Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the human workforce it sold as AI
Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the human workforce it sold as AI

Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on 30 September. The marketplace is 21 years old, and it paid people a few cents at a time to do work that computers could not. Jeff Bezos once called it “artificial artificial intelligence”. A banner across the MTurk …

Gatik has raised $200m to put more driverless box trucks on US roads
Gatik has raised $200m to put more driverless box trucks on US roads

Gatik has raised $200m in a Series D round led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies. It is the largest financing in the autonomous trucking company’s history. Millennium Management, ARK Invest and Intact Private Capital also t…

Meta plans to launch its OpenClaw rival, Hatch, within weeks
Meta plans to launch its OpenClaw rival, Hatch, within weeks

Meta plans to launch a consumer AI agent within weeks. It has considered charging up to $199.99 a month for it. Three months ago it started selling access to its AI chatbot for $7.99 a month. The new product would cost 25 times that. Meta will launch i…

The stealth model that beat DeepSeek belongs to Zhipu
The stealth model that beat DeepSeek belongs to Zhipu

Z.AI made it. The Beijing company, also known as Zhipu, owns the free model that took the top of OpenRouter’s charts last weekend. It confirmed on Wednesday that Ox Alpha is a new iteration of its GLM series, and said it would release the weights the s…

Bill Gates calls for some jobs to be ‘Human Reserved,’ suggests taxing AI tokens and robots — billionaire says that ‘AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history’
Bill Gates calls for some jobs to be ‘Human Reserved,’ suggests taxing AI tokens and robots — billionaire says that ‘AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history’

The billionaire philanthropist penned a 6,000-word essay raising the societal risks that AI bring and his proposed solutions to protect the average person.

Alabama wants the name of everyone at OpenAI who raised a safety concern
Alabama wants the name of everyone at OpenAI who raised a safety concern

Alabama has asked OpenAI to name every employee who has ever raised a safety concern about any model test. Not the Hugging Face evaluation. Any of them, at any point, with no date limit attached. That is request eight of sixteen in a subpoena the state…

The SEC has subpoenaed four banks over Situational Awareness
The SEC has subpoenaed four banks over Situational Awareness

American securities regulators have subpoenaed the banks that lent Situational Awareness the money it used to make its AI bets. The Securities and Exchange Commission wants the timing of the fund’s trades, and its communications with lenders about the …

Microsoft Paint and Photos apps add invisible watermark to AI-generated content — developer reverse engineers GUID embedding

A developer has uncovered some previously unknown GUID watermarking functionality deep within Microsoft’s Paint and Photos apps.

Moonshot AI wants 30% of what US clouds earn from Kimi K3
Moonshot AI wants 30% of what US clouds earn from Kimi K3

Moonshot AI is in early discussions with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google about hosting Kimi K3 on their cloud platforms, seeking up to 30% of the revenue those services generate, according to Reuters. It would be the first arrangement of its kind between…

OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank — used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website
OpenAI bans Russian ChatGPT accounts posing as a fake Israeli think tank — used VPNs to push pro-Kremlin narratives and steal academic papers for its website

Instead of using ChatGPT to write the articles, the operators used the chatbot to strip any wording that might mark them as Russian speakers.