I came across possibly one of the weirdest official automotive accessories this morning, courtesy of a friend’s social media feed. It’s called the “Truckle,” and it’s a hand-crafted silver and bronze belt buckle that might be the envy of every other cowboy out there, since this one has a place to keep your F-150’s key fob without ruining the lines of your jeans.

The Truckle was designed by Utah-based A Cut Above Buckles, with a hand-engraved F-150 on the bump in the front. Behind the truck? Storage space for a Ford truck key fob, which should fit any F-150 from model year 2018 onward.

“You can put your key fob in the buckle—all your remote features work while it’s in the buckle,” designer Andy Andrews told the Detroit Free Press. “Once you have it in there, you’re not going to lose that key fob. You’re not going to be scratching your head (wondering) where it’s at. It’s right there with you in the Truckle.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, sounding like a digital media consultant, Pope Leo XIV urged reporters to avoid “the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.” He was addressing global news agencies at a gathering in Vatican City about the risks of a post-truth world, with a speech that also doubled as a severe societal warning about the dangers of AI.

“Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” the pontiff said, according to Reuters. “We must be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

REUTERS / Reuters

OpenAI is hungry for as much compute power as it can get its hands on, and the company has signed another deal with a chipmaker to help make that happen. This time around, it’s teaming up with Broadcom to make custom chips and systems for use in both OpenAI’s infrastructure and its partners’ data centers. 

OpenAI is designing the “AI accelerators” and systems. Broadcom will start deploying those racks in the second half of next year, the companies said. The aim is to complete the rollout by the end of 2029. The two companies are said to have started working together 18 months ago.

The deal is for 10 gigawatts of chips and it’s worth “multiple billions of dollars,” according to The Wall Street Journal. It was reported last month that OpenAI and Broadcom were making custom chips together. For what it’s worth, the latter’s CEO said recently that a new, unnamed client had put in an order worth $10 billion.

The Broadcom deal follows agreements that OpenAI recently struck with both NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA is investing $100 billion into OpenAI and will provide it with 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. The deal with AMD is for six gigawatts of compute power. OpenAI is said to be paying AMD tens of billions of dollars under that agreement and it could ultimately take up to a 10 percent stake in the company. As with the Broadcom rollout, both the NVIDIA and AMD deployments are expected to start in the second half of 2026. OpenAI also inked a deal with Oracle in July for 4.5 gigawatts in data center capacity as part of its Stargate Project.

According to recent reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that he wanted the company to build out 250 gigawatts of compute power over the next eight years, significantly up from the 2GW it’s expected to have by the end of this year. (For context, 250GW is about a fifth of the energy generation capacity of the entire US, which sits at around 1,200GW.)

As things stand, it would likely cost around $10 trillion to buy that much capacity. Altman said OpenAI would have to develop new financing tools to make that happen, but he hasn’t elaborated much on what those might look like. Even its current deals have OpenAI on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.  

While the likes of NVIDIA and Microsoft have invested heavily into OpenAI, there isn’t a backer on the planet that can plow $10 trillion into the company. As things stand, OpenAI is very, very far away from making up the difference in revenue too. It’s reportedly expecting to make $13 billion in revenue this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-making-its-own-ai-chips-with-broadcoms-help-142242231.html?src=rss

Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn’t ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded.

Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn’t appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim to have experienced a powertrain failure at highway speeds.

Jeep pulled the update after reports of problems, but the software had already downloaded to many owners’ cars by then. A member of Stellantis’ social engagement team told 4xe owners at a Jeep forum to ignore the update pop-up if they haven’t installed it yet.

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OpenAI and Broadcom are working together to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips and computing systems over the next four years, a high-profile partnership aimed at satisfying some of the startup’s immense computing needs. From a report: OpenAI plans to design its own graphics processing units, or GPUs, which will allow it to integrate what it has learned from developing powerful artificial-intelligence models into the hardware that underpins future systems. As part of the agreement announced Monday, the chips will be co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom and deployed by the chip company starting in the second half of next year. The new agreement will be worth multiple billions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said.

Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI chips that are specifically tailored to certain artificial-intelligence applications. It began working with OpenAI on creating a custom chip 18 months ago, and the companies broadened their partnership to include work on related components, including server racks and networking equipment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.

Young people are always finding new ways to blur the lines between irony and sincerity, the public and the private, and every thing else: TikTokers are using a caveman schtick to tell sad romantic stories; a Twitch streamer broadcast the birth of her daughter to her adoring chat; and young people are meeting a deadly serious political moment with colorful animal costumes. There’s also a new cartoon, for some reason, from Nintendo, and the rise of slopcore.

The Portland Frog and Chicken

The young people in Portland are changing the idea of what “protesting” means. In the days since the President declared Portland a “war zone” and a “never-ending disaster,” more and more young people have been showing up to protests dressed in colorful costumes. Frog guy was first. You can see him here, bravely facing down a cadre of heavily armed men:

before being pepper-sprayed for his trouble.

And then there’s the chicken guy, whose presence in front of an ICE facility provided important context to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s recent rooftop photo opportunity. “Our reality is beyond satire at this point,” Chicken Guy (aka Jack Dickinson) told The Atlantic. “So meeting it with absurdity…I guess that’s the idea.”

Frog and Chicken seem to have inspired others to meet ICE and the National Guard with absurdity (and colorful costumes), which might be the sign of a growing movement.

Protestors have been using ridiculousness to make their point since protests began, but the instant, worldwide dissemination of videos from Portland’s “front line” is fairly new. Images of heavily armed and armored law enforcement officers staring down Portland weirdos in unicorn and panda costumes makes a more compelling point than would clashes with radicals in ski masks—you don’t have to think very hard to know which side you’re on. And there’s something so Portland about the whole thing.

Twitch streamer Fandy livestreams her child’s birth

Austin based Twitch streamer Fandy is known as much for letting her 300,000 followers in on her personal life as she is for playing Overwatch, but the 30-year-old influencer cranked it up to 11 last week when she livestreamed her daughter’s birth. Fandy started streaming as soon as she went into labor, with 30,000 or so concurrent visitors on Twitch alone watching her deliver another human into the world. She even joked around with her chat in between breathing and contractions, and Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stopped by to offer congratulations. After a routine eight-hour labor, Fandy showed her child off to the world.

Her fans seem mostly happy to be included but some are questioning whether a live birth is in keeping with the streaming platform’s terms and conditions, and more importantly, if it was fair to the child who didn’t ask to be born and definitely didn’t ask to be livestreamed.

On the other hand, Fandy’s stream takes parasocial relationships to a new level, her fans seemed happy to be included, and who wouldn’t want to have 30,000 godparents?

Why are so many TikTokers talking like cavewomen?

It’s becoming cool on TikTok for young women to talk like cavewomen. Over videos labeled “POV: We’re Cavewomen and I’m Telling You About My Ex,” folks are spilling their guts about past relationships, while replacing “I” with me and generally leaving out articles.

The trend seems to have started when @em.brdly posted this video about she (sic) disastrous introduction to polyamory:

Others followed, detailing they bad experiences with young men:

But talk like caveman old! She make video talk like cavewoman “Karen” 2024:

He talk caveman 1991:

Like me say, more things change, more stay same.

What is “slopcore”?

Slopcore is the slang term for the countless 100s of millions of cheesy-looking, unsettling, AI-generated images, videos, and songs that have hit the internet since AI was given to the masses a couple of years ago. It also describes the uncanny, dreamy, slightly menacing vibe of all that slop. I did a deeper dive here, if you want to get further into the slop with me.

Viral video of the week: Nintendo teases…something

On Oct. 7, Nintendo posted this video on X with the caption “Close to You”:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

and no one knows why. There are no credits; there’s no logo. It’s just a baby chasing a pacifier. But because it’s Nintendo’s baby, the video has been streamed over 16 million times on X alone, and everyone seems to have a guess. Some theories:

• It’s a teaser for a new Pikmin game.

• It’s teasing a new Earthbound game.

• It’s teasing a new Chibi-Robo game.

• It’s teasing a new Elebits game (even though Elebits was from Konami)

• “Nintendo Baby” is being introduced as a character in Smash Brothers.

• Its the first look at a new Nintendo intellectual property involving babies and pacifiers.

• It’s a short meant to show off what Nintendo has been doing with its new animation studio.

• Nintendo wants to show its fanbase an experience that they will never have.

The point is there’s no way to know and it could be anything. (But it’s Pikmin, because Nintendo has released a Pikmin game for every console since the GameCube.)

Enthusiasm for Sora 2 “wasn’t shared in Hollywood,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “where the new AI tools have created a swift backlash” that “appears to be only just the beginning of a bruising legal fight that could shape the future of AI use in the entertainment business.”

[OpenAI] executives went on a charm offensive last year. They reached out to key players in the entertainment industry — including Walt Disney Co. — about potential areas for collaboration and trying to assuage concerns about its technology. This year, the San Francisco-based AI startup took a more assertive approach. Before unveiling Sora 2 to the general public, OpenAI executives had conversations with some studios and talent agencies, putting them on notice that they need to explicitly declare which pieces of intellectual property — including licensed characters — were being opted-out of having their likeness depicted on the AI platform, according to two sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment. Actors would be included in Sora 2 unless they opted out, the people said. OpenAI disputes the claim and says that it was always the company’s intent to give actors and other public figures control over how their likeness is used.

The response was immediate…. [Big talent agencies objected, along with performers’ unions and major studios.] “Decades of enforceable copyright law establishes that content owners do not need to ‘opt out’ to prevent infringing uses of their protected IP,” Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement… The strong pushback from the creative community could be a strategy to force OpenAI into entering licensing agreements for the content they need, legal experts said… One challenge is figuring out a way that fairly compensates talent and rights holders. Several people who work within the entertainment industry ecosystem said they don’t believe a flat fee works.

Meanwhile, “the complete copyright-free-for-all approach that OpenAI took to its new AI video generation model, Sora 2, lasted all of one week,” writes Gizmodo. But that means the service has “now pissed off its users.”

As 404 Media pointed out, social channels like Twitter and Reddit are now flooded with Sora users who are angry they can’t make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore. One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was “the only reason this app was so fun.”

Futurism published more reactions, including “”It’s official, Sora 2 is completely boring and useless with these copyright restrictions.”
Others accused OpenAI of abusing copyright to hype up its new app. “This is just classic OpenAI at this point,” another user wrote. “They do this s*** all the time. Let people have fun for a day or two and then just start censoring like crazy.” The app now has a measly 2.9-star rating on the App Store, indicative of growing disillusionment and frustration with censorship… [It’s not dropped to 2.8.]

In an apparent effort to save face, Altman claimed this week that many copyright holders are actually begging to have their characters appear on Sora, instead of complaining about the trend. “In the case of Sora, we’ve heard from a lot of concerned rightsholders and also a lot of rightsholders who are like ‘My concern is you won’t put my character in enough,'” he told the a16z podcast earlier this week. “So I can completely see a world where subject to the decisions that a rightsholder has, they get more upset with us for not generating their character often enough than too much,” he added. Whether most rightsholders would agree with that sentiment remains to be seen.

Business Insider offers another reaction. After watching Sora 2’s main public feed, they write that Sora 2 “seems to be overrun with teenage boys.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It’s not just you: Flatpak flat-out doesn’t work in the new Ubuntu 25.10 release,” writes the blog OMG Ubuntu:

While Flatpak itself can be installed using apt, trying to install Flatpaks with Flatpak from the command-line throws a “could not unmount revokefs-fuse filesystem” error, followed by “Child process exited with code 1”. For those who’ve installed the Ubuntu ‘Questing Quokka’ and wanted to kit it out with their favourite software from Flathub, it’s a frustrating road bump.

AppArmor, the tool that enforces Ubuntu’s security policies for apps, is causing the issue. According to the bug report on Launchpad, the AppArmor profile for fusermount3 lacks the privileges it needs to work properly in Ubuntu 25.10. Fusermount3 is a tool Flatpak relies on to mount and unmount filesystems… This is a bug and it is being worked on. Although there’s no timeframe for a fix, it is marked as critical, so will be prioritised.

The bug was reported in early September, but not fixed in time for this week’s Ubuntu 25.10 release, reports Phoronix:

Only [Friday] an updated AppArmor was pushed to the “questing-proposed” archive for testing. Since then… a number of users have reported that the updated AppArmor from the proposed archive will fix the Flatpak issues being observed. From all the reports so far it looks like that proposed update is in good shape for restoring Flatpak support on Ubuntu 25.10. The Ubuntu team is considering pushing out this update sooner than the typical seven day testing period given the severity of the issue.

More details from WebProNews:

Industry insiders point out that AppArmor, Ubuntu’s mandatory access control system, was tightened in this release to enhance security… This isn’t the first time AppArmor has caused friction; similar issues plagued Telegram Flatpak apps in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS earlier this year, as noted in coverage from OMG Ubuntu.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this excerpt from a Los Angeles Times newsletter:

One of the most consequential moments in California’s drive to beat back climate change will take place next month. The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning our reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over…

[T]he U.S. got nearly half its electricity from coal-fired plants as recently as 2007. By 2023, that figure had dropped to just 16.2%. California drove an even more dramatic shift, getting just 2.2% of its electricity from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from the Intermountain plant. Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month.
“And with improved technology to store power, the change has been made without the power shortages that dogged the state up until 2020…”5

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScienceDaily reports:

Our everyday GPS struggles in “urban canyons,” where skyscrapers bounce satellite signals, confusing even advanced navigation systems. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) scientists created SmartNav, combining satellite corrections, wave analysis, and Google’s 3D building data for remarkable precision. Their method achieved accuracy within 10 centimeters during testing [90% of the time]. The breakthrough could make reliable urban navigation accessible and affordable worldwide…

“Cities are brutal for satellite navigation,” explained Ardeshir Mohamadi. Mohamadi, a doctoral fellow at NTNU, is researching how to make affordable GPS receivers (like those found in smartphones and fitness watches) much more precise without depending on expensive external correction services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But “Ukraine’s foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station,” reports Reuters, “in order to link the plant to Moscow’s power grid.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia’s grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant’s output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow’s forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. “Russia intentionally broke the plant’s connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid,” Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the “attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility”…. Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia’s continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine’s energy sector “a key battleground” in the war.

The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid… Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.

In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that “An unappreciated motive for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers…”

At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that’s a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.
Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine’s leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.

Brookings looks at how Ukraine’s energy sector has fared during the war:

The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war… A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption… The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia’s in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that “During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure… ”
And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. “As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs,” warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But “Ukraine’s foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station,” reports Reuters, “in order to link the plant to Moscow’s power grid.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia’s grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant’s output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow’s forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. “Russia intentionally broke the plant’s connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid,” Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the “attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility”…. Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia’s continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine’s energy sector “a key battleground” in the war.

The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid… Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.

In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that “An unappreciated motive for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers…”

At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that’s a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.
Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine’s leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.

Brookings looks at how Ukraine’s energy sector has fared during the war:

The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war… A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption… The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia’s in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that “During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure… ”
And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. “As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs,” warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal marvelled at AMD’s “game-changing deal” this week with OpenAI, calling it “the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long turnaround effort, solidifying AMD’s status as Nvidia’s most legitimate competitor.”

Shortly after taking charge of the company in 2014, [CEO] Su implemented a systematic plan to eat Intel’s lunch, which she accomplished by going after Intel’s main product lines while it was bogged down by manufacturing problems. Now, Su has set her sights on Nvidia, the $4.5 trillion chips behemoth led by her cousin, Jensen Huang. Some analysts believe that if Su can sign up more big customers for its AI chips, AMD could join the $1 trillion valuation club before too long.

“With this, it’s natural to ask: Did AMD just say checkmate to Nvidia?” asks the Motley Fool investment site. But their answer seems to be “no”…

AMD has increased its push into the AI market over the past few years, launching the AMD Instinct line of accelerators, and in the latest quarter, predicted its MI350 series would drive revenue growth in the second half of the year. Some analysts have said that AMD’s innovations position it to compete with Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture and chip — released late last year — but Nvidia’s commitment to release upgrades on an annual basis could keep it a step ahead when it comes to overall GPU performance and therefore revenue. Big tech companies are looking for the most powerful compute available — and so far, they know they can find that at Nvidia…
[AMD’s deal this week] is indeed an interesting operation, ensuring the company a major position in this infrastructure scale-up phase. [Nvidia CEO] Huang has said AI infrastructure spending may reach $4 trillion by the end of the decade, and this represents an enormous opportunity for chip designers such as AMD and Nvidia. So, the OpenAI deal is positive for AMD — but I wouldn’t say it’s negative for Nvidia. This chip giant signed its own deal with OpenAI last month, and it involves the deployment of 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems across data centers…

A quick comparison of the two deals: The Nvidia-OpenAI agreement involves more gigawatts, and Nvidia isn’t giving up a stake in its business — on top of this, though Nvidia is offering OpenAI funding, this will result in revenue growth as OpenAI returns to Nvidia to order GPUs. This pretty much guarantees that Nvidia will be the chip designer to benefit the most as OpenAI expands — and AMD isn’t about to step ahead of the market leader. All of this means that, yes, AMD should score a win thanks to its agreement with OpenAI and this may boost its growth in the market. But the chip designer can’t say “checkmate” to its bigger rival as Nvidia is perfectly positioned to maintain its lead over the long term.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from Fast Company:

According to Monster’s newly released 2025 Mental Health in the Workplace survey of 1,100 workers, 80% of respondents described their workplace environment as toxic. The alarming statistic is an increase from 67% just a year ago.
The challenging environment has major implications. An astonishing 71% of workers say their mental health is poor (40%) or fair (31%), while only 29% rank it positively: 20% said it was good and 9% described it as great. Workers say that a toxic workplace culture is the top cause of their poor mental health (59%), followed closely by having a bad manager (54%)…

Mental health is incredibly important to employees. The majority (63%) care more about it than having a “brag-worthy” job. Likewise, many would pass on a promotion (43%) or opt out of a raise (33%) if it was better for their mental health… The vast majority (93%) say their employer isn’t focused on supporting employee mental health — a statistic that rose drastically since just a year ago, with 78% claiming the same.

“According to the survey, more than half of workers (57%) say they’d rather quit their job than continue working in an environment they feel is toxic and overall, causing major strains to their mental wellbeing…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Star Trek universe panel at New York Comic Con (NYCC) this weekend concluded with a brand new trailer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The ten-episode series will follow the exploits of the first new crop of cadets in a century.

Per the official premise:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy introduces viewers to a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.

The new cadets include Sandro Rosta as human orphan Caleb Mir; Karim Diané as a Klingon cadet, Jay-Den Kraag; Kerrice Brooks as Sam (Series Acclimation Mil), the first Kasquain to attend the Academy; George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, a Khionian cadet who wants to be a captain; Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe, a Dar-Sha cadet; and Zoë Steiner as Tarima Sadal, daughter of the president of Betazed. In addition, Holly Hunter plays Academy chancellor Captain Nahla Ake; Gina Yashere plays Cadet Master Lura Thok; Becky Lynch plays a member of Starfleet bridge crew; and Paul Giamatti plays a half-Klingon, half-Tellarite character named Nus Braka, the series’ chief villain.

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“I’m here to say we have to give these AI bubble predictions a rest,” says Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi.

First of all, AI is a real technology being deployed in real ways inside of Corporate America. Second, this technology is requiring more physical assets in the ground — which are being built to support AI’s real-world application. What Zach Dell (son of Michael Dell) is working on at startup Base Power (which just raised $1 billion) impressed me this week. It’s addressing a key issue — power availability and costs in part because of rising stress on the grid due to AI development.

Next, the spending on AI infrastructure doesn’t strike me as reckless. I talk to CFOs and they walk me through their thinking, which seems logical. They aren’t foaming at the mouth with wild-eyed predictions of grandeur similar to the late ’90s. Plus, the tech giants making the biggest AI investments are fueling their ambitions by cash on hand — not loading up balance sheets with debt. The upstarts in AI are well funded, not being 100% stupid in their organizational build-outs. They’re working on tangible technology that has actual orders behind it…
Lastly here in my scolding of the AI worrywarts is that valuations don’t support the warning calls. According to new research out of Goldman Sachs this week, the median forward P/E ratio across the Magnificent Seven is 27 times, or 26 times if excluding Tesla (TSLA), which has a much higher multiple than the other companies. This is roughly half the equivalent valuation of the biggest seven companies in the late 1990s, while the dominant companies in Japan (mostly banks) traded at higher valuations still. What’s more, the current enterprise-to-sales ratios are also much lower than those of the dominant companies in the late 1990s.

“So it is true that valuations are high but, in our view, generally not at levels that are as high as are typically seen at the height of a financial bubble,” said Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer.

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