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Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is ending revenue-sharing payments to OpenAI (paywalled; alternative source) and making the partnership non-exclusive. "The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies," Microsoft said Monday in a blog post. Bloomberg reports: The revised deal is meant to simplify a complicated relationship between two partners that has been foundational to OpenAI's rise and the broader AI boom. OpenAI has since pursued partnerships with multiple cloud providers, including Microsoft rival Amazon.com Inc., to meet its growing computing needs to build and service AI software to a wider audience. As part of OpenAI's restructuring last year as a for-profit business, Microsoft received a 27% ownership stake in the AI startup.

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No ads, no algorithm, and you actually have to physically tap phones to add a friend

It's been more than a decade since social media platform Friendster went dark, but a new owner has brought it back from the dead - sort of - with the hope he can give exhausted users of modern platforms a reprieve. …

Executives from Citi, Home Depot, and Capcom describe early work with AI agents

While AI agents have moved from experimental tools to customer-facing workers in a matter of months, the next challenge is governance and reliability once those agents touch real money, real shoppers, and real creative output.…

California's proposed billionaire tax appears headed for the November ballot after backers said they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the threshold needed to qualify. SF Standard reports: Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth tax to a statewide vote come November. That's well beyond the 875,000 names needed to qualify the measure, and likely sufficient to account for illegible or invalid signatures. The Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West, a union representing more than 120,000 healthcare workers, pitched the tax to make up for federal spending cuts that threaten to shutter hospitals(opens in new tab) and kick millions of people off medical insurance. Proponents of California's wealth tax estimate it would raise $100 billion in one-time revenue, even if some billionaires leave because of the measure. The nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst's Office forecasts tens of billions in upfront revenue, but cautioned that the tax could cost hundreds of millions or more a year if some billionaires move out of state. The proposal, which needs a simple majority to pass, would apply to assets of people with net worth of $1 billion or more who lived in California as of Jan. 1 this year. That means it would affect about 200 people, according to the SEIU-UHW.

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Facebook provider also working with energy storage firm to keep 100 hours of juice on hand

With AI demand growing, Facebook parent Meta is looking for new ways to power its datacenters, with one ambitious project pledging to send solar power down from orbit. Another agreement offers Meta the opportunity to store enough power to keep its bit barns going, even when the grid is over capacity or down.…

No. More. Exclusivity. Redmond keeps the ring until 2032, but OpenAI is free to see other clouds

Once tied tightly together, Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their agreement, making the Windows giant's license non-exclusive. In exchange, Microsoft will no longer owe OpenAI a revenue share.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The whale has resurfaced. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup offshoot of High-Flyer Capital Management quantitative analysis firm, became a near-overnight sensation globally in January 2025 with the release of its open source R1 model that matched proprietary U.S. giants. It's been an epoch in AI since then, and while DeepSeek has released several updates to that model and its other V3 series, the international AI and business community has been largely waiting with baited breath for the follow-up to the R1 moment. Now it's arrived with last night's release of DeepSeek-V4, a 1.6-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model available free under commercially-friendly open source MIT License, which nears -- and on some benchmarks, surpasses -- the performance of the world's most advanced closed-source systems at approximately 1/6th the cost over the application programming interface (API). This release -- which DeepSeek AI researcher Deli Chen described on X as a "labor of love" 484 days after the launch of V3 -- is being hailed as the "second DeepSeek moment." As Chen noted in his post, "AGI belongs to everyone". It's available now on AI code sharing community Hugging Face and through DeepSeek's API. The new DeepSeek-V4-Pro model delivers "near-frontier performance" at a much lower price, costing $5.22 for 1 million input and 1 million output tokens compared with $35 for GPT-5.5 and $30 for Claude Opus 4.7. That makes it roughly 1/7th the cost of GPT-5.5 and 1/6th the cost of Claude Opus 4.7, reinforcing VentureBeat's point that DeepSeek is "compressing advanced model economics into a much lower band." While GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7 still lead on most benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro gets close enough that its lower cost could "force a major rethink of the economics of advanced AI deployment."

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Side boosters to make simultaneous touchdown while center core takes one for the team

SpaceX is preparing to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in more than 18 months, kicking off what could be a busy time for the vehicle.…

Space Force awards 11 firms prototype deals to build orbital interceptors

The United States Space Force (USSF) has awarded eleven companies contracts to develop space-based interceptors for President Trump's Golden Dome program, in agreements worth up to $3.2 billion.…

Global recruitment giant says 71% of human firewalls saw wages stagnate last year as threats and responsibilities grew

Cybersecurity professionals were the most overlooked workers in IT when it came to pay rises in 2025, according to new figures from recruiter Harvey Nash.…

Security giant says attackers grabbed 'limited set' of data. Crooks claim 10 million records

A home security biz getting digitally burgled is not a great look - but that's exactly where ADT finds itself. The company has confirmed a cyber intrusion following an extortion attempt by the ShinyHunters crew, which claims to have made off with more than 10 million records.…

Keep the patches away for as long as you like

Microsoft has devised a solution to the problem of Windows Updates that break customer devices – users are now able to pause them for as long as they like.…

"There are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States," says Andy Hunter, the founder/CEO of Bookshop.org. Fast Company checks in on his site, which gives over 80% of its profit margin to independent bookstores, structuring itself as a B Corporation (a for-profit company certified for its social-impact) while providing an alternative to Amazon and other online booksellers: Hunter created Bookshop.org in January 2020 to help independent bookstores survive by utilizing e-commerce... "There were over 5,000 bookstores in the American Booksellers Association in 1995, which is one year after Amazon launched. By 2019, that had gone down to 1,889, so more than half of them disappeared." He says he never could have predicted how the pandemic would accelerate his company's growth... "All these stores that had been trying to get around e-commerce or never really launching or building their website, they had to sell online. That was the only way they could survive during the pandemic...." "Our goal is to help independent local bookstores get their fair share of online sales, which would end up being maybe 10% of Amazon's market share," he says. "And right now we're at about 2%, so we have a long way to go. But a lot of people didn't even think we could ever get 1%...." Bookshop.org has given almost $47 million back to local bookstores. For Hunter, it's not just about the money but changing the way society thinks. He's delighted that many big organizations no longer use Amazon affiliate links, choosing to send people his way instead. "People have absorbed the message that they should support independent bookstores when they buy books," he says.

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Dynamic Earth's ancient rock holds not primordial crystal, but a tiny Linux box having a bad day

Bork!Bork!Bork! From the beginning of time, there has always been Bork. Lurking within the heart of this ancient rock is not a precious crystal or a rare fossil. No, it's a Raspberry Pi desktop and dialog.…

UK’s data watchdog confirms its boss has been off the job since February while an HR investigation runs

The UK's data watchdog is without its chief after John Edwards stepped aside from the Information Commissioner's Office while an independent workplace investigation examines unspecified HR matters.…

Microsoft Copilot now heading into ‘Official Sensitive’ work after winning back just 26 minutes a day in a trial

HMRC is betting big on Microsoft Copilot, rolling it out to tens of thousands of staff after a Whitehall trial estimated it saved each user roughly 26 minutes of time per day.…

AI vuln-hunter finds what humans taught it to find. Funny that

Opinion In retrospect, calling it Mythos made it a hostage to fortune. Anthropic may have hoped that the name implied its AI code security model had mythical god-like powers, but there's an alternate reading. Another definition for Mythos is a set of beliefs of obscure origin which are incompatible with reality.…

Public stock exchanges "appear to be warming to climate tech startups," reports TechCrunch. "Or at least some of them." This week, nuclear startup X-energy went public, raising $1 billion in an upsized share offering that appears to have delivered a windfall for its investors, including Amazon [and Google]. Retail investors apparently can't get enough, with the stock popping 25% in its first hour of trading. Also this week, geothermal startup Fervo said it filed for an initial public offering. The size of the Fervo IPO has yet to be disclosed, but private investors have valued the company at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook. The move to go public aligns with what investors told TechCrunch at the end of last year. After years of tepid attitudes toward climate tech companies, they expected public markets to start welcoming energy-related startups. Nearly every investor that weighed in on the question said the startups with the best chances of going public specialize in either nuclear fission or enhanced geothermal. Fervo, specifically, was mentioned several times. Thank data centers for that. The AI craze has taken a trend of rising demand for electricity and made it sexy and salable.

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There was only one ESC from sneaky screenshots and fake BSODs

Who, Me? Welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column that shares your stories of mistakes, occasional malice, and how you came out the other side.…

"California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Washington have all passed comprehensive right-to-repair regulations," reports CNBC, "covering everything from consumer electronics and farm equipment to wheelchairs and automobiles." And the consumer movement "continues to gain political momentum" across America... As of this year, advocates are tracking 57 right-to-repair bills across 22 states. In Maine, the state senate just advanced a bill that would bring the right to repair to electronics in the state. Texas's new right-to-repair law kicks in on Sept. 1 and covers phones, laptops, and tablets, but excludes medical and farm equipment, and game consoles.... [U.S.] Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are unlikely political bedfellows but have joined together to sponsor the REPAIR Act... The REPAIR Act would require automakers to give vehicle owners, independent repair shops, and aftermarket manufacturers secure access to vehicle repair and maintenance data, preventing manufacturers from funneling consumers into their own exclusive and more expensive dealership repair networks... Hawley criticized big corporations in his arguments in favor of right-to-repair legislation. "Big corporations have a history of gatekeeping basic information that belongs to car owners, effectively forcing consumers to pay a fixed price whenever their car is in the shop," Hawley told CNBC. "The bipartisan REPAIR Act would end corporations' control over diagnostics and service information and give consumers the right to repair their own equipment at a price most feasible for them." The largest small business lobby in the U.S., the NFIB, says 89% of its members support right-to-repair legislation, making it a top legislative priority for 2026.

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