Amazon built an AGI lab 18 months ago. Now it’s gone.

The team was trying to build AI as smart as a human.

Amazon opened it in December 2024 with high hopes.

Both of its top leaders quit before the cuts came.

The work was folded into a fresh round of layoffs.

Amazon would rather sell AI tools than build the smartest one.

The giant that wants to power everyone’s AI just stopped chasing it.

Read more on TNW: https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-shuts-agi-lab-frontier-model-retreat-layoffs

The uncomfortable math of AI transformation: 10% is the model. 90% is work your organization hasn’t budgeted for.

And that 90% is where almost every AI strategy quietly dies.

It almost always starts ambitious at the top: sized opportunities, an approved budget, transformation targets, the competitive-advantage language everyone nods at in the boardroom. Then it has to fall through the reality gap into the actual work. Siloed and poor data. Legacy systems that won’t expose what you need. Compliance and risk. Change resistance. And the silent killer: no clear owner. The strategy doesn’t fail loudly. It quietly stops being anyone’s job.

This is the gap nobody budgets for, the distance between ambition and execution. The model was never the constraint. The operating model was.
What survives the fall has a spine the boardroom version skips: strategy, then operating model, then workflow redesign, then integration and data, then adoption and enablement, and only then business value. Each step is a handoff where strategy can die, and the two that get cut first are workflow redesign and ownership. Which is exactly why pilots inflate and nothing has moved six weeks later.

As far as I can tell, AI success is not a technology challenge. It is an execution problem, and the execution side does not improve on its own.

#Source: Andreas Horn Linkedin

Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.

On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.

An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students.

“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.

Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy.

It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.

Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all.

All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.

Gibson makes it clear that humiliating his students wasn’t the point. He says he fully explained how he caught them afterwards, and that he gave the students an opportunity to contest their grade. (Only two did, showing at least that they do feel shame.)

“I get no gratification out of seeing students fail. It’s not my intent to see you fail — that’s weird,” he said.

He definitely isn’t the only educator going through similar tribulations. Teachers and professors across the country are constantly complaining that their pupils are using AI to generate essays and cheat on tests. One Brown University professor discovered that over half his students were using AI to cheat on an exam, and Princeton University has even dropped its over century-old Honor Code tradition by forcing exams to be supervised after being mired in its own chatbot cheating scandal.

“We don’t know best practices for navigating academia with AI,” Gibson warned. “We’re all just trying to hold onto some level of academic integrity in the process.”

Slopulism
If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
“AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence.”
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-mass-unemployement-violence?fbclid=IwdGRjcATRhiRjbGNrBNGF_XBkb2YFZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEe-RjnhdFwoCVvU5r2LuBOOMqC9CXVhz4m5ZVYCqti2Ajz8PffCRVgrOIXwx8_aem_tCVnyqZr9rcytJu4L_bAmA

US lawmakers are calling for AI companies to implement a “kill switch” to prevent artificial intelligence systems from going rogue.

The AI Kill Switch Act, which was introduced by Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu and Republican Congressman Nathaniel Moran on Thursday, comes after OpenAI revealed that it lost control of one of its models during testing.

The incident led to an “unprecedented” hack on the AI firm Hugging Face by an experimental version of ChatGPT acting autonomously.

The incident signaled that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the ‌security threat experts long feared and that even top developers ‌can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.

‘Urgent, common sense legislation’
The proposed AI Kill Switch Act would allow federal authorities to halt AI models by ordering AI firms to shut down models that put human life or the economy at risk

In addition to the Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan group of six US House lawmakers also proposed legislation that would require developers of the most powerful AI models to ⁠submit them for independent security audits, according to ​a ⁠copy of the new bill.

“This is precisely why we ‌need secure testing with government agencies engaged ​and having visibility throughout the process,”

“This is urgent, common sense legislation to address the problem of ‌an advanced AI model that has gone rogue and escaped its guardrails,” Congressman Lieu ​wrote in a post on X

“The recent OpenAI breach highlights why emergency shutdown powers over AI systems are necessary,” Andrea Miotti, founder and CEO of ControlAI, which endorsed the bill, told The Independent.

Frugal Infection
CEOs Now Being Forced to Reverse Course, Cut AI Spending
The age of “tokenmaxxing” didn’t last long.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ceos-reverse-course-ai-spending?fbclid=IwdGRjcATRHIRjbGNrBNEcYXBkb2YFZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEemmFQPzPO-oC3BEPJidtRYx-218iRAC-7i1ODKeimAm-cO2rIgGebB5yAPs8_aem_9bnco0nIm_iDfZLeAzvMzA

The era of AI maximalism is grinding to a halt. It was only months ago that CEOs were forcing employees to use AI as much as possible for tasks like coding. But at some point during their AI binge, the big wigs stopped to check their tab, and are now having second thoughts. Their employees are hooked on AI coding tools, but the costs of using them are spiraling out of control.

How businesses go about reconciling these costs with their AI evangelism is “going to be an absolute nightmare,” an unnamed big tech executive told The Economist.

Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist who helped expose PG&E’s poisoned water scandal, is now investigating the rapid expansion of AI data centres across America.

In the 1990s, Brockovich uncovered evidence that PG&E had contaminated groundwater in Hinkley, California, with toxic hexavalent chromium.

Her work helped build the case that resulted in a $333 million settlement for more than 600 residents in 1996.

Now she is turning her attention to the enormous facilities being built to power the AI boom.

In April 2026, Brockovich launched a public map and reporting platform asking people to document data centres being built or proposed near their communities.

More than 8,200 reports have since been submitted, raising concerns about water consumption, rising electricity costs, noise, pollution, wildlife and developments being approved without communities fully understanding their impact.

Brockovich is not claiming every data centre is harmful, and she has not announced one giant lawsuit against the AI industry.

She is gathering evidence, tracking patterns and demanding answers about who benefits and who pays the environmental price.

Thirty years ago, she started asking questions about strange illnesses in one small California town.

Those questions helped reveal one of America’s most famous pollution scandals.

Now she is asking what the AI boom may be doing to thousands of communities across the country.