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Anthropic: Anthropic acquires Stainless (May 18, 2026)
Anthropic is acquiring Stainless, which builds SDKs, CLIs, and MCP server tooling to help agents connect to APIs, data, and tools. This brings Stainless’ tooling, multi-language SDKs, and team into Anthropic. -
Qwen: Qwen3.7 Preview (May 18, 2026)
Qwen3.7 Preview arrives on Arena, introducing Qwen3.7-Max-Preview, Qwen3.7-Plus-Preview, and upcoming releases. Alibaba ranks #6 in text and #5 in vision. -
WSJ: Move Over CoreWeave, Here Comes Nebius (May 18, 2026)
Nebius reshaped itself after divesting Russian assets, using cash and staff to build an AI cloud, land big Microsoft and Meta deals, and attract Nvidia investment. -
NY Times Opinion: Tech Workers Have Fears About A.I., Too. They Can Do Something About It. (May 17, 2026)
A.I. builders are alarmed by military use, job loss, and privacy harms, and are unionizing to push for control. Their expertise, despite legal hurdles, can reshape A.I. -
Cloudflare: Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us (May 17, 2026)
Cloudflare found Mythos chains vulnerabilities into exploits, generates working proofs, and reduces noisy, hedged findings. Inconsistent refusals and false positives require narrow prompts, adversarial review, and a harness to scale safe triage. -
WSJ: Your New AI Professor Is the Rapper From the Black Eyed Peas (May 18, 2026)
Rapper will.i.am taught a 16-week ASU class where students built AI agents, drawing on his history as a tech investor and creator. He aims to blend culture and technology, urging people to shape AI personalization. -
WSJ: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam (May 18, 2026)
Opposition to AI and data centers has surged, fueled by energy costs, job fears, and concerns about education and mental health. Protests, threats, local bans, and political fights have stopped projects. -
Gallup.com: Americans Oppose AI Data Centers in Their Area (May 13, 2026)
A March Gallup survey found 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers nearby, 48% strongly. Opposition stems from worries about water, energy, pollution, quality of life, and higher bills. -
Andy Masley: A crash course on US air pollution (May 18, 2026)
A review of US air pollution finds data center backup generators can cause large local health costs, though nationally data centers likely won’t dominate air pollution harms.
Category: Environment
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AI Cloud Expansion Meets Public and Worker Backlash (Links) – May 22, 2026
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Frank Gehry, RIP
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (Source: Wikipedia) From the NYTimes: Frank Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96
Pioneering American architect, Frank Gehry died earlier this month. He is best known for landmark, sculptural buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) — which sparked the “Bilbao effect” of using iconic architecture to revive cities. The Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles uses similar forms and materials for a striking appearance.
Walt Disney Concert Hall (source: Wikipedia) He broke with modernist orthodoxy by using everyday materials and expressive, often fragmented forms; he was an early adopter of computer design to achieve complex, sculptural structures. I see his influence in Chipotle restaurants. We have two locally: one prominently features corregated metal throughout the restaurant; the other has a lovely lighted wall made of plywood with a series of holes. Both use simple, inexpensive materials to create a pleasant aesthetic.
He also partnered with Fossil to design perhaps my favorite watch. It used Gehry’s own handwriting along with a clever display to present the time. There’s a simple artistic elegance in how it projects time: half past 8, 27 til 2, and so on within a simple rectangular frame.
Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison issued a call for a new design aesthetic while noting how Bauhaus thinking affected design in the 20th century. Gehry’s unique contribution to late 20th and early 21st century architecture is notable for how it leaned into organic forms, creating structures that are as much art as function. Architecture, it seems, can both serve a physical need and stir the soul.
Gehry (as well Cowen’s and Collison’s Call for a New Aesthetic) reminds us that people and society are embodied souls. We need physical spaces. While the internet, mobile technology, and more recently AI tech are amazing and transformative, Gehry’s architecture invites us to see beauty in the places we live and in the structures we build. And the watches we put on our wrists.1
- Yes, I have an Apple Watch, and it’s an amazing tool but not in a particularly beautiful form. But that’s a much longer post I’ll likely never write! ↩︎
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Various (AI) Links (Nov. 6)
- WSJ: Microsoft Lays Out Ambitious AI Vision, Free From OpenAI (Nov 6, 2025)
Microsoft is reorganizing its AI efforts to focus on developing “superintelligence,” or AI with capabilities exceeding human performance. This includes forming a new MAI Superintelligence Team. - Simon Willison’s Weblog: Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex (Nov 6, 2025)
“It turns out coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are a fantastic fit for this kind of work as well. Give them the right goal and a useful environment and they’ll churn through a basic research project without any further supervision.” - OpenAI Help Center: Publishers and Developers – FAQ | OpenAI Help Center (Oct 21, 2025)
To have your website appear in ChatGPT search results, ensure you aren’t blocking the OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file and use the noindex meta tag if you don’t want your page title and link surfaced. Developers can improve website performance with ChatGPT Agent in Atlas by using ARIA tags to improve accessibility. - Inside Higher Ed: Student Success Leaders Worry About Affordability, AI, DEI (Nov 6, 2025)
“Just 2 percent of student success leaders say their institution is very effective in helping students understand how, when, and whether to use generative artificial intelligence in academic settings.” - The Chronicle of Higher Education: AI on Campus: Emerging Governance Models (Oct 29, 2025)
University leaders are exploring questions of AI governance, strategy, education, and accountability. A tension between creativity/innovation and risk/governance exists, but universities will have to navigate this (quickly) as the AI rollout continues unabated. - Electrek: Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity (Nov 4, 2025)
The Australian government is proposing a “Solar Sharer” program that would provide free electricity to all ratepayers for at least three hours a day, leveraging the abundance of midday solar power and negative wholesale electricity rates. - Fortune: CEO of $8 billion AI company says it’s ‘mind-boggling’ that people think you can work 38 hours a week, have work-life balance, and be successful | Fortune (Oct 13, 2025)
Prominent business leaders, including the CEO of Cerebras, Andrew Feldman, are dispelling the idea of work-life balance as a requirement for achieving extraordinary success. My take: there’s more to success than power or money, and you ought to invest much of your life into people who simply can’t replace you after you die. - WSJ: Why AI Will Widen the Gap Between Superstars and Everybody Else (Oct 12, 2025)
AI will amplify the advantages of top-performing employees (“superstars”) rather than leveling the playing field, as these individuals are better equipped to leverage AI due to their expertise, work habits, and preferential treatment. - Jack Clark: Import AI 431: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear (Oct 13, 2025)
AI systems should be acknowledged as real and complex entities, not dismissed as simple tools. Understanding and mastering our fears about them is crucial for peaceful coexistence and harnessing their potential. - Torrentfreak: Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Digital Trade Barriers (Nov 6, 2025)
Cloudflare is reporting foreign site-blocking measures, intended to combat piracy, as significant trade barriers for US technology companies. This is a shift from previous years where copyright holders were advocating for more site-blocking.
- WSJ: Microsoft Lays Out Ambitious AI Vision, Free From OpenAI (Nov 6, 2025)
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More on AI & Water
As I noted earlier this year, water needs for European AI data centers was negligible at best considering population and overall water usage.
Andy Masley comes to the same conclusion in his recent post, The AI water issue is fake. (Also, three cheers for accurate and descriptive article titles):
All U.S. data centers (which mostly support the internet, not AI) used 200–250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023. The U.S. consumes approximately 132 billion gallons of freshwater daily. The U.S. circulates a lot more water day to day, but to be extra conservative I’ll stick to this measure of its consumptive use, see here for a breakdown of how the U.S. uses water. So data centers in the U.S. consumed approximately 0.2% of the nation’s freshwater in 2023.
However, the water that was actually used onsite in data centers was only 50 million gallons per day, the rest was used to generate electricity offsite. Most electricity is generated by heating water to spin turbines, so when data centers use electricity, they also use water. Only 0.04% of America’s freshwater in 2023 was consumed inside data centers themselves. This is 3% of the water consumed by the American golf industry.
And later:
This means that every single day, the average American uses enough water for 800,000 chatbot prompts.
I suppose if we truly want to save water, we should take shorter showers.
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