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Bill Gates published an essay urging governments to impose enforceable rules on AI, including a tax on AI token usage to fund support for displaced workers and protected 'Human Reserved' jobs like caregiving. He said tech executives privately worry about AI's disruptive pace but avoid saying so publicly, breaking from the industry's optimistic public stance.
The UK's grid connection queue is overwhelmed with speculative data center projects that are unlikely to ever be built, worsening wait times and complicating energy demand forecasts. Ofgem has proposed requiring developers to post large nonrefundable deposits, potentially reaching hundreds of millions of dollars for the biggest projects, and to demonstrate secured customers and funding before joining the queue. The plan is open for industry feedback until September before being finalized.
Linum has begun detailing its work on Linum v3, the successor to its open-weight text-to-video model released in January, in a new blog series. The company says its focus is on three goals: improving how well outputs follow prompts, speeding up training and inference, and making generated physics more consistent, while arguing that most recent progress in image and video generation comes from better data practices rather than new model architectures.
Amazon has announced it will close Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its long-running marketplace connecting businesses with a distributed workforce for microtasks, effective September 30. The platform allowed companies to outsource work like data validation, content moderation, and survey collection to human workers worldwide, tasks often too subjective or complex for automation.
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the marketplace it launched in 2005 where businesses paid workers small sums to complete tasks like data labeling and surveys. The platform quietly built the infrastructure and workforce model that later became essential for training AI systems on human-generated data.
Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of $96bn, over twice what it earned a year earlier, driven largely by its data centre business which brought in $89bn, up 117% year-on-year. The company forecasts $108bn in revenue next quarter, and shares rose about 4% in after-hours trading following results that beat Wall Street estimates.
Security researchers have identified GoCaracal, a previously undocumented modular malware framework used by the Dark Caracal cyber espionage group. The tool expands the group's ability to steal data from victims and maintain persistent access to compromised systems.
An opinion piece suggests communities resisting new data center construction could be won over by receiving actual financial stakes in the projects, modeled after the Consumer Stock Ownership Plan structure. Instead of only offering tax breaks or jobs, developers would share ownership benefits directly with residents near the facilities.
OpenAI expanded its free ChatGPT for Teachers initiative to 55 more school systems across 20 states, adding over 100,000 educators and staff. The company now partners with more than 100 K-12 organizations in 30 states, offering free access and training to over 300,000 educators through June 2028. OpenAI also introduced a 16-state data privacy agreement giving districts a shared framework to assess the tool against student data protection standards.
Nvidia reported record quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion, up more than $10 billion from the prior quarter, driven by data center revenue that more than doubled year-over-year to $89 billion. Profits also more than doubled to $59.7 billion, and the company projects revenue will climb to $108 billion in the coming quarter.
More than 15 candidates for state and federal office, including Nebraska Senate independent Dan Osborn, have signed the AI Pact, a five-point pledge covering mandatory AI safety reviews, worker dividends from AI profits, and legal accountability for AI-caused harms. The pact grew out of the Political Integrity Project, an anti-money-in-politics group, and is funded by a progressive PAC rather than tech companies or AI safety organizations. Nearly all current signers are Democrats, though organizers say they hope to attract Republican candidates too.
Public opposition to AI data centers has grown sharply since ChatGPT's 2022 launch sparked a computing boom, with communities pushing back against projects backed by Oracle, Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who plan to invest over $700 billion in U.S. data centers this year. The backlash has become significant enough to shape 2026 midterm election dynamics and prompted President Trump to publicly defend the industry.