Shameless Plug

US Aims to Give Cold War Plutonium to Startups For Nuclear Fuel Published on 2026-05-30T11:34:00Z The Trump administration is planning to provide Cold War-era plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads to nuclear startups that want to convert it into reactor fuel, arguing it could help address a looming fuel shortage for advanced reactors. Critics warn the idea raises serious nonproliferation, security, cost, and technical concerns. The New York Times reports: The plan has generated debate and some unease among nonproliferation experts. If finalized, it would mark the first time the U.S. government has made weapons-grade plutonium available to private companies. The Energy Department has more than 50 tons of surplus plutonium left over from nuclear weapons programs, and the agency had previously been planning to dilute much of that material and bury it. Some of the nuclear start-ups trying to obtain that plutonium say that transforming the waste into fuel is a better way to dispose o...

Apple Working To Cram Massive Gemini Model Into iPhone To Power New Siri Published on 2026-05-30T08:00:00Z Apple is reportedly working to shrink Google's Gemini models enough to power parts of a long-delayed AI-enhanced Siri on iPhones. But despite Apple's best efforts to run the AI locally, "the iPhone's Gemini makeover will lean heavily on Google and Nvidia in the cloud," reports Ars Technica. That could complicate Apple's privacy-first AI messaging, especially if more complex Siri requests are routed through Google infrastructure and Nvidia's encrypted cloud-computing platform. Ars Technica reports: After inking the Google deal, Apple apparently got to work distilling Google's giant cloud-based Gemini models. Distillation is a process in which a small, less resource-intensive model learns to mimic a large, expensive one. With enough time, this can reliably transfer useful capabilities while pruning less important weights from the model. That may e...

Dell Stock Surges 32% in One Day. Big Revenue From AI Servers Stuns Analysts Published on 2026-05-29T23:34:00Z Dell's stock skyrocketed 32.76% on Friday, "its best day ever," reports CNBC, after Dell "reported its fastest pace for revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018..." "Shares are now up 234% in 2026." Dell, which reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, saw a flood of artificial intelligence-related demand for its servers, which contain graphics processing units from companies like Nvidia. Quarterly revenue soared nearly 88% year over year, with AI server revenue alone increasing 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion... Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at [research/investment firm] Melius, said he'd "never seen anything like" Dell's latest quarter. "They beat every line in the model, so this wasn't just AI, it was great execution," Reitzes tol...

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test Published on 2026-05-29T18:28:00Z Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames." Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.") It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from hori...

Anthropic Releases Opus 4.8 With New 'Dynamic Workflow' Tool Published on 2026-05-28T22:00:00Z Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.8 with stronger performance and better handling of uncertain or flawed data, including a greater tendency to flag issues rather than make unsupported claims. The update also introduces a "Dynamic Workflows" research preview for coordinating complex tasks across many subagents. TechCrunch reports: Opus 4.8 comes with the expected best-in-class benchmark results, but there's also particular attention to how the model manages bad or uncertain data. In the launch post, Anthropic's early testers found that the new model is "more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims." Echoing this point, a testimonial from Bridgewater associates said the biggest difference in the upgrade was "Opus 4.8's tendency to proactively flag issues with the inputs and outputs of an analysis, s...

Occupy Wall Street Co-Founder Built an On-Device AI For Activists Published on 2026-05-28T21:00:00Z An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: In an era where Silicon Valley's conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it's strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today's tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X's openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a small group of very powerful, very conservative people. But does it have to be this way? Can LLMs and AI agents find a place in the toolkit of progressive activist groups? The conviction that they can is the idea behind a new app called Outcry, which provides a chatbot designed specifically as a "private, on-device AI mentor for activists, organizers and movement...

Trump Loses More Control Over AI Regulation As Illinois Passes Landmark Law Published on 2026-05-28T20:00:00Z Illinois lawmakers on Wednesday passed a landmark AI safety bill (SB 315) that would require major AI companies to publish safety plans, submit annual third-party testing reports, report serious incidents quickly, and protect whistleblowers who flag emerging risks. OpenAI and Anthropic supported the bill, which could make Illinois a testing ground for state-level AI governance as federal regulation remains stalled. Ars Technica reports: To force companies to be more transparent about rapid developments, Illinois would likely rely on "the Big Four accounting and auditing firms -- Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC -- to audit their safety practices," [said Scott Wisor, a policy director at a nonprofit called Secure AI Project, which supported the bill]. The required independent audits will likely frustrate Trump, who has tried and failed to stop states from implementing AI ...