Tech

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just made the kind of statement that sounds absurd until you remember what year it is: only humans can win Oscars. In a sweeping rules update announced May 2nd, the Academy declared that acting performances must be “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” and screenplays must be “human-authored” to qualify for nomination at the 99th Academy Awards in March 2027. Ninety-nine years of handing out golden statues, and they never had to spell this out before. ...

Everyone’s talking about who builds the best AI model. But the real bottleneck in artificial intelligence right now isn’t software — it’s concrete, copper wire, and electricity. KKR just put $10 billion behind that thesis. Helix Digital Infrastructure: The Pitch The private equity giant launched Helix Digital Infrastructure this week — a standalone company that will design, build, own, and operate the physical backbone AI depends on. Data centers. Power generation. Transmission lines. Cooling systems. The unsexy stuff that makes everything else possible. ...

A single Nvidia B300 server now costs roughly $1 million on China’s grey market. That’s nearly double the US retail price and almost double what it sold for in China just months ago. The cause is a collision of forces: exploding AI demand, a US crackdown on chip smuggling that’s strangling supply, and the growing desperation of Chinese tech companies racing to stay competitive. This isn’t a pricing anomaly. It’s the US-China tech cold war rewriting the economics of artificial intelligence in real time. ...

The U.S. military just took its biggest step toward becoming an “AI-first fighting force.” On May 1st, the Department of Defense announced agreements with eight AI companies — SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle — to deploy frontier AI models on the Pentagon’s most sensitive classified networks. But the real headline? The company that’s not on the list: Anthropic. What Actually Happened The agreements give all eight companies access to deploy AI on the Pentagon’s Impact Level 6 and IL7 network environments — the most sensitive classified systems where war plans get made and intelligence gets analyzed. ...

A company founded five years ago by researchers who thought AI safety deserved more attention is now worth more than Switzerland’s GDP. Anthropic is closing a $50 billion funding round at roughly $900 billion. If that lands, the Claude maker officially leapfrogs OpenAI — the very company its founders left behind — to become the most valuable AI startup on Earth. Welcome to 2026, where turning away billion-dollar checks is a flex. ...

Four earnings calls. One evening. One number that made Wall Street’s collective jaw hit the floor: $1 trillion. That’s the projected cumulative AI capital expenditure for Big Tech by 2027 — more than the GDP of the Netherlands, more than three times the value of the entire U.S. airline fleet, and the single largest corporate infrastructure bet in human history. But here’s what makes this story interesting: the market didn’t react to that number with uniform euphoria. It split cleanly down the middle. Google got a 10% pop. Meta got punched 8% in the face. Same thesis, same spending spree, wildly different verdicts. ...

Three-quarters of a trillion dollars. That’s how much Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon plan to spend on capital expenditure in 2026 — and nearly all of it is aimed at AI infrastructure. Wednesday night’s earnings dump wasn’t just big. It was historically unprecedented. Every single hyperscaler either raised or reaffirmed their guidance upward, blowing past Wall Street’s already-aggressive $670 billion estimate. If anyone still questioned whether Big Tech was serious about the AI arms race, $725 billion in concrete, silicon, and fiber optic cable answers that definitively. ...

For sixty years, getting a drug approved in America has followed the same grinding playbook: run a trial, collect data, package millions of pages of submissions, send it to the FDA, and wait. The average journey from Phase 1 to market takes 10 to 12 years. Nearly half of that, according to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, is “dead time” — paperwork, administrative lag, and data sitting in limbo. On Tuesday, the FDA said it’s done with dead time. ...

Your next job interviewer might not have a pulse. On April 28, Amazon unveiled Connect Talent — an agentic AI system that finds, screens, interviews, and evaluates job candidates around the clock. No human involvement until the final hiring decision. It’s not a chatbot on a careers page. It’s a full-stack autonomous hiring agent, and Amazon is selling it to every enterprise that hires at scale. They even coined a philosophy to soften the blow: humorphism. ...

On Sunday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced the end of their exclusive partnership. By Monday, OpenAI’s models were live on Amazon Web Services. The speed tells you everything about how long this was in the making. This isn’t a cloud provider swap. It’s OpenAI declaring independence — while juggling missed revenue targets, an $852 billion valuation, a looming IPO, and a trial against Elon Musk happening simultaneously. What Actually Changed On April 27, OpenAI and Microsoft jointly announced a restructured deal: ...