"Last week’s tech earnings saw outlet after outlet claim that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s AI bets were “paying off” as their respective cloud segments reported record revenue growth, casually ignoring that none of them have broken out their AI revenues
(...)
To be clear, all three of these companies’ cloud platforms have many other customers paying for many other things other than generative AI services or AI GPUs, and they’ve all engaged in a combination of multiple outright price increases and changing their core subscriptions to force AI features on them as a means of boosting revenues and conning the street into believing that “AI is paying off” every time they non-consensually thrust it on their customers, framing higher prices as “better value” in a way that fucks the user to appease Wall Street.

Yet the biggest con of all is that a vast majority of this revenue growth comes from the compute spend of Anthropic and OpenAI, both of whom account for the vast majority of AI revenues and overall cloud growth we’ve seen in the last few years.

Every publication you read right now will tell you that AWS and Azure and Google Cloud are growing like wildfire as a result of the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve invested in AI GPUs and data centers, when the truth is far simpler: their revenues are being buoyed by two unprofitable, unsustainable AI labs that cannot exist without being funneled tens of billions of dollars each year.

And a decent chunk of that money is coming from the hyperscalers themselves. In the last seven months alone, Google has sunk $10 billion (and up to $30 billion more) into Anthropic, with Amazon funnelling $5 billion to Anthropic within a week of that investment and a total of $50 billion into OpenAI."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-demand-bubble/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIBubble #AIHype #BigTech #OpenAI #Anthropic

"When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”

The police guidance document is unusual in how clearly it tells police not to mention their Flock use, but it also highlights several important things in the Flock debate. While Flock likes to say that it is a transparent surveillance company and that it cares about “accountability” and “governance,” some of its customers believe its use should be kept secret. Flock is now operating in thousands of cities and towns, and when, how, and why police use the system is wildly inconsistent. Even though Flock does have various auditing and transparency tools, police have their own opinions about what Flock can and should be used for and what the policies for it should be."

https://www.404media.co/do-not-mention-alpr-usage-how-cops-are-trying-to-hide-the-existence-of-flock/

#USA #Flock #Surveillance #PoliceState #ALPR

Uma tarde em Utrecht bem passada.

Utrecht é uma cidade que aparenta ter uma excelente qualidade de vida - ideal para tirar um Erasmus ou mesmo um mestrado/doutoramento. Por outro lado, também deve ser vantajoso para as pessoas que trabalham em Amesterdão morar em Utrecht, uma vez que fica apenas a 30-50 minutos de comboio. Isto para além de ter uma excelente biblioteca, instalada no antigo edifício dos correios e telecomunicações. Até encontrei uma pastelaria portuguesa que vende café Delta e tudo (Casa Ferreira).

Ainda assim, pareceu-me ser menos cosmopolita que Haia e muito mais pequena. Seja como for, neste momento encontra-se classificada na quarta posição do ranking de cidades com maior qualidade de vida do mundo, de acordo com o Numbeo (https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings.jsp).

[Flash News: as outras três primeiras ficam todas na Holanda -> Roterdão, Eindhoven e... Haia]

"As countries around the world look to follow Australia’s lead in restricting young people’s access to social media, a new report by the eSafety Commissioner might give them reason to pause, at least temporarily.

Australia’s online watchdog found more than 80% of kids were still using an age-restricted platform, such as Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat, three months after the trailblazing social media ban took effect.

The report is the first in a series the commissioner will publish as part of a two-year evaluation process. It contains several other key findings which confirm earlier evidence that the ban isn’t quite going to plan.

Reductions in social media use ‘limited in scale’
The commissioner’s report presents findings from 803 children (aged 10–15) and their parents, drawing on national baseline survey data from just before social media restrictions took effect in December 2025, and data collected from a three-month follow up from March to April 2026."

https://theconversation.com/more-than-80-of-kids-still-using-social-media-despite-ban-new-esafety-report-finds-288808

#Australia #SocialMedia #AgeVerification #Censorship

"Microsoft has introduced new limits to how much its engineers can spend on AI tools at work and told employees that maximizing AI use internally is not the company’s goal.

This makes Microsoft one of the last major companies to rein in its employees’ expensive AI use. Scaling back maximalist AI use, or what some companies have called “tokenmaxxing,” is a trend we’ve covered in recent months as the price for using AI has increased while not always delivering commensurate productivity gains.

“As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens,” Jay Parikh, an executive vice president at Microsoft said in an email to Microsoft employees. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and GitHub Copilot is an AI coding tool. “Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our business.”

“As such, we are updating our internal guidance and managing token spend with the same discipline we apply to every other critical resource,” Parikh said in the email."

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-tells-engineers-tokenmaxxing-is-not-what-we-are-optimizing-for/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Microsoft #BigTech #TokenMaxxing #Copilot

"If you've ever needed another reason to use an ad-blocker, this is it. By blocking ads, you can prevent pervasive tracking, surveillance, and yes, even malware, from landing on your computer.

Adform has now disclosed the breach, but the company didn't say how it was initially compromised or how many people may have been affected. When I reached out to the company with questions about the incident, a spokesperson referred me instead to its public statement.

Per its statement, Adform said it was still investigating if the hackers also took information about which websites a person visited; Adform said the code suggests this was possible.

I went to check out Adform's statement but couldn't at first, in large part because my ad blocker (uBlock Origin on desktop; Filtr/Wipr on iPhone) prevented Adform's entire domain from loading. Even had I visited a website that contained the malicious Adform code, this shows my ad blocker would have prevented the code from loading."

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/online-advertising-giant-adform-was-hacked-proving-once-again-why-ad-blockers-are-necessary/

#CyberSecurity #Hacking #AdForm #AdBlockers #Malware #AdTracking

"The headlines surrounding DeepSeek, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, Alibaba’s Qwen family of models, Tencent’s Hunyuan, Zhipu AI and MiniMax are often treated as separate stories. They are anything but. Viewed collectively, they reveal something far more consequential than the emergence of several successful Chinese AI companies. They demonstrate that China has cultivated a frontier AI ecosystem capable of repeatedly producing world-class capabilities across multiple firms. Whether those advances emerge through original innovation, engineering optimization, open-weight collaboration, or from distillation of U.S. models is increasingly beside the point. The larger strategic reality is that they are occurring across an ecosystem, while the U.S. continues to evaluate them one company at a time and often responds as though each breakthrough were an isolated event rather than evidence of a broader structural transformation.

Over the past several years, the U.S. has consistently underestimated China’s commitment to long-term technological advancement and its ability to translate domestic industrial strategy into global competitive advantage. Whether the issue was rare earths, electric vehicles, robotics, semiconductors, or artificial intelligence, the analytical mistake has remained remarkably consistent. Washington has tended to evaluate China’s progress company by company and product by product, often dismissing each advance as exceptional or unsustainable, while Beijing has pursued a patient strategy designed to cultivate the conditions under which an entire ecosystem could innovate and deploy simultaneously.

It is equally important to recognize that China’s plans and long-term trajectory toward becoming a technology superpower were established years before the Biden administration’s technology restrictions."

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/02/ai-model-competition-us-china.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #China #USA

"Top AI researchers continue to jump between leading AI labs as competition for elite talent intensifies.

Why it matters: Hiring elite AI researchers is hard. Keeping them — even after offering enormous pay, prestigious titles and vast computing resources — is proving almost as difficult.

Between the lines: The churn reflects an unusual moment in which a small group of researchers can command extraordinary compensation while choosing among companies with different cultures, missions and technical resources.

Zoom out: Frontier AI now resembles a single, tightly connected ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated rivals.

Companies battle fiercely for talent and customers while simultaneously investing in one another, buying one another's services, relying on the same cloud providers and hiring from the same small pool of researchers.

Driving the news: The latest high-profile move is Lilian Weng, co-founder of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab."

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/03/ai-talent-wars-openai-google-meta-anthropic

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #OpenAI #Anthropic

"Providers must design AI systems to explicitly notify users when they’re dealing with AI instead of a human, “unless this is obvious,” and include machine-readable marks on synthetic audio, image, video, and text so that it can be detected as artificially generated or manipulated. Likewise, deployers are required to label any AI-generated or manipulated image, audio, and video deepfake content that’s designed to look real.

“The rapid development of generative and interactive AI systems is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish AI interactions and AI-generated content from human-created and authentic content,” the European Commission said in its transparency guidelines. “People should know when they are interacting with AI or exposed to AI-generated content. This will help them make informed decisions, calibrate their trust and reliance on AI and avoid misinformation or deception.”

The Commission has also developed a set of AI disclosure labels that tech platforms can adopt in accordance with the AI Act rules, alongside examples of when they should be used."

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/974571/eu-ai-act-transparency-labels-rules-deepfakes

#EU #AIAct #Transparency #Deepfakes