Articles by Richard L. Wells
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Jeff Bezos Bets On Flourish, A $500 Million Startup Trying To Copy The Brain To Fix AI's Power Crisis
Jeff Bezos has put money behind one of the most contrarian bets in artificial intelligence. Flourish, a neuroscience-focused AI startup, has raised $500 million at a $2.5 billion valuation from a roster that includes Bezos, Lux Capital, GV (Alphabet's venture arm), and Catalio Capital.
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Windows 11's June 2026 Update Lands June 9 With Shared Audio And NPU Monitoring: The 6 Features Worth Knowing
Microsoft is set to begin rolling out the June 2026 update for Windows 11 on Tuesday, June 9, and unlike a routine security patch, this one carries a handful of consumer features worth turning on. The two that stand out — Shared Audio and an NPU usage monitor in Task Manager — address things Windows users have wanted for a while, one for everyday convenience and one for the AI-PC era.
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WhatsApp Patches Reels Preview and Windows Attachment Flaws: Check Your Version Now
WhatsApp users on Windows, iPhone, and Android should confirm they are running the latest version of the messaging app after Meta disclosed and patched two security flaws in a 2026 advisory, one of which can disguise a malicious program as a harmless document. Security firm Malwarebytes urged the app's roughly 3 billion users to update on May 5, 2026,
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Google Gemini 3.5 Pro Nears June Launch With 2 Million Token Context And Deep Think Reasoning
Google's most powerful AI model of the year is expected to arrive within weeks. Gemini 3.5 Pro, unveiled at Google I/O on May 19, is slated for general availability in June 2026 — a launch Google has teased but not yet delivered, positioned to compete at the frontier of AI reasoning and multimodal capability.
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NASA Moves Roman Space Telescope Launch Up To August 30: A Billion-Galaxy Survey Arrives 8 Months Early
NASA has set August 30, 2026 as the launch date for its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — pulling the schedule forward by about eight months from its earlier commitment to fly no later than May 2027.
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Suno Raises $400 Million At A $5.4 Billion Valuation While The Record Labels Sue Over 61,000 Songs
AI music startup Suno has raised a $400 million Series D round at a $5.4 billion valuation — more than double its previous round
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Personal AI Assistant Startup Town Raises $55 Million From Andreessen Horowitz
Town, a San Francisco startup building a personalized AI assistant that works across a user's email, calendar, messages, and work apps, has raised a $55 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Forerunner Ventures, First Round, Alt Capital, and Conviction also participating.
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Musk's Grok Now Builds Your Grocery Cart As Gopuff Launches Go AI Shopping Assistant
Elon Musk's Grok is moving from chatbot answers into your grocery cart. On June 3, delivery company Gopuff and SpaceXAI launched "Go," a Grok-powered personal shopping assistant built into the Gopuff app that aims to predict what you need before you go looking for it. It is one of the most concrete examples yet of an AI assistant that does not just answer questions but takes action on a user's behalf — in this case, assembling and ordering a cart.
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Google Will Pay SpaceX $920 Million A Month For Nvidia GPU Capacity At xAI Data Centers
In a sign of how scarce AI computing power has become, Google has agreed to pay SpaceX about $920 million a month for access to compute capacity, leaning on the rocket company's infrastructure rather than relying only on its own data centers.
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Salesforce Will Not Hire More Software Engineers Next Year As Claude Code Compresses Migrations
Marc Benioff credits a 30% productivity jump after a 231-day migration shipped in 13 days with Claude Code
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NVIDIA RTX Spark Brings Blackwell AI To Windows Laptops This Fall: Intel And AMD Shares Slide
NVIDIA used Computex 2026 in Taipei to enter a market it had always left to others: the consumer Windows laptop. On June 1, chief executive Jensen Huang unveiled the RTX Spark superchip and said NVIDIA would "reinvent the PC" with Microsoft, pushing the company straight into ground that Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have contested for years.
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Trump AI Order Creates Voluntary 30-Day Review Window for Frontier Models
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google could give US national security agencies early access to their most cyber-capable AI systems, but the new framework is voluntary and does not give the government authority to approve or block model launches.
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OpenAI GPT-5.5-Cyber Reaches EU: Anthropic Mythos Opens to ENISA Days Later
OpenAI is extending its cybersecurity-tuned frontier model, GPT-5.5-Cyber, to Europe under a newly announced EU Cyber Action Plan, opening limited-preview access to vetted European defenders, businesses, governments, cyber agencies, and EU institutions including the EU AI Office.
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Xbox Games Showcase 2026: Gears of War: E-Day Direct Anchors 25th-Anniversary Show
Microsoft will stream the Xbox Games Showcase 2026 on Sunday, June 7, at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT), immediately followed by a dedicated Gears of War: E-Day Direct from developer The Coalition.
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Tesla Robotaxi Covers Entire Austin Metro: 245 Square Miles, About 20 Driverless Cars
Tesla's fifth Austin geofence expansion spans 245 square miles as Texas filings list 42 driverless cars.
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NVIDIA Is Not the Only AI Chip Winner: Broadcom Forecasts $56 Billion as Custom Silicon Demand Surges
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan expects fiscal 2026 AI semiconductor revenue to approach $56 billion, nearly tripling in one year. The forecast shows that custom accelerators and high-speed networking are becoming a second center of power in the AI infrastructure market.
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Bot Traffic Passes Humans Online: Cloudflare Says Agentic AI Drove 57.5% Share
For the first time since the web opened to the public, machines now generate most of the requests moving across it. Cloudflare co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said this week that automated systems account for 57.5% of HTTP requests to web content worldwide, against 42.5% from people.
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AI Chip Shortage Will Last Years, TSMC Warns: Why Stable Pricing Still Means 2026 Increases
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Chairman and CEO C.C. Wei told shareholders at the company's June 4 annual meeting in Hsinchu that the AI chip shortage will persist for years and that TSMC will not impose sudden, memory-style price spikes — a pledge that, read closely, does not mean prices are holding flat.
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Gemini-Powered Apple Siri Will Run on Nvidia B200 Chips via Google Cloud
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is scheduled to open Monday, June 8, at 1:00 p.m. ET, and the most consequential detail of its artificial intelligence overhaul concerns hardware Apple does not own.
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RAM Prices 2026: Buy Now or Wait as Gartner Forecasts 130% Memory Cost Surge
On June 3, Tom's Hardware reported that the cheapest 32GB DDR5 kit available in the United States had climbed to $374.97, with no comparable option selling for less, a detail captured in its daily RAM price tracker.
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Meta Smart Glasses Facial Recognition Code Is Already on Millions of Phones, Wired Finds
The dormant NameTag system would let Meta smart glasses identify people, and the ACLU wants it scrapped.
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GitLab Trades 350 Jobs for AI Spending as Revenue Climbs 23% in Same Quarter
CEO Bill Staples cited agentic tailwinds, and the company expects no material Duo AI revenue this year.
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Broadcom Pivots to Chips Only as AI Guidance Miss Drags Down the Semiconductor Sector
Broadcom reported on Wednesday that its AI chip revenue grew 143% in a single quarter, then watched its stock fall sharply on Thursday and pull the rest of the semiconductor sector down with it.
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Apple Approves Poke as First iMessage AI Agent, Charging Per User Before WWDC
Apple has approved Poke, an AI assistant built by Palo Alto's The Interaction Company of California, as the first AI agent approved to operate on its Messages for Business platform, the startup confirmed Thursday, June 4.
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Meta Builds AI Data Centers in Tents: Strategy Halves Build Time Amid $145 Billion Bet
Meta is building AI data centers inside giant fabric tents to bring computing capacity online in roughly half the usual time, according to satellite imagery and city permits surfaced on June 4 by Cleanview Energy founder Michael Thomas.
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Meta AI Instagram Hack Outlasts Fix: Company Alerts Victims as Account Takeovers Continue
Meta has started emailing Instagram users this week to warn that their accounts may have been compromised, days after attackers found they could seize profiles simply by asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email address on someone else's account.
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X Petitions FTC to End Twitter Privacy Order as Grok AI Data Questions Resurface
Elon Musk's X has asked the Federal Trade Commission to scrap the privacy order that has governed the platform for years, and on June 3 the agency opened public comment on the request.
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NVIDIA OpenAI Investment Shrinks From $100B to $30B: Compute Lock-In War Continues
NVIDIA OpenAI investment dropped from a $100 billion letter of intent to a $30 billion equity stake in early 2026. As Vera Rubin GPUs now enter production with OpenAI as an early customer, the restructured deal reveals how AI chip lock-in and circular investment have become the real battleground in frontier AI development.
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ChatGPT Memory Dreaming Update: OpenAI Rewrites Personalization Engine, Limits Audit Trail
OpenAI is upgrading ChatGPT's memory from a list of stored facts into a more active system that can synthesize information across conversations and update it over time.
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ChatGPT Reaches 1 Billion App Users: Claude's 640% Growth Splits Session Time
ChatGPT Claude monthly active users data from Sensor Tower reveals a split market: ChatGPT reached 1 billion monthly app users in May 2026, the fastest app ever, while Claude grew 640% year over year and US dual-platform users reduced ChatGPT session time by 5% after installing Claude, as both companies filed for IPOs.
