An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab's debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company's backers told the FT that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing at that level could unlock billions of dollars in gains for the five-year-old company's early investors but would also test public markets that are growing more nervous about the AI boom.

Anthropic's backers say booming demand for the lab's advanced AI models and tools justifies their lofty expectations. Investors expect the Claude maker's annualized revenue to be between $100 billion and $120 billion by the end of 2026 -- using the startup's preferred measure, which infers full-year sales from recent performance -- up by more than 10 times over the course of 2026. "If Anthropic is growing 800 percent a year, you'd think at the incredibly low end they would trade at 30 times [revenue]," said one investor in the group. "That would make them a $3 trillion company." According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Anthropic is currently in talks to acquire Decart AI for roughly $6 billion.

"Decart develops world models alongside software designed to lower AI training expenses by improving how efficiently chips are utilized," reports Quartz. "That capability could allow Anthropic to get more out of its current infrastructure as demand grows. If the deal closes, Decart's team would join Anthropic's inference and performance organization."

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Heart Aerospace's X1, billed as the world's largest battery-electric aircraft, completed a 27-minute maiden flight in New York using more than 1 MW of power and only about $5 worth of electricity. The 106-foot-wingspan demonstrator is a precursor to the company's 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30 regional airliner, targeted for service in 2031. Interesting Engineering reports: Developed by Heart Aerospace, the X1 demonstrator lifted off from Plattsburgh International Airport in New York on Wednesday, August 12. The piloted aircraft remained in the skies for about 27 minutes and made it to a 1,100-foot altitude above ground level (AGL). According to the Swedish aerospace company, the aircraft has a wingspan of 106 feet (32 meters). It's additionally 76 feet (23 meters) long and has a takeoff weight exceeding 25,000 lbs (11,340 kilograms). "With the first flight of X1, Heart Aerospace has demonstrated electric flight at the scale of a commercial airliner," said Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace founder and CEO. "Electric commercial aircraft have the potential to fundamentally reshape airline economics and, ultimately, lower the cost ofÂair travelÂfor passengers."

"This is at the heart of our vision for abundant air travel, with electrification enabling more affordable, frequent, and cleaner air service to and from airports closer to home."

You can watch the first flight on YouTube.

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Apple is reportedly negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its redesigned Siri access to current news and other information, with payments potentially tied to how often publishers' content is used. The talks come as Apple prepares to launch its long-delayed Siri AI later this year, after partnering with Google to use distilled Gemini models. Engadget reports: [The Wall Street Journal] did not reveal the specific publishers Apple reached out to, but did note the company has proposed structuring payments around a variable compensation plan, which would see it pay those organizations when their content is used. By contrast, most large AI labs like OpenAI have typically offered guaranteed fees in exchange for broad access. According to the The Journal, Apple has paid publishers for access to their content in the past as part of earlier agreements that saw the company secure AI training rights.

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Jamelle Bouie almost never misses. In this video that’s just shy of 10 minutes long, he chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on “wokeness” instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime. (And he worked in a reference to Jonathan Frakes saying no.)

I bring this up because this is just a great example of a phenomenon I’ve been struck by over the past year. Which is that, in the midst of a government that is systematically dismantling Americans’ rights, that is systematically dismantling the post-World War II world order, that is systematically tearing apart the social safety net, that is trying to exert nearly totalitarian control over large parts of American life, which is constructing concentration camps and throwing migrants into them, which has killed two Americans on the street and is looking to suppress as much as possible dissent, even bringing the full force of the federal government against people it wrongly accuses of wrongdoing — as we observe all of this, so many of our pundits and professional commentators are still obsessed with people they got mad at in 2020 and 2021.

They are obsessed with fighting the specter of wokeness — whatever that misappropriation of African American vernacular means. They look at overzealous college students, overbearing HR departments, or colleagues who put pronouns in their signatures as tantamount to a Cultural Revolution. And meanwhile, as the Secretary of Defense quite literally purges Black people from the highest reaches of the military, it doesn’t look like anything to them.

They don’t even comment on it. The Republican Party has turned pretty openly against liberal democracy. Republican lawmakers are confirming election deniers to lifetime appointments. They’re nominating election deniers to high-ranking offices like governor. And meanwhile, pundits, reporters, the press — they’re obsessed with “Hey, did Francesca Hong once say that she thought we should cancel Thanksgiving?”

I would note that the free speech absolutists are awfully quiet these days too.

Bouie was reacting specifically to this David Brooks piece and this one from from Ross Douthat (with the amazing titular admission that he can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys these days)¹ and possibly this one too. Michael Hobbes has been talking about this on Bluesky as well:

There were excesses in 2020 but they were mostly low-stakes efforts by well-intentioned people to address real injustices.

The excesses of the right during the same era were far more harmful. The reckoning we need now is about how elites lost sight of that.

…

Centrists convinced themselves annoying leftists on twitter were an equivalent threat to Jan 6 insurrectionists. They wildly inflated the threat of left-wing authoritarianism while ignoring how it was taking hold on the right.

Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about “cancellation” for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about “free speech restrictions” and “educational indoctrination” while embarking on them every chance they got.

The excesses of the Woke 1 era mostly amount to cringe public statements, harmless vocabulary updates and loss of prestige for public figures.

The backlash to Woke 1, on the other hand, is imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy. That’s what needs reckoning.

1. Real “are we the baddies?” energy from Douthat here. ↩

Tags: Jamelle Bouie · politics · Ross Douthat · Tyler Austin Harper

Zeker zestig bewoners van de Stationsstraat en de Pieter Karel Drossaartstraat in Vlaardingen zijn in actie gekomen omdat ze het niet meer trekken in hun woningen. Ze hebben last van lekkages, verzakkingen, schimmel en muizen. Er wordt zelfs gesproken van 'helwoningen.'

With a top-eight finish offering at least a playoff place, the temptation to spend big in pursuit of the Premier League will grow – but so will the risks

The Championship’s collective wage bill grew to a record £903m in 2024-25, according to Deloitte’s latest Annual Review of Football Finance. Clubs are paying players enormous sums in their pursuit of Premier League football. With the playoffs expanding this season, the number of owners willing to risk even more money in the hope of securing promotion is only likely to increase.

In isolation, the figure of £903m does not signify much. Compared to the Premier League’s £4.4bn salary outlay, it almost looks small. But England’s top division can afford that gargantuan commitment to wages whereas the second tier cannot. The 24 clubs in the Championship earned £942m, meaning salaries consumed 96% of revenue. If there was any surprise in their collective net debt being £1.4bn at the end of 2024-25, it was only that it had reduced from the £1.5bn it was a year earlier.

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Former PM of Israel calls events ‘concerted and meticulous attempt at ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians

Israeli troops have forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged West Bank homes, the day after a top Israeli commander personally promised he would end a violent settler campaign to drive them out.

Israeli soldiers also took over eight other homes in Qusra early on Thursday, telling the village’s mayor, Abdul Azim Wadi, that the buildings were needed for a days-long operation to remove the settlers. They later relinquished six. Settlers still roam the village.

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DEN HAAG (ANP) - Honderden mensen lopen mee tijdens de stille tocht donderdagavond voor de 34-jarige vrouw die afgelopen weekend werd doodgeschoten in een woning aan de New Yorksingel in Den Haag, ziet een ANP-verslaggever. De stoet is kort na 19.00 uur vertrokken bij het huis van de ouders van de vrouw en loopt vanuit daar naar de New Yorksingel, waar ze met haar kinderen woonde.

De vrouw werd in de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag doodgeschoten in haar woning. Ze was op dat moment zwanger. De drie kinderen waren ten tijde van de schietpartij in het huis aanwezig. De 42-jarige vader van de kinderen is als verdachte opgepakt.

De kinderen lopen donderdagavond ook mee. De tocht staat naast herdenken ook in het teken van de strijd tegen femicide, liet de organisatie eerder al weten. Op een bord staat onder meer de tekst "Break the silence stop the violence" en diverse mensen dragen een T-shirt met de tekst "Stop femicide" en een foto van de vrouw. Vrijwel iedereen is in het wit gekleed, zoals door de organisatie was gevraagd. Ook de Haagse burgemeester Jan van Zanen en wethouder Ralf Sluijs lopen mee.

The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background. Why, then, wasn't it invented much earlier?