AWS opens Trainium externally, OpenAI poaches Shazeer, Adobe centers Firefly

Sources

Amazon hopes to challenge Nvidia more directly by selling its AI chips techcrunch.com

AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

OpenAI is bringing on some big guns in the lead-up to its IPO techcrunch.com

OpenAI is bulking up before its IPO, landing Transformer co-inventor Noam Shazeer from Google DeepMind and former Trump AI policy official Dean Ball in the same week.

Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months theverge.com

Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company’s head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned […]

Photoshop and Premiere now have AI assistants theverge.com

Adobe’s plan to stick AI assistants into all of its Creative Cloud suite is now fully underway, with new chatbots now rolling out to its biggest editing and design apps. As part of a public beta launching today, Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io now each have a bespoke AI Assistant that can be used […]

Adobe’s redesigned AI studio remembers what your creations look like theverge.com

Adobe is introducing some new capabilities for its Firefly AI assistant, alongside a “reimagined” AI studio that lets you edit and generate new designs from a single interface. The new Firefly experience launching today in private beta is designed to give you “persistent context, reusable assets, and organized workflows” across your projects, according to Adobe, […]

Bernie Sanders unveils $7 trillion plan to give Americans control of AI industry arstechnica.com

Bernie Sanders unveiled a $7 trillion plan that would give Americans an ownership stake in major AI firms through a public wealth fund. The proposal targets OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading labs, and is expected to draw sharp pushback from companies and the Trump administration.

AI data centers just got a government-mandated fast lane to the grid techcrunch.com

Federal regulators directed grid operators to prioritize interconnection requests from AI data centers, shortening queues that have stretched for years. The order skips the harder problem: actually expanding electricity supply to meet the new load.

AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round techcrunch.com

AI inference startup Baseten is closing a $1.5 billion raise at a $13 billion valuation, just months after its previous mega-round. The jump reflects an ongoing inference gold rush as enterprises scramble for capacity to serve production models.

Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits theverge.com

Three Amazon software engineers say they face termination after testifying at a Seattle City Council hearing in support of data center limits. They cite a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech, with disciplinary action arriving June 10th, one week after the hearing.

New usage analytics and updated spend controls for enterprises openai.com

OpenAI rolled out budget caps and usage analytics for ChatGPT Enterprise admins, letting organizations track consumption by team and rein in costs as deployments scale. The controls target finance and IT leaders trying to keep AI rollouts on budget.

General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation techcrunch.com

General Intuition is in talks to raise $300 million at a roughly $2 billion valuation to build embodied AI and world models. The startup trains on sibling Medal’s dataset of 2 billion gameplay videos a year from 10 million monthly users.

Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M techcrunch.com

Elastic agreed to buy DeductiveAI, a three-year-old CRV-backed startup that uses AI to detect and resolve software bugs, in a deal worth up to $85 million. The acquisition slots an AI site-reliability capability into Elastic’s observability stack.

(AINews) GLM > GPT? GLM-5.2 passes vibe check; Z.ai forecasts Open Fable by December latent.space

With GLM-5.2 passing everyone’s vibe check, the open models story finally becomes a real frontier story.

Improving health intelligence in ChatGPT openai.com

Learn how GPT-5.5 Instant improves ChatGPT’s health and wellness responses with stronger reasoning, better context, clearer communication, and physician-informed evaluations.

Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs techcrunch.com

The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be composed of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

As China looms, Taiwan makes more drones for defense and the US military arstechnica.com

Taiwan’s drone spending plans for defense could also boost business overseas.

Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex. technologyreview.com

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different…

A tech worker-backed PAC is bringing a $5M knife to Big Tech’s $100M gunfight techcrunch.com

Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.

Who decides when AI is too dangerous? theverge.com

On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5. […]

The Professor of Outputmaxxing — Anjney Midha, AMP latent.space

We talk about how this legendary investor went from humble beginnings in Singapore to leading rounds in Anthropic, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, and Periodic Labs… and the AMP secret master plan!

🔬 The Self-Driving Lab — Joseph Krause, Radical AI latent.space

Radical AI’s Joseph Krause on why the moat in materials is the lab, not the model

(AINews) Satya on Loopcraft: Building Frontier Ecosystems latent.space

a quiet day lets us report on Satya’s hit essay

Pixi’s new iOS app turns text messages into interactive AR experiences techcrunch.com

Forget stickers, GIFs, and emoji reactions. Pixi is betting that the next evolution of messaging is interactive augmented reality (AR).

The first big exit in AI bensbites.com

little tools for making life easier

Almost half of US singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says techcrunch.com

About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating — but many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

State of the blog, mid-2026 interconnects.ai

About 3 years since I started writing weekly.

The smartphone era created an attention crisis — slow tech is fixing it techcrunch.com

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention… They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

‘Queer Eye’ life coach Karamo Brown launches Kē, a wellness app featuring his AI digital clone techcrunch.com

After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey — from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth — Brown wants to help others do the same.

References

SemiAnalysis — Trainium3 Deep Dive newsletter.semianalysis.com

Trainium3 UltraServer scales to 144 chips via the NeuronSwitch-v1 all-to-all fabric, delivering 362 FP8 PFLOPs per rack and reaching rack-scale parity with Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72.

Stocktwits — Jensen Huang on chip war stocktwits.com

Huang brushed off the threat from in-house silicon, arguing Nvidia’s full-stack ‘electrons-to-tokens’ economics — CUDA, NVLink and optical fabric — make beating its platform ‘not that easy.’

SiliconAnalysts benchmark roundup siliconanalysts.com

Leaked internal documents showed Cohere and Stability AI found Trainium2 ‘underperforming’ versus H100s, citing higher latency and frequent service disruptions; developers describe the Neuron SDK as ‘clunky’ next to CUDA.

Trefis — ‘The Secret Chip Company’ trefis.com

Marvell shares surged over 7% on the external-sales news, but Alchip is reportedly taking the lead role in Trainium3 backend physical design, clouding Marvell’s long-term position.

CryptoBriefing cryptobriefing.com

Trainium3 is ‘largely sold out’ and much of Trainium4 capacity is already reserved through 2027, raising the question of whether AWS can supply external buyers without starving its own cloud customers.

Amazon press release — AWS European Sovereign Cloud press.aboutamazon.com

AWS launched its European Sovereign Cloud with an independent region in Brandenburg and new sovereign Local Zones in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal, with T-Systems operating Trainium-powered AI Factories for ITZBund and EWE AG.

Hindustan Times hindustantimes.com

Google spent $2.7 billion to rehire AI legend Noam Shazeer. He’s now heading to OpenAI

Dave Shapiro Substack (‘OpenAI Strikes Back’) daveshap.substack.com

Shazeer, a co-author of ‘Attention Is All You Need,’ has long critiqued the inefficiency of dense scaling… His move to OpenAI is widely viewed as a ‘rescue mission’ to fix stagnant pretraining scaling.

Finviz / wire report on Zoph firing finviz.com

Murati reportedly informed staff that Zoph was terminated for ‘unethical conduct’… OpenAI explicitly rejected these claims, stating in an internal memo that they did not share Murati’s concerns regarding Zoph’s behavior.

AI Magazine aimagazine.com

rival Anthropic reportedly overtook OpenAI in key enterprise metrics, including LLM revenue share (31.4% vs. 29%) and annual recurring revenue ($30 billion vs. $25 billion)

Staffing Industry Analysts staffingindustry.com

OpenAI plans to double headcount this year… from approximately 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026

Crypto Briefing on OpenAI governance cryptobriefing.com

its proposed IPO structure includes a controversial dual-class share system, granting insiders ‘Class B’ shares with ten votes each… criticism from institutional investors who fear it creates ‘founder kings’

Creative Bloq creativebloq.com

Adobe solves one of AI’s most maddening problems — character and style consistency — by letting creators save a character like ‘Carla’ as a reusable Element across image and video generations.

Futurum Group analyst note futurumgroup.com

Adobe’s Creative Agent represents a shift from media generation to ‘production orchestration,’ where the AI acts as an extension of the creator’s intent rather than just a generator — though it remains unclear whether Adobe will expose APIs that let these agentic capabilities run in third-party or custom enterprise environments.

Courthouse News (investor suit) courthousenews.com

The complaint alleges Adobe executives misled investors by calling the company’s AI ‘commercially safe’ while training models on a ‘shadow library’ (Bibliotik) containing nearly 200,000 pirated books.

r/photoshop discussion thread reddit.com

Designers report a persistent ‘regeneration loop’ and 5–7 second server latency that makes the Assistant slower than the Clone Stamp for micro-fixes; the panel also pops up unprompted, with some users preferring offline-only builds to avoid ‘cloud-based judgment.’

Adobe newsroom (Creative Agent launch) news.adobe.com

Over 75% of Fortune 500 companies — including Accenture, KPMG, Merck and Ulta Beauty — are using Firefly Enterprise; AI-influenced ARR now accounts for more than one-third of Adobe’s business, with 22 billion assets generated to date.