The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

Outside of tech there has been no financial payoff to US companies for using AI, now viewed as a margin-hurting cost center, as VC-backed firms burn more tokens (Torsten Slok/Apollo Global Management) [13d]
Source: Replit recently moved most AI spend from Anthropic to OpenAI, which gave 30%+ off in a deal worth $100M+/year, after Anthropic discontinued its discount (The Information) [13d]
A look at Alpha School, a network of private schools that claims to teach kids 2x as fast using AI; data shows ~50% of K-8 students missed this goal in math (Dana Goldstein/New York Times) [13d]
An interview with Ciena CEO Gary Smith, a veteran of the 2001 telecoms crash, on AI demand outpacing supply for Ciena's optical networking chips, and more (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal) [13d]
Block unveils Dessa, a "true speech-to-speech" AI model trained on "nothing but human conversation" that it says runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max or better (Jay Peters/The Verge) [13d]
Ukraine says Starshield was working normally again on Saturday morning; US officials said Trump asked Elon Musk to restore the service (Wall Street Journal) [13d]
Inside Meta's law enforcement outreach team, which uses AI and human reviewers to analyze social media posts, aiming to prevent threats like school shootings (Rachel Monroe/New Yorker) [13d]
A look at OpenAI's Project Daybreak, which lets vetted partners use its top hacking models to find and fix vulnerabilities and helped uncover PHP2Shell RCE bugs (Thomas Brewster/Forbes) [13d]
The PHP Foundation, which coordinated fixes for two critical PHP flaws, operates on a shoestring budget with one full-time staff member and 14 contractors (Toby Sterling/Reuters) [13d]
Google updates its privacy policy to clarify it could use data shared via Personal Intelligence from connected apps, including Gmail and Photos, to target ads (Shimul Sood/Android Authority) [13d]
Andy Jassy says AWS capacity for 2027 is "largely sold out" and a "good chunk" of 2028 capacity is also sold, though AWS reserves some capacity for on-demand (Catherine Perloff/The Information) [13d]
The UK plans to invest £100M to create the AI Biosecurity Lab to boost defenses against biological threats, supported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind (Liv McMahon/BBC) [14d]
OpenAI says it built an "offline world" from cached web content to train isolated frontier models to browse, search for information, and use web apps (OpenAI) [14d]