OpenAI announced its next model, codenamed Spud, finished pretraining, moved safety to Mark Chen's research org and security to Greg Brockman's scaling org, appointed Fidji Simo CEO of 'AGI Deployment', and shut down the Sora app to reallocate resources. - Sources

the potato is baked. I repeat, the potato is baked. mash the priorities.

OpenAI shutters Sora - X (formerly Twitter)

New OpenAI 'Spud' model rumored counting down for liftoff as Altman reshuffles priorities. - X (formerly Twitter)

OpenAI raises yet more money (gift link). Does Sam think winter is coming? - Bloomberg

OpenAI is shutting down its Sora video-generation app to reallocate scarce compute toward ChatGPT and revenue-generating products ahead of an expected IPO in 1–2 years, freeing capacity for world simulation research amid supply constraints. - Business Insider

$200b OpenAI nonprofit names leaders, plans to spend $1b this year. - Bloomberg

OpenAI COO Lightcap warns memory shortages pose imminent bottleneck risk for AI industry growth - Bloomberg

OpenAI releases open-source teen safety guardrails following ChatGPT wrongful death lawsuits - TNW | Artificial-Intelligence

OpenAI's 'Parameter Golf' recruitment challenge's 4th top contributor is Claude Code … presumably because they accepted PRs from the community assisted by Claude Code, not because they used it internally over Codex? - GitHub

SK Hynix plans to float shares in the United States this year to raise capital for expanded memory production driven by AI demand. - Bloomberg

Microsoft to rent Texas data center abandoned by Oracle and OpenAI - Bloomberg

Google partnered with Gap Inc. to let Gemini buy clothes from Gap brands via Google's Universal Commerce Protocol with Google Pay and Gap shipping; OpenAI is removing ChatGPT's built-in checkout in favor of retailer-operated apps. - The Verge

Who will govern AI? Nvidia secured U.S. permission to ship H200 chips to China while the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era model-notification order, issued a pro-industry AI blueprint, and states enacted AI privacy and bias laws amid warnings of growing harms. - The American Prospect

Anduril, Palantir and Scale AI are part of the group developing software to run President Trump's planned $185 billion Golden Dome antimissile shield. - The Wall Street Journal

Star Wars with military industrial complex + AI and VC

Armed and Dangerous: Arm Unveils 136-Core AI-Optimized CPU for Meta Data Centers, Claiming Double x86 Efficiency. Lotta cores in a rack holding 42 1U servers. - The Verge

Arm confirmed it will produce its own CPU for the first time, and CEO Rene Haas said the move is intended to coexist with Arm's licensing business and "won't alienate" existing chipmaker licensees. - WIRED

Alibaba's DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie C950 RISC‑V server processor, which it says is the most powerful RISC‑V chip, fabricated on 5nm with SPECint2006 >70 and an AI acceleration engine offering up to 8 TOPS supporting models like Qwen3. - The Register

China's chip industry is accelerating amid AI-driven demand, with SEMI China projecting 22–40nm manufacturing capacity will rise to 42% of global output by 2028 from 37% in 2026, prompting expanded capital spending and capacity. - Yahoo

Cache me inside: Google's TurboQuant achieves 6x cache compression and 8x speedup on H100 GPUs - Google Research

Emerald AI and NVIDIA demonstrated power‑flexible AI factories in production trials across Arizona, Virginia and Illinois that autonomously adjusted IT power, using 96 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs while Emerald's Conductor platform hit 100% alignment with 200+ power targets. - NVIDIA Blog

Very serious breach in litellm, which is a proxy a lot of enterprises use to track LLM usage. - Simon Willison’s Weblog

More info. Companies who installed poisoned app need to move fast or more bad stuff will happen, AWS account takeovers and whatnot. Could herald a new class of super-script-kiddies using AI to pry small holes in the dike and lever them into major incidents. - Snyk

Should probably take more than a single ssh key, like 2FA, to push a foundational package to thousands of big companies. Otherwise we're gonna have a catastrophic Great Blackout like in Blade Runner 2049. There’s like 6 companies like Google, AWS and CloudFlare, if they are breached, the entire cloud shuts down. And no one has a tested playbook for a cold restart, who knows how long it could take.

Judge calls Anthropic ban troubling as company seeks injunction - CNBC

Anthropic launched an "auto mode" for Claude Code that flags and blocks risky actions, as a middle ground between asking permission for everything, and than going YOLO mode and turning off all permissions, and is rolling out as a research preview to Team plan users now, with Enterprise and API access coming in the coming days. - The Verge

Anthropic's Claude Cowork 'computer use' with Dispatch lets the model control a user's Mac or Windows x64 desktop (cursor, apps, typing, web navigation) and execute phone-sent tasks, requiring Claude Pro/Marx and the desktop and mobile apps; it's in research preview. - Tom's Guide

Peter Gostev's BullshitBench, launched late February, found Google Gemini 3.0 failed to reject nonsensical prompts in over half the tests, while Anthropic's latest base models usually rejected such nonsense. - Business Insider

DeepSeek pivots toward agentic AI according to recent job postings - Bloomberg

Agents are getting better, but reliability lags. - Fortune

artificial general midwittery

If you model the environment as graphs, you can ask complex questions about what agent touches what even indirectly, what the blast radius is for problems with what system, and let agents ask complex multi-hop questions about the environment and their knowledge base. - The Potential Surface

Companies might benefit from an institutional memory layer that records how and why decisions were made in chats, emails, and meeting minutes. - Hacker Noon

Hyperagents incorporate meta-cognition to improve themselves - arXiv.org

In many ML tasks, LLMs are the simplest zero-shot approach that might work, but if you have good training data, a traditional ML pipeline performs much better. - TechRadar

Gabe Stern, Synthesia's general counsel, built and is privately testing a prototype legal avatar called Willow using Synthesia's low-code platform and a custom OpenAI ChatGPT integration, drawing on internal policies and templates; prototype took about two weeks to create. - Business Insider

AI developer tools, like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, may compress execution cycles, enable smaller teams, improve productivity, but pose risks to code quality and innovation. - Braden Kelley

Harvard Economists Estimate AI Threatens 30% of Jobs in Advanced Economies - Harvard Gazette

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Warns of Rapid AI Job Displacement - CNBC

Duke Survey: 44% of CFOs Plan AI-Related Job Cuts This Year - Fortune

A paper by LSE's Luis Garicano and Jin Li and Yanhui Wu (University of Hong Kong) finds AI 'unbundles' jobs into task-level slices, raising output and lowering prices, which can reduce headcount without full replacement, with weak-bundle roles most vulnerable. - The Register

you’re not being replaced, you’re being unbundled

AI is creating the first generation of cognitively outsourced humans. - Fast Company

U.S. colleges are reintroducing in-person and oral assessments—e.g., Cornell's 20‑minute Socratic defenses, Penn's paired oral exams, and NYU's AI-powered oral interview pilot—to curb generative-AI misuse, prompting faculty training, research and demand for assessment tech. - AP News

Neuroscientist warns AI will obsolete test-based skills, urges focus on creativity - CNBC

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is testing a standalone Siri app codenamed 'Campo' for iOS 27 with persistent text and voice conversations and personal-data access, plus a systemwide 'Ask Siri,' which Apple will highlight at WWDC on June 8. - Mashable

American Express launched the AI-native Graphite Business Cash Unlimited Card, which bundles a $300 ChatGPT credit with cash-back rewards and integrated AI-powered tools to manage spending, track expenses and automate routine tasks. - Fast Company

5 projects entrepreneurs should try: build a website, research assistant, strategic planning assistant, content creator, communication/email writing assistant - Fast Company

Amazon Acquires Fauna Robotics to Enter Consumer Humanoid Robot Market - Bloomberg

Decathlon automated seven European warehouses with Exotec Skypods, doubling one site's orders from 57,000 to 114,000 and cutting pickers at another site from 50 to 12 while reducing pickers' daily walking from over 6 miles to under 1 mile. - Business Insider

This is nuts, when’s the crash — AI cow collar edition: A startup raised a hefty funding round to support development of an AI-powered cow collar. - Financial Times

Bessie got a Series A

AI helps geologists identify landslide risk using radar and physics-guided machine learning to detect millimetre-per-year-scale ground movements, enabling rapid mapping—British Geological Survey analyzed 300,000 slopes, found about 3,000 moving and produced over 4,000 Sumatra landslide maps. - BBC

AI-powered smart signs funded by the Environment Agency were deployed at Goring Beach, Worthing and Worthing Beach House to answer bathing-water questions, route urgent reports to a 24/7 hotline and augment monitoring. - GOV.UK

AI Edge Cases and Technical Limits Stymie 100% Vehicle Autonomy - Business Insider

Fast and Furious: Tokyo Model Drift

Sebastian Mallaby's biography The Infinity Machine profiles DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis and traces his lifelong mission to create artificial general intelligence. - Financial Times

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