the FBI Directorate of Intelligence.
"To evaluate and manage threats to personal safety, property, and law enforcement, the FBI requires professional service firms that can provide License Plate Readers (LPRs) for tracking subjects on roads and highways over the US and its territories," the FBI said in a Request for Proposals (RFP) published on May 14. The FBI said the winning bidder or bidders "must provide law enforcement and/or commercial license plate reader data provided through the Contractor's existing platform." The system must cover 75 percent of locations, the FBI said.
The system must offer the ability to search for license plate information "and other descriptive data such as vehicle description information, time/date criteria, and geo-location criteria," the FBI said. "Additionally, the system must provide search result notifications. The Contractor system must have the ability to access and/or query cameras across the United States and its territories. The Contractor system must be capable of providing this data in near real time."
Contractors have to be able "to share/create maps depicting camera coverage (i.e. heat mapping)," and "provide the FBI the source of information (i.e. red-light cameras, repossession vendors, speed cameras, etc.)," the FBI said. The FBI said it needs to be able to search the database for partial or full plate numbers, plate states, addresses, locations where a plate was scanned, and vehicle makes and models.
The RFP divides the proposal into six regions covering the continental US, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and territories such as Guam and the US Virgin Islands. The FBI said it may award contracts to one or two vendors in each region. The deals can be for up to five years, with all deals combined potentially worth $36 million. The FBI said a contractor's system has to be available to FBI users via a website.
Flock and Motorola Solutions are well-positioned to bid on the contract, as 404 Media noted yesterday. Both companies could win part of the job, as the FBI said it may award contracts to multiple vendors to achieve its desired level of access.
Flock's Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are sold to local police departments. The company boasts of having deals with "over 12,000 public safety customers including cities, towns, counties, and business partners." Motorola Solutions sells license plate reader cameras that can be installed on busy roadways or mounted on police cars.
License plate reader cameras have raised concerns about privacy, data security, and errors in plate number recognition systems leading to wrongful arrests. 404 Media reported last year that local police departments performed searches of the Flock license plate reader system for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), "giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for."
The FBI already "runs a License Plate Reader program to facilitate LPR information sharing with and between its law enforcement partners," a Congressional Research Service report says. The US agency "maintains a hot list of vehicle data against which law enforcement agencies can compare their LPR data."
The FBI intelligence division's plan to obtain direct access to an extensive network of cameras could help expand that information sharing. As the FBI notes, its intelligence division shares information with a variety of federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies.
Flock itself temporarily provided access to Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, the Secret Service, and Naval Criminal Investigative Service as part of a pilot last year. Flock confirmed the pilot to the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), according to Wyden. Flock says it has federal customers "including National Parks, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and military bases," but that it does not work with ICE.
Federal attempts to access data could be limited by company policies. Flock says that communities using its cameras may grant data access to federal agencies, but that sharing with federal agencies is disabled by default. In March, Flock said it was "defining a new relationship with federal law enforcement," including conditions to maintain local control over the sharing of data.
"Flock data belongs to the agency that owns the cameras. There is no backdoor into Flock. Any access is explicitly permission-based and opt-in by the local agency," the company said.
We contacted Flock and Motorola Solutions and will update this article if they provide any comment.
There are also state laws limiting data access. California prohibits state and local agencies from sharing ALPR camera data with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in January 2024 that dozens of California law enforcement agencies violated the law by sharing ALPR information with out-of-state agencies.
A Virginia law enacted last year imposed similar limits. The FBI's request for proposals said contractors must identify the location of servers where data is stored to verify compliance with state and local laws on license plate reader data.
Europe's hunt for secure, high-capacity satellite communications infrastructure has produced a laser-equipped mountaintop ground station in northern Greece.
Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser-based communications between satellites and Earth.
The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance. Its job is to receive data from satellites via infrared laser links rather than the radio systems that space operators have relied on for decades.
PeakSat and ERMIS-3, two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA's wider Greek IOD/IOV mission program, both carry Astrolight's ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal. Astrolight also built the ground segment, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup.
Astrolight CEO Laurynas Mačiulis told The Register that the company originally pursued laser communications after concluding it "would need to tap into the optical spectrum," as demand for satellite bandwidth continues to grow. He described optical connectivity as "one of the enabling technologies for further expansion into space."
The company says the station uses an 808-nanometer laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver capable of receiving data at up to 2.5 Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams that are harder to intercept or jam while also supporting significantly higher throughput.
The engineering problem, however, is slightly more complicated than pointing a laser pointer at the sky and hoping for the best.
"You have two moving objects that try to establish a laser link, which means trying to point a very, very narrow laser pointer at your object, which is potentially tens of thousands of kilometers away, moving at eight kilometers per second," Mačiulis said.
ESA and its partners are pitching optical comms partly as an answer to an increasingly crowded radio spectrum, but the tech is also drawing attention from defense and dual-use operators interested in more resilient communications systems.
"There is a need for networking in space, both for connectivity and tactical reasons, and dual-use defense applications," Mačiulis said, adding that future satellite constellations "will inevitably rely on optical links, because that gives information superiority and security and resistance to jamming electronic warfare."
He added "there's also sovereignty aspects, which means that there will never be a single player – there cannot be just Starlink."
The EU has chosen Swedish investment giant EQT to run a new €5bn fund aimed at keeping Europe's most promising deep tech companies on home soil.
The European Innovation Council (EIC) has selected Stockholm-headquartered EQT as fund manager for the Scale-up Europe Fund, following a competitive selection process that drew expressions of interest from December 2025 to February 2026.
The fund is the largest of its kind ever launched in Europe and will direct growth capital at high-potential companies across a range of strategic sectors, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, clean energy, space technology, biotech and medical innovation.
The core goal of the fund is to close a persistent late-stage financing gap that has long pushed European scale-ups to raise capital elsewhere and, in many cases, to relocate abroad altogether.
The new multibillion-euro fund was initially announced back in October 2025, and is designed to build on the ‘choose Europe to start and scale’ strategy launched earlier last year.
With an initial goal of €5bn, the Commission eventually hopes to raise €25bn for the scale-up fund, a spokesperson said at the time.
Sweden’s EQT is one of Europe’s most established global investment firms, and was chosen by the EIC board, it said, on the basis of its track record in growth equity, fundraising capability and commitment to housing a dedicated investment team within the EU.
The firm brings a broad, pan-European presence and a strong institutional infrastructure that the EIC said was well-suited to the scale and ambition of the mandate.
The fund has already assembled a strong group of founding investors alongside the European Commission, including Novo Holdings, CriteriaCaixa, Santander/Mouro Capital, Dutch pension fund ABP (managed by APG), Allianz, Denmark’s EIFO, and a consortium of Italian foundations including Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Intesa Sanpaolo and Fondazione Cariplo.
The breadth of that group, spanning pension funds, banks, foundations and sovereign-backed institutions from across the continent, suggests wider confidence in the fund’s structure and return potential.
EQT and the EIC will now finalise the legal agreements covering the fund’s structure, governance and investment framework. Founding investor commitments are moving through internal due diligence and board approvals in parallel, with first closing expected within weeks.
The fund and its new manager will be formally presented at the EIC Summit on 3 June, with first investments planned for autumn 2026.
“Europe’s competitiveness hinges on scaling our own innovation, in our own strategic sectors, with our own capital,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, Europe’s commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation. “This is proof of what Europe can achieve when we align our resources.”
Previously: European Commission: Make Europe Great Again for Startups
https://obsoletesony.substack.com/p/the-coolest-record-player-ever-made
Back in 1983, portable music was changing fast. Cassette tapes were at their peak, compact discs were the shiny new thing, and vinyl records, once the heart of hi-fi, were fading out. Sony, the company that made music personal with the Walkman, had a wild idea: a turntable you could carry, stand upright, or even mount on a wall. They called it the Flamingo, a name inspired by the idea of balancing on one leg, much like the bird. The PS-F5 and PS-F9 didn't fly off the shelves, but their clever design still turns heads today. This is the story of a record player that did its own thing and earned a quiet spot in tech history.
Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has declared the project's security mailing list has become "almost entirely unmanageable" due to multiple researchers using AI to find bugs and then filling the list with duplicate reports.
Torvalds used his weekly state of the kernel post to deliver release candidate four for Linux 7.1 and report "fairly normal" progress towards a full release.
He then pointed kernelistas to the project's documentation, which he wrote "might be worth highlighting" as "the continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools."
"People spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or saying 'that was already fixed a week/month ago' and pointing to the public discussion," Torvalds complained.
The Penguin Emperor believes that kind of chatter is "all entirely pointless churn" and isn't productive because "AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved – and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters can't even see each other's reports."
He then offered an opinion on how best to use AI to improve software security.
"AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work," he wrote. "Feel free to use them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better experience."
"The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am," he added, "but that's the core gist of it."
"So just to make it really clear: If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on *top* of what the AI did. Don't be the drive-by 'send a random report with no real understanding' kind of person. OK?"
AI will indeed eat the world – if your world involves software-size margins:
The future of AI is unwritten, but the writing is on the wall – your margin is my opportunity.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said as much more than a decade ago in support of the e-souk's low-price, low-margin sales strategy.
That opportunity exists in the AI training and inference business. But perhaps not for long.
Two leading American AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are not actually profitable at this point, but their pitch to investors is something along the lines of "just hang in there a few more years and keep sending cash."
Given reports that Claude Code subscribers paying $200 a month can potentially consume $5,000 worth of tokens and that OpenAI is also losing money on subscriptions, it starts to become a bit clear why Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have already started pushing customers toward metered usage pricing. AI revenue needs to go up for frontier model makers to survive. And then AI adoption needs to grow.
Government agencies and large corporations that don't keep a close eye on fees may be terrified enough of AI-enabled exploitation to pay a premium for models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5.
But more price-sensitive folk may shop for cheaper tokens. And they're likely to find them.
[...] Open weight models like GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4-Pro, and Qwen3-Coder-Next are already adequate for less demanding software development work and some, like Qwen3.6-27B, run quite well on suitably provisioned local hardware.
US companies are estimated to have a lead of about seven months on Chinese AI companies. But that race will not go on forever. Even if US AI models continue to improve at their current pace, open weight models from China and elsewhere should match current leaders Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI GPT-5.5 by the end of 2026.
At that point, better benchmarks will no doubt be welcomed, but they won't be necessary. Commodity AI will be good enough for enterprise and entrepreneurial software development. And maybe other uses will emerge, but coding right now is what people are paying for.
[...] Anthropic and OpenAI need pricing and adoption to go up in order to thrive. Their margin is their vulnerability. They're going to strike deals with incumbents to make their models available on desktop and mobile hardware, particularly given the space and power constraints of phones. That will come at a cost.
The likely winners will be the companies that control software distribution and delivery – operating system vendors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Absent regulatory or legal barriers, supply constraints, or practical obstacles, prices face downward pressure where margins are high. And when you're many billions in the hole like Anthropic and OpenAI, that makes escape more difficult.
In his presentation, Evans observes, "Sometimes software eats the world, and sometimes it only nibbles.
Of the world's most powerful supercomputers, nine of the top 10 are powered by GPUs, but that might not be the case for much longer.
As chipmakers like Nvidia prioritize AI FLOPS over the ultra-precise floating point calculations used in scientific computing, US National Labs are turning to new chip architectures to get their FP64 fix.
Among the candidates is NextSilicon's Maverick-2, a dataflow processor designed explicitly with the 64-bit floating point mathematics that dominate the Department of Energy's most important simulations.
Despite its name, the Department of Energy is concerned with far more than the US' power grid. It operates some of the largest publicly known supercomputers in the world, which are responsible for everything from simulating the physics of nuclear weapons at the moment of criticality and bioweapons defense to public health and safety.
Since the Titan Supercomputer made its debut in 2012, a growing number of these supercomputers have been powered by GPUs from Nvidia, and more recently AMD.
But that's not the case for Sandia National Laboratory's new Spectra supercomputer, which was built in collaboration with Penguin Solutions and NextSilicon.
Compared to exascale systems like Frontier or El Capitan, Spectra is tiny. The machine counts 64 nodes and 128 of NextSilicon's "runtime-configurable" accelerators.
But scale isn't the point. Spectra is a test bed for NextSilicon's Maverick-2. This week, Sandia gave the chips the thumbs up, announcing that the big iron had met all of its system acceptance requirements, opening the door for the chips to be deployed in larger systems in the future.
Despite some similarities to Nvidia's B200, Maverick-2 is a very different beast. Instead of the standard von Neumann compute architecture that underpins most CPUs and GPUs today, NextSilicon's chips employ a reconfigurable dataflow architecture.
The processor's two compute dies comprise a grid of arithmetic logic units interconnected in a graph. Each unit is configured at runtime to perform a specific operation, whether it be addition, multiplication, or some other logic operation.
But the chip's real trick is overlapping data flow and compute. As soon as data reaches the next unit in the pipeline, it's computed immediately, no waiting for load-store operations to shuffle data around.
According to NextSilicon, this dramatically improves the performance and efficiency of the chips in real-world workloads.
Dataflow architectures aren't new. Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova have all built chips based on the concept. However, all of these designs are aimed at AI inference or training. NextSilicon's is one of the few we've seen aimed at HPC.
Dataflow is notoriously difficult to program for, which is likely why the chip startups that have built chips around it have largely offered them as a managed or white glove service rather than selling bare metal servers.
Rather than trying to port workloads to run on its chips, NextSilicon has built a compiler that it claims allows it to run any existing C, Python, Fortran, or CUDA codebases on its chips. As we understand it, it works by initially running these workloads on the CPU. The compiler then captures the compute graph, maps it to the chips, and then optimizes it to maximize performance.
[...] In the US, the bigger challenge may be competing with chip designers' shareholders. AI has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world; HPC by comparison remains an important, albeit niche market.
The 24 Megawatt subsea AI facility houses 2,000 servers and uses ocean water for passive cooling:
Cooling has become a major bottleneck for modern AI data centers, where dense GPU racks can consume hundreds of kilowatts, converting nearly all of that energy into heat. The underwater design uses surrounding seawater as a passive heat sink, sharply reducing cooling power requirements.
Chinese media reports claim the facility achieves a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) below 1.15, placing it among the most energy-efficient large-scale data centers in operation. Traditional enterprise data centers often operate closer to 1.5 or higher, meaning a significantly larger portion of their total electricity consumption goes toward cooling and supporting infrastructure rather than computation itself.
The project also reflects China’s broader push to integrate renewable energy directly into digital infrastructure. The underwater data center is connected to nearby offshore wind farms, allowing a substantial portion of its electricity demand to be supplied directly from renewable generation sources. As AI expansion drives explosive growth in electricity consumption worldwide, countries and hyperscalers are increasingly exploring unconventional infrastructure approaches to address both energy availability and thermal management constraints.
However, underwater data centers also introduce substantial engineering and operational challenges. Saltwater corrosion, long-term pressure sealing, subsea cable reliability, and maintenance accessibility remain major concerns. Replacing failed hardware is considerably more complex than in conventional facilities, where technicians can physically access racks within minutes. Operators therefore rely heavily on sealed modular designs, remote monitoring systems, and highly redundant infrastructure intended to minimize the need for physical intervention.
The Shanghai project follows earlier experimental efforts such as Microsoft’s Project Natick, which tested submerged data center capsules off the coasts of Scotland and California. Microsoft ultimately discontinued the program commercially, but the trials demonstrated that underwater deployments could achieve lower hardware failure rates.
Offshore-powered, ocean-cooled data center projects are continuing to emerge worldwide as AI infrastructure power and cooling demands continue to soar. Last month, we reported on a Peter Thiel-backed startup, Panthalassa, which is developing wave-powered floating data centers designed to operate far offshore using ocean water for passive cooling while drawing electricity from onboard renewable energy systems.
Humanoid looking robots sorting parcels is the new cat video that the Internet can't stop watching? Still not everyone is convinced that it's real or if it is fake, or somewhere in between. Why after all would the robots touch their faces if not for the VR people removing their goggles etc?
Figure AI streamed humanoid robots sorting packages for 8 hours straight — and not everyone is convinced it was fully real
The livestream is certainly quite hypnotic to watch — and it's also a hit, with 10 million views on the original video, prompting one Redditor to quip that the bots are "stealing jobs from warehouse workers AND streamers".
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/the-internet-cant-stop-watching-figure-ais-humanoid-robots-handling-packages/
https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/figure-ai-streamed-humanoid-robots-sorting-packages-for-8-hours-straight-and-not-everyone-is-convinced-it-was-fully-real
What if you posted a famous painting and told people it was AI generated?
A poster wrought some moderate havoc this week when they shared a cropped image of a real Monet painting while claiming it was an AI fake, unleashing a flood of ill-informed reactions and muddled discourse. So, you know, it was just another day online.
"I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI," read the original post, published to X-formerly-Twitter yesterday by an anonymous conceptual artist who goes by the pseudonym "SHL0MS."
"Please describe, in as much detail as possible," he continued, "what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting."
Commenters were quick to jump in to explain why, in their view, the alleged AI image was worse than the real work of the French impressionist master. According to one, the image was an "incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens." Another lamented that there was no "coherent composition," while someone else shared that the painting seemed "busy, artificial, nature in turmoil, polluted." Another commenter said that the allegedly AI-generated image seemed as if it was "trying too hard" to resemble Monet's later paintings, which he created when he was close to blindness. Others shared that the image was "obvious" AI slop.
[...] As is to be expected, other commenters were quick to dunk on the posters who'd insulted the fake-AI-fake-Monet. Many interpreted the harsh yet ill-informed reaction to the image as an example of "knee-jerk" AI distaste and foolish "AI hysteria."
[...] More than ever before, a lot of the web is fake — a reality that makes it shockingly easy to manipulate actual truth. And in an online world chock full of millions of post-happy armchair experts, insight from genuine experts is perhaps more valuable than ever. Now more than ever: think before you post! Better yet, do a little research before sounding off, or seek insights from informed specialists.
"I think this experiment," commented designer Paul Macgregor, "probably says more about Twitter than it does about AI and art."
Brits increasingly suspect the AI jobs revolution may end with fewer graduate roles, richer shareholders, and possibly riots.
New research from King's College London found that more than one in five people in the UK believe AI could eliminate jobs quickly enough to trigger civil unrest, as anxiety over automation, hiring freezes, and white-collar displacement continues to bleed out of Silicon Valley boardrooms and into public opinion.
The survey found 69 percent of workers are worried about the economic impact of AI-driven job losses, while 57 percent think the technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. More than half also agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
University students appeared especially gloomy. Around a third said rapid AI-driven job losses could lead to civil unrest, while 60 percent believe the technology will make the graduate job market significantly tougher by the time they finish university. The study also found that almost nine in ten students who use AI in their studies have already encountered problems with it, including factual errors and completely fabricated sources.
Unlike much of the AI industry's favorite future-of-work PowerPoint optimism, many employers admitted AI-fueled disruption is already happening. The study found 22 percent of employers have already made roles redundant or reduced hiring because of AI, rising to 29 percent among large organizations.
These findings sit in sharp contrast to years of increasingly grand promises from AI vendors about productivity gains and workplace transformation. Earlier this year, analysts predicted AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US jobs by 2030, while another survey found executives increasingly valued human workers less after rolling out AI tools.
The public also appears deeply unconvinced that the financial upside from AI will be shared particularly widely. Most respondents across every group surveyed said they expect the economic gains from AI to flow mainly to wealthy investors and large companies rather than workers or wider society.
Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King's College London, said workers and students were watching AI development "with more fear than excitement."
"The public, workers, young people and university students are watching the rapid development of AI with more fear than excitement, with real concern for what it will do to jobs, particularly at entry levels," he said.
Duffy added that the public remains unconvinced by repeated claims that AI will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. "Only a quarter agree with the World Economic Forum that AI will create twice as many jobs globally as it will eliminate by 2030," he said.
The study also found a growing public appetite for governments to slow things down a bit before the labor market turns into a live-action stress test. Around two-thirds backed tighter AI regulation, even if it slows development, while the majority also supported government-funded retraining schemes and taxes on companies replacing workers with AI.
Not everyone is fully aboard the doom train just yet. Employers remained substantially more optimistic than the public, with most saying AI is currently assisting workers rather than replacing them, and almost 70 percent saying they are excited about new job opportunities opening up as a result of AI.
Whether the AI industry eventually delivers its promised wave of new jobs and prosperity is still an open question. The British public, however, already sounds unconvinced. ®
These days, one would be forgiven for forgetting that SpaceX is, at its core, a rocket company.
Consider the company's mega deals over the last year. SpaceX paid $17 billion—more than it has spent developing every one of its rockets—to EchoStar for wireless spectrum to boost its Starlink network. It revealed plans to launch 1 million orbital data centers. SpaceX merged with xAI in a deal that valued Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm at $250 billion, and it announced plans to become a major computer chip manufacturer. And earlier this month, SpaceX sold an enormous amount of ground-based compute to Anthropic.
As a result of all this activity, an impending IPO will value the company at something like $1.5 or $2 trillion. That's trillion, with a t.
So yes, one might reasonably ask what SpaceX does these days. Because all the buzz, all the Wall Street euphoria, and all the financial frisson are only tangentially related to what SpaceX cut its teeth on during its first 25 years: becoming the globally dominant player in launch. It largely concerns telecommunications and AI data services.
And yet everything SpaceX aspires to accomplish in the next quarter of a century, all of its enormous valuation, is predicated on a new launch vehicle. A rocket that, to date, has a decidedly mixed record of success. A rocket that has not flown in seven months. A rocket that, finally, may return to the skies on Wednesday.
We are speaking, of course, of Starship—a truly revolutionary rocket. If it works. And after a long period of development and three years of test flights and setbacks, it kind of has to.
[...] Teething challenges notwithstanding, SpaceX is increasingly counting on Starship to be the bedrock of its launch initiatives.
After conducting 165 Falcon 9 launches last year, the company anticipates flying the workhorse rocket fewer times this year. SpaceX has also stopped flying the Falcon 9 from one of its two Florida pads, Launch Complex-39A at Kennedy Space Center. This facility will now focus on Starship launches.
Additionally, last month, SpaceX retired one of its two Florida-based seagoing landing platforms from service for future use as a transporter to ferry Starships and Super Heavy boosters from SpaceX's factory in South Texas to Florida.
This is a bold bet because, after a decade and a half, the Falcon 9 has become the most successful launch vehicle in the world, setting records for reuse, longevity, price, and cadence. Because of its reusable first stage and payload fairing, SpaceX has pared back internal launch costs to about $15 million. This affords the company a huge advantage over Starlink competitors who, for a similar launch capability, must pay four to six times this amount. SpaceX charges a base price of $74 million for a Falcon 9 launch to external customers.
[...] Despite its high flight rate, the Falcon 9 manifest is largely filled out for the next two years. The market, quite simply, is consuming available launch capacity faster than it is being created. So as much as SpaceX wants to obsolete the Falcon 9 rocket, it remains essential to almost everyone outside of China and Russia.
Many other people are counting on Starship beyond the walls of the Starfactory in South Texas.
Tom Patton, an author at The Journal of Space Commerce, recently wrote about the need for Starship to reach a "commercial" cadence for many space businesses to achieve their aims. These space companies, particularly those interested in large constellations of orbital data centers and other satellites, are basing their business models on a commercially available Starship.
[...] But first, Starship V3 must fly successfully and then become orbital. After that, SpaceX will begin deploying its larger Starlink satellites and start working toward orbital refueling. NASA then has dibs on lots of flights in 2027 and 2028 when Starship is slated to fly as part of Artemis III, make a demonstration landing on the Moon, and then fly an actual lunar landing with humans. Including refueling launches, this accounts for dozens of missions, and the company has recently signaled to NASA that it will prioritize the government program.
[...] So the stakes surrounding this Starship launch are really quite high. The US commercial space industry is depending on lower launch costs and higher capacity. NASA's lunar ambitions, to a great degree, hinge on its success. And the stakes are highest of all for SpaceX.
Starlink direct-to-cell? Orbital data centers? SpaceX's fantastic valuation after its IPO? An eventual city on Mars?
All of these rely entirely on Starship fulfilling its promise of rapid, low-cost, reusable launch. Starship must not just work; it must work far, far more efficiently than any rocket ever built, while simultaneously being the most colossal thing our species has ever launched into space.
CFO says GPU rentals are 'structurally higher margin than CPU cloud'
Chinese web giant Baidu has told investors its rare ability to build and operate AI infrastructure at scale represents a new high-margin business that its customers can't avoid.
Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO, chairman and co-founder Yanhong Li said GPU cloud revenue increased by 184 percent year-over-year which represented "growth well above the broader market."
CFO Haijian He said that Baidu's GPU cloud "is structurally higher margin than traditional CPU cloud, driven by stronger demand, tighter supply chain, higher technical barriers and pricing power." He added his view that AI applications are "naturally high-margin business, driven by sticky and subscription-based models and operating leverage over time."
Dou Shen, the president of Baidu's AI Cloud Group, remarked "While high-quality supply is relatively tight, customers prioritize proven stability and availability, not just cost."
"For enterprises, it's not only about the peak chip performance," he said. "What matters more is the stability at scale, compatibility with mainstream models and frameworks, migration costs and friction, support for a large-scale cluster deployment and ultimately, cost efficiency."
He thinks the AI market will "increasingly consolidate around players who can deliver on all of these dimensions" and thinks Baidu is nailing them.
[...] Baidu is one of many hyperscalers building its own AI chips and ecosystems, so if the Chinese company's experience is universal the enormous sums of cash US-based clouds are spending on AI infrastructure may well pay off over time.
[...] Baidu's AI revenue numbers remain modest – even the massive growth mentioned above saw its AI cloud revenue reach RMB 8.8 billion ($1.3 billion). But the company was pleased that AI-related products accounted for over half of all revenue for the first time, accounting for RMB 13.6 billion $2 billion) of the quarter's RMB 26 billion take ($3.8 billion).
Without the spike in AI-related sales, Baidu's quarterly revenue would have gone backwards.