Jonathan Vanian / CNBC: Nvidia and data center operator IREN announce a deal to deploy up to 5 GW of AI infrastructure; Nvidia can invest $2.1B into IREN; IREN jumps 9%+ after hours  —  IREN shares surged in extended-trading on Thursday before giving back nearly all of the gains after the data center operator announced …

The company made a series of other announcements during earnings, including a new commercial contract, a pilot program in Canada, and a collaboration.

Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, who took over for Bob Iger earlier this year, has emphasized his intent to streamline the Disney experience.

Today on Uncanny Valley, we’re diving into recent reports that the Trump administration is considering an executive order that would establish some sort of federal oversight over new AI models.

Lawsuit accuses DHS of plugging DNA database into ICE surveillance machine.

Ignacio Gonzalez / Bloomberg: Cloudflare reports Q1 revenue up 34% YoY to $639.8M, plans to cut 1,100+ jobs as it shifts to an “agentic AI-first operating model”; NET drops 13%+ after hours  —  Cloudflare Inc. plans to cut more than 1,100 jobs globally as it accelerates its shift to an agentic AI-first operating model.

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Cloudflare is laying off 1,100 staff as it prepares for "the agentic AI era," the company announced on Thursday. Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Cloudflare on Thursday announced layoffs of 1,100 staff as it reorganizes for "the agentic AI era." First-quarter earnings exceeded expectations, but Cloudflare shares dropped over 14% after hours. Read the full memo sent to staff below. Cloudflare is laying off more than 1,100 employees as the cybersecurity company says it is reorganizing for the "agentic AI era," according to a memo sent to staff on Thursday. The cuts came hours after the company reported first-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations, though shares fell sharply in after-hours trading — more than 14% at the time of publication. In the memo, Cloudflare executives said the company's use of AI has surged "more than 600% in the last three months alone," and argued the company needs to rethink how it is structured in order to move faster and deliver more value to customers. The layoffs make Cloudflare the latest tech company to cite AI-driven efficiency gains and organizational changes as reasons for reducing head count. Read the full memo below: Team: We are writing to let you know directly that we've made the decision to reduce Cloudflare's workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally. The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don't just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare's usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere. Today is a hard day. This decision unfortunately means saying goodbye to teammates who have contributed meaningfully to our mission and to building Cloudflare into one of the world's most successful companies. We want to be clear that this decision is not a reflection of the individual work or talent of those leaving us. Instead, we are reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company. Today's actions are not a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals' performance; they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era. This is a moment we need to own as founders and leaders of the company. Matthew has personally sent out every offer letter we've extended. It is a practice he has always looked forward to because it represented our growth and the incredible talent joining our mission. It didn't feel right for this message to come from anyone other than the two of us. Rather than trickling out notices through managers, we will be sending emails to every employee. Within the next hour, every member of our global team will receive an email from both of us clarifying how this change affects them. For those departing today, we will send this update to both their personal and Cloudflare addresses to ensure they receive the information immediately. It's important to us that we treat departing team members right and in a way that exceeds what we've seen from other companies. We believe acting with empathy isn't about avoiding hard decisions but rather about how you treat people when those decisions are made. If we are asking our team to be world-class, we have a reciprocal obligation to be world-class in how we treat them. We are pairing the directness of these measures with severance packages that lead the industry. The packages for departing employees will include the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. Healthcare coverage is different across the globe, and if you're in the United States, we'll continue to provide support through the end of the year. We are also vesting equity for departing team members through August 15th, so they receive stock beyond their departure date. And, if departing team members haven't hit their one-year cliffs, we are going to waive those and vest their pro-rated equity through August as well. We've asked the team to do this only once, as hard as that may be today. We don't want to do it again for the foreseeable future. By taking decisive action now, we provide immediate clarity to those departing and protect the stability of the team that remains. We are making these changes now because making smaller, repeated cuts or dragging a reorganization out over multiple quarters creates prolonged emotional uncertainty for employees and stalls our ability to build. It's the right thing to do; it's the honest thing to do; and it reflects the values of the company we are continuing to build. Cloudflare started as a digitally native company built in the cloud. That allowed us to catch up to and pass companies that had a head start of years or decades but were slowed down by outdated systems and processes. As we've now become the leader, we cannot rest on the workflows and organizational structures that worked yesterday. We're confident that our reshaped organization will be even faster and more innovative as we continue building the future. To those departing us: you've helped build the strong foundation Cloudflare stands on today. We have the utmost respect for your work and gratitude for the impact you have made. We're confident you will land at other great places and build many future great companies, bringing with you a unique set of skills learned while building Cloudflare. Transparency is a core principle at Cloudflare, and it was important that you hear this from us first. We will be heading to our earnings conference call at 2 PM PT, when we'll share more. We also plan to address today's announcements live with the team at our all-hands meeting. It's not an easy day, but it's the right decision. Our mission to help build a better Internet is more important now than ever, and there's a lot of work left to be done. Read the original article on Business Insider

NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 introduces a fundamentally new way to build GPU clusters by extending NVIDIA NVLink coherence across an entire rack. This design enables... NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 introduces a fundamentally new way to build GPU clusters by extending NVIDIA NVLink coherence across an entire rack. This design enables exascale performance, but it also changes the assumptions that many scheduling systems were built on. As a result, “rack-scale locality” becomes a hard constraint. When workloads cross domain boundaries, performance drops sharply… Source

Model quantization is an effective method to reduce VRAM usage and improve inference performance on consumer devices such as NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. By... Model quantization is an effective method to reduce VRAM usage and improve inference performance on consumer devices such as NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. By lowering computational and memory requirements while preserving model quality, quantization helps AI models run more efficiently in resource-constrained environments. This post walks through how to use NVIDIA Model Optimizer to quantize a… Source

Samantha Subin / CNBC: Airbnb reports Q1 revenue up 18% YoY to $2.68B, vs. $2.62B est., Nights and Seats Booked up 9% to 156.2M, vs. 155.77M est., lifts 2026 revenue growth guidance  —  Airbnb reported mixed first-quarter results after the bell on Thursday and warned of regional weakness spurred by the war in Iran.

Sam Altman's management style is under scrutiny in the OpenAI trial. Bloomberg/Getty Images Sam Altman's management style came under scrutiny at Elon Musk's OpenAI trial. Former OpenAI execs Mira Murati and Shivon Zilis weighed in, as did former board members. Here is what they said, from complaints of "chaos" to poor communication. The trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman features a lot of people complaining about their boss. On Wednesday and Thursday, Musk's lawyers elicited a common theme from the witnesses: Sam Altman's management style was not very good. The seventh and eighth days of the OpenAI trial, where Musk is seeking more than $100 billion in compensation from OpenAI after accusing its founders of "stealing" a nonprofit, featured testimony from Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of four of Musk's children, and other former board members and executives. Many of the criticisms raised by witnesses emerged during Altman's brief ouster as CEO in 2023, but the trial is resurfacing them. In a recent blog post following a New Yorker article questioning Altman's honesty, the OpenAI CEO wrote that he is "not proud of being conflict-averse," which caused "great pain" for OpenAI and led to a "huge mess for the company." Here is what three witnesses said about working with Altman while at OpenAI. One board member described "a culture of lying" Tasha McCauley, pictured here in 2014, was part of the OpenAI board that ousted Sam Altman. Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Kairos Soceity Former OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley said she voted to fire Altman as the organization's CEO after fielding months of complaints about him. According to McCauley, Altman wanted to "control the board" and resisted oversight. She said in her deposition, a video of which was played for jurors, that senior OpenAI employees had told her that Altman's "pattern of lying" had caused a series of "crisis events." "People at the company were copying that behavior, and there was kind of a culture of lying and a culture of deceit," McCauley said. "And I think for us, as a board, this was just extremely concerning." The "toxic culture" and "chaos" it caused would be a problem at any organization, McCauley testified. It was particularly concerning for a nonprofit with the high-stakes mission of developing safe artificial intelligence meant to benefit all of humanity, she said. "When we thought about being able to oversee the kinds of complex decisions that would be presented to us years down the line, it became very, very concerning to us," McCauley said. Sam Altman 'told people what they wanted to hear,' ex-OpenAI exec tells jury Jurors watched a recorded video deposition of Murati, who was also OpenAI's interim CEO after the board briefly ousted Sam Altman. Bloomberg/Getty Images On Wednesday, jurors watched a recorded video deposition of Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer and now founder of her own AI shop, Thinking Machines Lab. She was also OpenAI's interim CEO after the board briefly ousted Sam Altman. Murati's testimony focused on her concerns about Altman's "difficult and chaotic" management style. She said Altman had trouble "making decisions on big controversial things." He also had a habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. "My concern was about Sam saying one thing to one person and a completely different thing to another person, and that makes it a very difficult and chaotic environment to work with," said Murati. Murati said that her issue with Altman was not about safety, "it is about Sam creating chaos." She said she supported Altman's return to OpenAI because the company "was at catastrophic risk of falling apart" at the time of his ousting. "I was concerned about the company completely blowing up." Zilis also took issue with Altman's communication Shivon Zilis said she was upset that Altman rolled out ChatGPT without involving the board. Bloomberg/Getty Images Zilis said she was upset that Altman rolled out ChatGPT without involving the board. "It wasn't just me but the entire board raised concern about that whole thing happening without any board communication," she said. Zilis said she was also concerned about a potential OpenAI deal with a nuclear energy startup called Helion Energy because both Altman and Greg Brockman were investors. Although the executives had disclosed the investment to the board, Zilis said the deal talk made her uneasy. It "felt super out of left field," she said. "How is it the case that we want to place a major bet on a speculative technology?" Another board member said she learned more about ChatGPT from Twitter Helen Toner addressed why the OpenAI board, including herself, voted to remove Altman as CEO in 2023. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images In a video deposition, Helen Toner, a former member of OpenAI's board who resigned in 2023, said she first became aware of ChatGPT's release when an OpenAI employee asked another board member whether the board was aware of the development. The researcher described that she then started seeing screenshots of ChatGPT on Twitter, and the board knew little about it. When asked if she was surprised, Toner said: "No, because I was used to the board not being very informed about things." Toner also elaborated on why the board, including herself, voted to remove Altman as CEO in 2023. "There were a number of things — the pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight, as well as the concerns that two os his inner management team raised to the board about his management practices, his manipulation of board processes," said Toner. Read the original article on Business Insider

A DHS official and another person who attended a recent conference described the plans to 404 Media.

CNBC: Coinbase reports Q1 revenue down 31% YoY to $1.41B, vs. $1.52B est., and a loss of $1.49 per share, vs. a $0.27 profit est.; COIN drops 4%+ after hours  —  Coinbase posted lower-than-expected results for the first quarter as crypto prices fell, weighing on one of the companies' major revenue drivers — spot trading in digital assets .

AI startup Pit is led by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi and backed by a16z, which is leading the startup’s $16 million seed round.

The cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have hacked Instructure again, defacing the login pages of several Instructure customer schools with an extortion message.

Mike Massimino in space. NASA Mike Massimino overcame multiple rejections to become a NASA astronaut. Vision training helped Mike Massimino meet NASA's standards, leading to his acceptance in 1996. Persistence and focus on controllable factors were key to Mike Massimino's eventual success at NASA. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mike Massimino, a former NASA astronaut who spent more than 18 years with the agency, flew on two space shuttle missions, and logged more than 30 hours on spacewalks. It has been edited for length and clarity. The first time I applied to NASA's astronaut program, I was rejected outright. It happened again when I applied two years later. The third time, NASA invited me to interview. An initial interview is a big step in the process that starts with thousands of applicants and narrows to about 120 finalists. But it wasn't meant to be that time, either. My vision didn't meet NASA's standards, and I was medically disqualified. From what I saw, vision issues were the most common reason candidates were disqualified at that stage. I was disappointed, but I wasn't ready to stop trying. I treated the rejection like a problem to solve Mike Massimino was rejected by NASA three times before getting accepted into its astronaut program. Business Insider After I was disqualified, I started looking for a solution to fix my vision. One colleague told me to dehydrate before the vision test because it would "flatten the eye" and change how it focuses. Another told me the opposite — to drink a lot of water because it would make the eye "more viscous" and bend light differently. Neither seemed like sound advice, but it made me think there might be a way around the problem. I eventually found a vision training program designed to improve focus. NASA doctors told me they thought it wouldn't work, but they didn't see any harm in trying it. So I did. The exercises involved relaxing my eyes and learning to "focus beyond" an object so it would come into view, rather than forcing my eyes to strain. I also used undercorrected lenses, so my eyes had to work harder. It was enough to improve my vision by a couple of lines to pass the eye exam and requalify. When I got the call, I thought it might be a prank Mike Massimino as a kid holding a Snoopy astronaut. Courtesy of Mike Massimino I applied again for the 1996 astronaut class. My fourth attempt. This time, I passed the eye exam, completed the interview process, and then on a Monday that April, I got the call. I had stayed home that day because I knew the calls were coming. When I picked up, they told me they wanted to make me an astronaut. The only thing that came out of my mouth was, "Yes, yes, yes." After the call, I was so excited, but I wondered if it might have been a prank. So, I called NASA's astronaut selection office and spoke to the person in charge. "Yeah, you got the right call. You're in," he told me. NASA selected 35 astronauts that year. What I learned from being turned down Mike Massimino in space. NASA The hardest part of becoming an astronaut wasn't the training — it was getting the opportunity. There are thousands of qualified applicants, and a lot of the process is out of your control. For me, the rejections didn't change my goal; they simply showed me what I needed to work on. Even after I finally got accepted, it still took years before I actually flew in space. After becoming an astronaut, I spent about two years in training just to qualify. Then I worked technical jobs and kept training before I was assigned to a mission. It was about four years before I got that first assignment, and then another year and a half before I actually launched. The whole process taught me patience. You don't get everything right away, even when you finally get your foot in the door. It also taught me to focus on what I could control. I couldn't control how many people applied or who NASA selected. But I could control how prepared I was and how I responded when something didn't go my way. Looking back, those rejections were part of the process. Without them, I wouldn't have pushed myself the way I did to get there. Read the original article on Business Insider

PCPJack makes innovative use of parquet files for stealthy, pre-validated target discovery as it canvasses multiple cloud environments.

Gusto has shared an impressive milestone on its actual revenue, not an ARR number that estimates future income.

Robin Wigglesworth / Financial Times: Goldman Sachs: Alphabet and Amazon generated “other income” totaling $53B in Q1, or ~60% of their Q1 income; $49B was due to equity stakes in private companies  —  The AI “hyperscalers” reported bumper earnings for the first quarter, with both sales and profits beating expectations.