Project Rainier, a 1,200-acre site near Lake Michigan, is one of the largest operational AI data centers in the world. Amazon is using the site to train frontier artificial intelligence models entirely on its own chips. Amazon and its competitors have pledged more than $1 trillion towards AI data center projects. They are all racing to build supercomputing sites to meet an expected explosion in demand.
Tens of thousands of newly laid-off white-collar workers in the US are entering a stagnant job market with seemingly no place for them. Investors are pressuring companies to streamline operations. Nearly two million people in the US have been without a job for 27 weeks or more. Meanwhile, opportunities for front-line, blue-collar, and specialized workers are growing.
Three new physical attacks that target Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have surfaced, raising questions about the true security offered by these TEEs and the exaggerated promises and misconceptions coming from the big and small players using them.
OpenAI is sharing any prompt that requires a Google Search with Google, whoever is doing its scraping, and also with whoever's site shows up in the search results.
OpenAI has successfully converted to a more traditional corporate structure. It has turned its for-profit subsidiary into a public-benefit corporation. The new structure will make it easier for the company to raise money and attract talent, and could clear the path for an initial public offering. OpenAI continues to face litigation over its corporate status. Microsoft owns a 27% stake in the new public-benefit corporation.
Tesla is prepared to name a new Chief Executive Officer from inside the company if shareholders reject Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion pay package and he steps down. The unprecedented pay package will be voted on at the company's annual meeting on November 6. It is designed to incentivize Musk and ensure that development around AI and other new products happens within Tesla rather than with one of Musk's multiple other ventures. Shareholders will also vote on whether to invest in xAI at the annual meeting.
Nvidia and Uber plan to start rolling out a fleet of robotaxis in 2027. The companies are aiming for 100,000 vehicles, but there is no timeline yet for when they will reach that level of scale. The robotaxis will use Nvidia's latest in-vehicle computer, the Drive AGX Hyperion 10, which Nvidia claims makes cars ready for level-4 automation. It will enable vehicles to drive completely autonomously within designated areas.
1X Technologies' Neo robot is now available for preorder, with delivery expected in 2026. It costs $20,000, but the company will also offer a $499 monthly rental plan with a six-month minimum commitment. At launch, the robot may require remote operation from company representatives to get tasks done. Videos of the robot in action are available in the article.
Iru is the AI-powered platform used by the world's fastest-growing companies to secure their users, apps, and devices. With Iru, you can secure Mac, Windows, & Android, enable passwordless single sign-on to every app, and stay audit-ready for SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Iru collapses the stack and gives IT & Security time and control back.
HTTP's placeholder status code, 402: Payment Required, was meant to make payments as seamless as loading an image or video. It has been left undefined for years. Instead of protocol-native micropayments, the web economy was forced down the path of advertising, walled gardens, and awkward credit card forms. HTTP 402 has recently resurfaced as the foundation of an emerging agent-driven economy. New standards like x402 and h402 may finally make payments as native and invisible as information itself.
Feature flags are a powerful mechanism for services delivering new capabilities. They can be especially effective in helping control the blast radius in case of unforeseen problems with new features. However, they come with operational and cognitive costs, so it's important to have a way to bound the number of feature flags within the code base at any point in time. Feature flag toggles are no different than any other code changes, as they change the behavior of the service, so consider using the same mechanisms for deployment.
Meta is now spending more than a third of every dollar earned on AI infrastructure. The company announced $75.5 billion in infrastructure deals in just three months - more than most countries spend on their entire tech sector in a decade. It is betting that AI will improve ad targeting, improve new products, and create infrastructure business. However, if AI doesn't deliver proportional revenue growth, Meta is stuck with $600 billion in sunk costs, 16-year lease commitments, and massive depreciation expenses.
OpenAI spent months making the case to regulators that it was the economic heart of the California economy, and that it would be willing to leave if its plan to convert to a simpler corporate structure was blocked. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke with California Attorney General Rob Bonta nearly two weeks ago to discuss the issue, Altman made it clear that he was committed to his home state and that OpenAI wouldn't sue it or leave it. The discussion proved decisive - Bonta's office ended its extended investigation into the company. The final deal included a pledge for OpenAI to remain in California and expand its presence there.
Looking to boost your cybersecurity skills? Coursera can help you level up your career with self-paced learning programs. See your recommended credentials and start learning today [15].
Optimize repositories for AI by increasing static analysis, using 'just' for repeated agent commands, and organizing documents in a folder and referencing them in agent instructions.
Amazon is expected to start informing employees about sweeping job cuts starting today. It plans to lay off as many as 30,000 staff across its corporate workforce. The layoffs are part of a broader cost-cutting campaign that started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said earlier this year that the company's workforce could shrink further as a result of generative AI.
Anthropic gets about 80% of its revenue from corporate customers, of which it has around 300,000. Its Claude language models have been praised for their aptitude in coding. Anthropic is surprisingly close to OpenAI in revenue. It expects to get to a $9 billion annual run rate by the end of the year, a big lead in revenue per user over OpenAI.
Sam Altman's Merge Labs is a brain-computer interface (BCI) startup. It recently hired an award-winning biomolecular engineer, Mikhail Shapiro. Shapiro's past work suggests that the startup could be aiming to create a device that could link to the brain using sound waves. If Merge Labs is successful, its device may be preferable to Neuralink's BCI as it wouldn't require surgery.
The Progress Conference is a four-day event that connects people and ideas in the progress movement. The speakers at the conference discussed a technologically advanced future and provided thoughtful perspective on how we can make progress happen. This post contains notes and thoughts on some of the presentations at the conference, which had over 300 attendees.
Engineering teams lose hours every week to context switching and fragmented tools. Join Atlassian's November 20 webinar [13] to learn insights from their research on developer productivity. See how AI-driven workflows help teams reduce administrative overhead and reclaim time for actual innovation, with examples of measurable productivity gains and strategies for quantifying ROI. Register here.
This is an introductory tutorial to RISC-V assembly programming intended for those with a basic familiarity with low-level computer science concepts. RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture started its life at UC Berkeley. It is an open standard with a clean design that is quickly gaining steam and has found great success in many areas of application. The tutorial covers the 32-bit bare bones RV32I_Zicsr instruction set with a tiny subset of the privileged architecture.
Truncated IP addresses are still personal data under GDPR, especially when combined with other information that most systems routinely collect. Subnet size doesn't correlate with user anonymity. The network prefix itself contains enough information for trivial identification. Many organizations are creating compliance risks by thinking IP truncation is GDPR-compliant anonymization. What is actually needed is encryption specifically designed for IP addresses.
Companies in the US are increasingly making the calculation that they can keep the size of their teams flat, or even shrink them, without harming their businesses. Part of this is the belief that artificial intelligence will be used to automate more processes, but companies are also hesitant to make moves in an uncertain economy. The widespread caution in hiring is frustrating job seekers and leading many employees within organizations to feel stuck in place. Operating with fewer people can pose risks for companies by straining existing staff or hurting efforts to develop future leaders.
Grokipedia crashed shortly after it launched yesterday. It was live late evening with nearly 900,000 articles. Many entries closely resemble their Wikipedia counterparts, but Elon Musk's views shape how some topics are framed. For example, his own Grokipedia page features a 'Recognition and Long-Term Vision' section instead of Wikipedia's 'Accolades'.