A pending report on climate attribution may be setting the stage for conflict.

Aaron Holmes / The Information: Sources: Microsoft considered spinning out or restructuring its Xbox unit as a wholly-owned subsidiary, or creating a joint venture with other partners  —  As Microsoft gets ready to overhaul its struggling Xbox gaming unit, it hasn't ruled out spinning out or restructuring the unit …

The company made its heavily anticipated debut on Friday, trading higher than its initial $135 IPO price.

<blockquote cite="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies"><p>Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from <em>Forbes</em> is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">&mdash; <a href="https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies">Andrew Singleton</a>, AI Economics for Dummies</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a></p>

Full autonomy is rare, but Ukraine is installing AI modules on drones and robots.

Enterprise Document Intelligence [Vol.1 #5bis] - The same relational tables. Native table cells. OCR for scanned pages and images. Captions and headings without regex. The post When PyMuPDF Can’t See the Table: Parse PDFs for RAG with Azure Layout appeared first on Towards Data Science.

A cottage industry of celebrity figurines, blinking screens, and other DIY gadgets is helping drivers bypass Tesla's distracted-driving controls.

SpaceX’s stock market debut has thrust the richest man in the universe into an unexplored frontier of wealth.

Maxwell Zeff / Wired: A profile of former Google DeepMind employee Thibault Sottiaux, now OpenAI's head of core products tasked with combining ChatGPT and Codex into a super app  —  Thibault Sottiaux helped make AI coding one of OpenAI's fastest-growing businesses.  Now he's overseeing a sweeping overhaul of ChatGPT.

The funding round would value the company at around €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double its Series C valuation of €11.7 billion.

The tech giant said a group called "Outsider Enterprise" used AI to scam hundreds of thousands of victims, sending 2.5 million text messages over a span of two weeks.

Meta's spokesperson confirmed outage issues on Friday morning. Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images Widespread outages plagued Facebook and Instagram Friday morning. A Meta spokesperson confirmed platform issues in a post on X and later said: "We're coming back." Outage reports on third-party website DownDetector have since fallen. Facebook and Instagram suffered from widespread outages for hours on Friday before the service began to come back online. Outage reports spiked throughout the morning on the third-party website DownDetector.com before the disruption appeared to ease. "We're aware people are currently having trouble accessing our services," Meta's communication director, Andy Stone, said in a 10:11 a.m. ET post on X. "We're working on it." Facebook and Instagram users reported outage issues on DownDetector.com on Friday. DownDetector At the time, Meta's systems dashboard page also showed "high disruptions" for its Facebook Ads Manager, Messenger API, Messenger platform, and WhatsApp Business Platform. Just before noon EST, Stone said in another update: "We're coming back, though it may take a bit of time for everything to be fully back to normal." Users were quick to take to X to complain about the disruptions amid the outage. "This is the third time Facebook has gone down this week. Every time, it takes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger down with it," one user said. Another added, "Anybody else just been logged out of Facebook messenger and can't log back in? Unknown error." FACEBOOK IS DOWN INSTAGRAM IS DOWN META ADS MANAGER IS DOWN QUICK EVERYONE GO OUTSIDE AND TOUCH GRASS — Peter Czepiga (@peterczepiga) June 12, 2026 Others took the opportunity to make light of the moment. "QUICK EVERYONE GO OUTSIDE AND TOUCH GRASS," user Peter Czepiga said. Then there were the memes. "Everyone's yearly instagram down drill to X," one user shared with a GIF of a crowd. Everyone’s yearly instagram down drill to X #instagramdown #instagram pic.twitter.com/bsNU1PXcfH — WEB_GOAT (@0x7Sameer) June 12, 2026 Read the original article on Business Insider

Elon Musk's companies have been swapping IP and cash. It's led to rumors of potential mega mergers. Spencer Platt/Getty Images The companies led by Elon Musk have become increasingly intertwined in the past couple of years. These firms have shared employees and purchased batteries, software, and vehicles from each other. SpaceX is expected to contribute to Tesla's coming Roadster, for example, and xAI's Grok is in Teslas and Optimus demo bots. For years, the sprawling companies in Elon Musk's business empire have worked closely together. Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, et al. have behaved like pieces of a shared ecosystem inside Elon Inc. — buying one another's products, investing billions across company lines, sharing software and materials, and moving employees between ventures. Now, the overlap is leading to consolidation. In the past year alone, Musk's empire has already consolidated from six major companies to four after his xAI acquired social network X and SpaceX acquired xAI. Those tie-ups are fueling a bigger acquisition question: Is he eyeing a mega-merger between aerospace company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla? That speculation renewed on Friday when SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell was asked on CNBC about combining the two. "That might make Elon's life a little easier, actually," she said. "There's no question that there's synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures, definitely, there's a convergence of a kind of what we're all trying to accomplish in the future." That merger would be the most dramatic step yet, collapsing two of Musk's best-known companies into a single corporate giant. Even without a deal, his companies are already increasingly intertwined. Here's how: Tesla and SpaceX are buying from each other SpaceX is lending rocket-boosting tech to Tesla's upcoming hyper-powered sports car, Musk said. Joe Raedle/Getty Images SpaceX is a major customer of Tesla's energy business. In SpaceX's S-1 securities filing, the rocket and AI company unveiled that it spent $697 million on Tesla Megapack battery products across 2024 and 2025. SpaceX is also giving some technology back to Tesla. Musk has said that the carmaker's long-awaited next-generation Roadster will be a "Tesla/SpaceX collab" and feature SpaceX-built cold-gas thrusters. The hyper-powered sports car's launch event has been repeatedly delayed after Musk penciled an unveil in for April 1. Tesla/SpaceX collab — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 28, 2024 "It's gonna be really cool, and it's gonna have some rocket technology in it," he said during a 2024 sit-down with Don Lemon. Tesla's AI ambitions are increasingly tied to xAI Tesla wants to build out its AI software, including its self-driving ambitions. CEO Elon Musk said a $2 billion investment in his software company would help. Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images Tesla's January earnings disclosed that it had agreed to invest $2 billion in xAI, with a related "framework agreement" to explore additional collaboration opportunities. Tesla has already integrated xAI's Grok into its vehicles, allowing drivers to chat with the AI and use it to add and edit navigation destinations. Videos have shown early versions of Tesla's in-development Optimus robot using xAI's Grok AI chatbot for its voice. Elon’s Tesla Optimus 🤖🔥 is here! Dawn of the physical Agentforce revolution, tackling human work for $200K–$500K. Productivity game-changer! Congrats @elonmusk, and thank you for always being so kind to me! 🚀 #Tesla #Optimus pic.twitter.com/bA5IYIylE1 — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) September 3, 2025 SpaceX and The Boring Company have bought Tesla vehicles A Tesla entering the Hawthorne Tunnel, made by Elon Musk's Boring Co. Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS Aside from full-blown investments or acquisitions, the most visible example of Musk's companies coordinating might be Tesla's vehicle sales to his tunnel-building startup. The Boring Company, which operates tunnels in Las Vegas and Texas, uses fleets of Tesla vehicles to transport passengers through its underground systems. The tunnel builder has also constructed tunnels around Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin. It isn't alone. SpaceX reported in its paperwork ahead of the public offering that it bought $131 million worth of Cybertrucks. Musk's employees move between companies Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk brought Tesla engineers into the offices to work on its code base. Photo by -/Twitter account of Elon Musk/AFP via Getty Images Musk has repeatedly drawn on employees from one company to support others in his portfolio. In 2022, about a month after Musk bought Twitter — now known as X — he sent roughly 50 Tesla employees to the social-media company's headquarters to help overhaul its code-review systems, according to court filings. Musk later argued in court that the Tesla employees had "volunteered" to do the work and that their temporary reassignment should not concern Tesla's board. Executives share overlapping functions on several of Musk's companies, too, according to org charts obtained by Business Insider. For example, Charlie Kuehmann, the vice president of materials and engineering at Tesla, also holds the same title at SpaceX. It's all par for the course for 'Elon Inc.' The growing web of internal deals has fueled discussion among investors and analysts about whether Musk's companies are evolving into something closer to a single, vertically integrated enterprise. And it's not clear if it'll stop at SpaceX combining with xAI. "In Tesla's case, an important factor to consider is that investors are buying into Elon Musk's vision for the future as much as they are buying into an automaker or clean energy company," Lou Whiteman, a contributing analyst at The Motley Fool, told Business Insider in January. "Since this group of companies, public and private, combine to represent Elon Musk's full vision of the future, I'd bet that many investors are happy to see Tesla involved in all aspects of 'Elon Inc.'" Read the original article on Business Insider

Winning fight against AI data centers gives people a "taste of political power."

GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it’s much more complicated than that.

The trading platform says some customers experienced intermittent disruptions, but those issues have resolved.

The methodology described in Evolutionary Database Design and operationalized in Refactoring Databases: ...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei arriving at the White House earlier this year. JESSICA KOSCIELNIAK/REUTERS Anthropic faced backlash over AI model limitations and transparency. Anthropic cited safety reasons, but also aims to protect its business from AI model distillation. Open-source AI models challenge Anthropic with competitive performance and lower costs. Anthropic changed course after a developer backlash this week. The bigger story is what the company is still doing, and why. The startup said it will no longer secretly degrade Fable 5 responses when users ask for help on frontier AI model development. Instead, Anthropic said these requests will be routed to a less-good model, Opus 4.8, and developers will be told. This addresses the freakout over Anthropic essentially giving intentionally worse answers and lying about it. "We apologize," the company said. But Anthropic is still restricting use of its most powerful public model for certain AI development work. The company says this is about safety, arguing these limits stop "foreign adversaries" from using Anthropic's top model to erode America's edge in AI and chips. That explanation only goes so far. These restrictions also help Anthropic protect its business from distillation, or intelligence extraction. That's when rivals query a powerful model, collect its outputs, and use that data to improve their own systems. These techniques help open-source model providers catch up with Anthropic quicker, and undercut the company on price. Anthropic has warned about Chinese labs doing this. But the same threat comes from open model developers in the US and Europe, too. That's the key point. These limits apply broadly to anyone building rival AI models, and Anthropic's terms of service also forbid anyone using its products to develop competing offerings. Stopping open competitors So, Anthropic is treating Western open model developers much like Chinese ones. That undercuts the idea that this is only about stopping foreign adversaries. It is also about stopping competitors. And you can see why. Open models are potent rivals. One MIT Sloan analysis from January found open models averaged 90% of closed-model performance and usually closed the gap within 13 weeks. (A year earlier, it took them 27 weeks to close the gap). Artificial Analysis tracks AI model performance, and this chart shows how open-source models have been keeping up. Arena's leaderboard shows similar pressure. On Thursday, Anthropic models were still at the top for expert text-based tasks such as math, coding, and creative writing. But Xiaomi's open-weight MiMo v 2.5 Pro wasn't far behind. A chart showing different model performance over time Arena Then look at the price. That Xiaomi open model costs 43 cents per million tokens for inputs, and 87 cents per million for outputs. Anthropic's Fable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens — at least 20 times more expensive, according to Arena data. "Almost as good" and "a lot cheaper" must be terrifying if you're spending billions to build frontier models. No wonder Anthropic is limiting rivals like this. "This does read as a business move," said Nicholas Vincent, a computer science professor at Simon Fraser University, who studies how data is used in AI models. "Without much more explicit targeting of specific 'bad orgs,' it's pretty hard to defend how this could be more safety-focused than business-focused." Anthropic does not owe rivals a shortcut to its best technology. But it should be honest about what's going on: Partly safety, but business, too. Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com. Read the original article on Business Insider

Even moderately sized data centers can have an outsized local impact.

David Hockney has died at 88. David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images The iconic British artist David Hockney has died at 88. He had a voracious work ethic and kept working until his final days. Research suggests that working into old age could help stave off chronic disease. David Hockney has died at age 88, one month short of his 89th birthday. The iconic British artist, known for his signature bleached blonde hair and colorful, rounded glasses, had a work ethic that kept him creating until the very end of his seven-decade career. "I have to paint, I've always wanted to make pictures since I was tiny," Hockney said in an interview filmed at his home in France in 2019. "That's my job, I think, making pictures, and I've gone on doing it for 60 years, I'm still doing it." Days before the opening of "David Hockney 25," a months-long 2025 exhibition in which he filled the Fondation Louis Vuitton gallery in Paris with 400 of his artworks, Hockney told The Independent, "I will never stop painting." At the time, he was 87, fighting a chest infection, and accompanied by a nurse. "He is very conscious of his physical fragility, but his mind is as clear as is his memory," the exhibition's curator Sir Norman Rosenthal, told the outlet. Hockey's work continued to evolve throughout his career. "He never stood still. His work embraced stage design, portraits, photo collages, prints, and even faxes," journalist Andrew Marr said in a BBC documentary about Hockney's 2012 exhibition "The Art of Seeing." New artworks by the artist, including iPad drawings, are on display at The Serpentine Gallery in London in an exhibition that opened on March 12 and is slated to run until August 23, 2026. Hockney's commitment to his work — and to continuing to work — places him in good company with other titans of their fields, both corporate and creative, who have said they have no plans to slow down as they age. It also chimes with evidence that suggests working, which can provide a sense of purpose, could help prevent cognitive decline and lead to a longer life. A 2019 study of 6,985 participants between the ages of 51 and 61 found that those with a stronger purpose in life were less likely to die in the 16- to 18-year follow-up period. Researchers at LongeviQuest, an organization that validates the ages of the world's oldest people, told Business Insider in 2023 that working hard for as long as possible was a common trait among the more than 1,000 people over 100 they had met. In a statement announcing Hockney's death, his publicist Erica Bolton wrote: "David Hockney's enduring legacy reflects his underlying enthusiasm for life, his outstanding sense of humour, his immense generosity, and his investigative curiosity encapsulated by his signature phrase, Love Life." Read the original article on Business Insider